Chambered Body Vintage Guitar Reissued

Eastwood guitars as you probably know reproduces legendary vintage guitars with the technology and techniques of today’s luthiers.

This particular model is the National Newport Guitar of 1962. Valco manufactured it between 1958 and 1964. At the time, National Newport guitars were made of fiberglass. They called it Res-O-Glass for commercial reasons, but it is just basic fiberglass.

When Eastwood guitars decided to reissued this guitar, they had a great idea to Change the fiberglass for mahogany and to make it a chambered body. The chambered body is a plus. It gives the smoothness high-quality sound of a hollow body guitar, but the lack of F-hole prevents the guitar from Larsen. Another significant advantage is its lightness, due to the fact that the body is empty.

The odd shape of the guitar is the reproduction of the US map, hence the guitar’s name. 😉 The pointy horn below is supposed to represent map of Florida. The strange looking shape made it famous back in the days. I remember musicians playing it, but as hard as I’m trying to remember, I can’t come up with names of superstars using that guitar in the 70s.

Pickups are Hot-10 alnico humbuckers; they are good and silent. The vibrato is a Bigsby, and the bridge is a roller bridge. It helps greatly to keep the guitar in tune and to save strings life, because there’s no friction when the vibrato is actioned.
I really like the sound of this instrument. Be it: clean, crunch or distortion. Every setting works like a charm. The crunch sound is amazing. The guitar has lots of sustain and a smooth sound. Although it has a vintage look, you can play every style of music with it. Jazz, rock, blues, etc. You can also use a lot of pedals and have a very modern sound.

You can forward to 5:05 if you want to skip my bla-bla and get right to the guitar solo

Airline map details

• Body: Tone Chambered Mahogany
• Colours: Seafoam Green, Red, Black, White, Sunburst
• Pickups: 2 Alnico Hot-10 Humbuckers
• Switching: 3-Way
• Controls: 2 Volume, 1 Tone
• Bridge: BIGSBY tremolo, Roller Bridge
• Neck: Bound Maple, Bolt-on
• Finger Board: Rosewood, Block Markers
• Scale Length: 24 3/4″ (628mm)
• Width at the Nut: 1 11/16″
• Hardware: Grover Style Nickel/Chrome

I recorded two songs featuring that guitar. Videos are hosted in the video section on this site or in my channel at YouTube.

The first one is an old song of mine, Général Fraise (General Strawberry in English) written in 1991 if I remember right. I recorded it last week because I felt it was tailor-made for the airline map. Check out the link below, if you want to listen to it.

Second one is a song that I composed three days ago, also to feature that guitar. It’s called Funk That Map. This is the song I used as an extract in the review video posted above. If you want to listen to the studio version, owning a better mix and the full length of the song, check out the link below. (better solo too) 😉

• General Fraise
• Funk That Map

Some links to get the Airline map from Eastwood guitars

• Airline Map Guitar @ Amazon
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Picture &  video : Hervé Senni

Testing The Airline Map from Eastwood  Guitars

This post is also available in: French