Yamaha FG-180

Dreadnaught style accoustic. Bought from a friend of a friend in 1972, made in Japan in the late '60's. Solid spruce (?) top, 3-piece mahogany neck, with high gloss finish, mahogany back and sides, apparently solid. Basic black and black/white binding on the body, no binding or decoration on the neck. This is not an ornate instrument. Nickel-plated (?) tuners, open backed, and of fairly poor quality. The neck is a very thick V-section with twenty (fairly skinny) frets, fourteen to body. It is almost as deep as it is wide, and could double as a telegraph pole.

This guitar has a huge tone. Even played gently it puts out a fair amount of sound, and the output just goes up the harder you play it. The tone is not particularly subtle and is particularly strong over the mid and low frequencies. Chords sound great on it but because of the high action (see below) you need a good technique to get single string work to sound good, and even so it's not easy to get the notes to ring well above about the 7th fret. Great for strumming or basic fingerpicked stuff, not an ideal jazz box (!).

This guitar had a high action from the outset, and over the years it didn't get any easier. The huge neck also feels rather clumsy. In fact I hardly played it for many years because it was such hard work. About a year ago I had it set up by a good luthier. With the frets dressed, bridge lowered, and truss rod adjusted, it is so much improved as to be reasonably playable. Nevertheless the action is still quite high (walk into any guitar shop and out of a random selection of #100 acoustic guitars, most will be significantly easier to play). Good for the technique, but hard work nevertheless. The guitar is fairly plain, but the quality of the wood and finishing is good. The back is nicely book-matched, and the spruce top has mellowed to a beautiful pale gold colour. The tuners were always pretty awful, and are now more or less work out. I'm contemplating whether it is worth the expense of replacing them with a set of Grovers.

I've had it for nearly 30 years and it has survived with only a few cosmetic dings and scratches. It's been thrown about, stored in a garage and generally abused and has stood up without any problems. It appears to be more or less indestructible. I wouldn't use it at a gig, but it's a good instrument to take to parties, since I suspect that it would survive the worst.

I've never had to deal with Yamaha. They did run a feature about on their web site offering help to identify old Yamaha guitars from their serial numbers. I e-mailed them but they never replied to my message.

As a "vintage" instrument it is probably becoming collectible and as such its value is going up. I am quite fond of it, it does have some history and a very nice tone, but playing it is such hard work. If it were stolen I would gladly spend the insurance money on something a bit less technically demanding.