The Epiphone Casino

April 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Epiphone Casino is a wonderful hollow-bodied electric guitar first made in 1958 and based on the Gibson ES-330. It’s probably most famous for being played by three Beatles between 1965 and 1967. (You can probably guess that Ringo Starr was the odd Beatle out.) In fact, John Lennon loved his so much, he used it for the rest of his time with the band, favouring it over the Rickenbacker 325 he’d been using up to that point.

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The Epiphone Casino is famed for its rich, heavy sound. However, its use of Gibson P-90 pick-ups means that the sound is thinner than that of the Gibson ES-335 which uses humbuckers. The Casino, unlike most hollow-bodied electric guitars, doesn’t have a centre block and so is lighter and louder than, say the ES-335, but also more prone to feedback.

The body of the Casino is made of laminated maple, and the neck is mahogany, although has occasionally been maple. The fretboard is either rosewood or ebony, depending on the model. The first versions of the Epiphone Casino had a spruce top but subsequent models, until 1970, had a headstock made of five laminated layers of maple, birch, maple, birch, and maple, set at a 17-degree angle. Since then, the headstock has been set at a 14-degree angle and has five layers of maple laminate.

John Lennon sanded his Epiphone Casino down, recoated it with lacquer, took the pickguard off and replaced the tuning pegs with gold Grovers, making it look like a completely different guitar. Epiphone has two John Lennon re-issues in its current range. The John Lennon 1965 Casino shows how his guitar looked before he modified it, and the John Lennon Revolution Casino sports the Beatle’s modifications. The Revolution is so-called because the modified Casino was first seen in the promo film for the Beatles song, Revolution.

Other notable Casino players are Brian Jones and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, The Kinks’ Dave Davies, Carl Wilson and Al Jardine of the Beach Boys, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ronaldo, The Edge, Paul Weller, and Noel Gallager of Oasis. It has been said that the Epiphone Supernova — Gallagher’s famous Union Jack guitar — was a Casino, in fact it is a custom made guitar closer to the Sheraton and the Dot than the Casino.

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The Epiphone Story

April 16, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Epiphone name first appeared in 1928 as The Epiphone Banjo Company and is derived from the nickname of its founder, Epaminondas Stathopoulo, ‘Epi’, and ‘phone’, the Greek for ‘sound.’

Epaminondas Stathopoulo was the son of a Greek musical instrument maker who made fiddles, lutes, and Lioutos in Izmir, Turkey in the late 19th Century. Stathopoulo senior, Anastasios, moved to the US in 1903 and started making mandolins as well as his existing range of instruments. After his death in 1915, Epaminondas took over and in 1918 started to make banjos.

The first Epiphone guitar was made in 1928 and the company continued making guitars until Epaminondous’ death in 1943. Following Epi’s death, control of the Epiphone Banjo Company passed to his brothers who did a poor job of running the company. In 1951 workers went on strike for four months and the company relocated from New York to Philadelphia.

During the period from 1928, Epiphone made a range of archtop guitars such as the Emperor, Deluxe, Broadway, and Triumph which were a match for those produced by arch-rival, Gibson. It was probably inevitable then that, with Epiphone in trouble and the brothers seemingly incapable of resolving the problems, the Epiphone Banjo Company was bought by Gibson in 1957.

Following its acquisition, Gibson produced a guitar which was a close copy of its ES-330, the Epiphone Casino. The Casino counted amoung its admirers, three Beatles. Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and John Lennon all bought one and McCartney’s can be heard on his solo on Taxman. It’s also very much in evidence on the Revolver album. Lennon used the Casino regularly after that, both as a Beatle and a solo artist and McCartney still uses his today. McCartney also uses an Epiphone acoustic when performing Yesterday in concert.

Since the 1970’s the Epiphone brand has largely been used to produce less expensive versions of Gibson guitars, such as the SG and several versions of the Les Paul, first of all in Japan, then in under licence in Korea. Since 2002, Gibson has made Epiphone guitars in its own factory in China.

In addition to electric and acoustic guitars, Epiphone also makes amplifiers, such as the Epiphone Valve Junior.

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