Hi-Lo Unknown

My HiLo as I recall was spelled HyLo. It was my first electric guitar I bought in 1965. Don't remember all that well because I traded it along with cash in Jan 1966 for a 450-12 Rickenbacker. As I recall they gave me $25 on trade, complete with chipboard case that I had painted in swirling 60's LSD style graphics. It was probably the cheesiest guitar I ever owned. 2 single coil plastic pickups in a plywood, veneer covered strat style body. Bolt on neck with plastic tipped tuners. The epidome of Japanese 60's crap. The tuners bugged me but I never changed them. Two volume & one tone control.

Tinny at best. Low volume due to the microphonic pickups which was probably better than hearing it! The tonal range of a 2x4 (which I suspect it was made of).

The action was higher than Timothy Leary at Woodstock. I remember actually notching the nut when I couldn't lower the bridge anymore!The finish was a 2 tone sunburst veneer that was thick. The worst thing though was the plastic tuners with open gears. They were all mounted on one continous plate on the headstock & I painted them silver so people would think they were decent. Tuning was always fun!

If it had a strong point this was it. It was fairly durable & didn't look all that bad when I traded it. The veneer was thick so it didn't chip easily.

HyLo!!

If this guitar did anything for me it was to strengthen my hands due to the high action. It also showed me how much to appreciate my Ric! I have to admit that I still have some fond memories of that clunker.

This guitar is a boltneck ES-335 style. It has two single coils and a selector toggle. Neck is 22 fret, maple. Semiacoustic thinline body is a sort of translucent cherry. Bridge is floating, like a jazz guitar.

Intonation was hard to set, to avoid fret buzz action has to be set high. When I got it the neck had a pronounced pitch. Somebody used a pop-top to set the neck angle. I replaced the poptop with a brass shim. The pickups are noisy and harsh sounding, but good for blues and distorted rock. There is not much difference between the selector settings.

This is an old japanese or korean guitar and is something of a struggle to play, but the effort forces one to step out of one's usual soloing rut. Workmanship is rather crude. Hard to say how old it is-- finish is crazed, yellowed, metal parts are showing some corrosion. Fretwork was fairly smooth and the frets were not worn badly enough to require dressing.

I don't play live, just collect and play tunes for my own amusement. The guitar has lasted a long time but seems fragile. Something inside rattles.

I think the manufacturer/importer/distributor network would be defunct by now.

I have been playing several years. I have some good instruments currently and have owned some excellent guitars. This guitar is handy to grab and play on a whim, to leave about the apartment, with no case, and if it breaks, no great loss. I like this guitar because it is so cheesy, and yet playable.

This guitar was bought at the Kalamazoo flea market for all of 3 and a half banannas. I have to say it is far and away the best $3.50 guitar I have ever purchased out of my six flea-market and yard sale gems. Like every other cheap knock-off the three remarkable pickups are cheap single coils with more hum than a 75-year-old trying to recall an old dixieland tune from her youth. the body is a strat-style (surprise, surprise) with a raw 21-fret neck and a normal headstock. The vendor claimed this one had a "rich but raw beautiful natural finish" but I say someone was too lazy to paint it. the bridge is a whammy resembling cardboard. Tuners are the standard chrome-plated plastic with stripped gears. poor.

If you haven't realized already the guitar sucks. Its clean and bluesy sounds are unacceptable and the metal tone just barely covers up buzz. Even my Rivera Knucklehead or Mesa/boogie triple recto can't pep this bad boy up. The sound is something akin to putting some wire on a bow&arrow and playing it. sounds? what sounds?

Factory? what factory? maybe you mean "Middle-school shop"! the finish is all but nonexistent. Pickups are so high they sometimes pull on the strings. action is too high. Guitar features a plethora of dings, scratches, and other value-enhancing devices. Did the guitar contain any flaws? more like "what part of the guitar wasn't flawed"? the answer to that is none.

no, no, no, no, no, no. dont even get me in to that.

the sixth-grader who made is now on the street, has three teeth, and asks for change from other more fortunate homeless persons.

I have been playing for almost 14 years and my other equipment includes a G&L invader, Epi Casino, and a Zakk Wylde Les Paul. This guitar is what I like to call my "smasher" or "Assisting groupies off stage" guitar. If it was stolen it would probably spontaneously combust when the car it was in hit a pothole. and I'd Laaaaugh.

Not a lot of specifics on this one. One of your department stores specials. two pickups, 3/4 scale, 21 frets, body of unknown wood type, but only one step removed from plywood. Fixed bridge. One volume, one tone, two big white switches to turn the pickups on and off. Headstock like a Fender (surprise surprise). I'm guessingthis thing was from the late 60's??? but honestly who knows. It had that look though. Made in Japan. It was a sunburst when I bought it, but my brother sanded it down and painted it grey and white as part of a high school shop project. really small frets in a fingerboard that felt like it was made with a lot of plastic. A very average guitar, feature-wise

this guitar had about the weakest pickups I've ever seen in my life. Each one was a single coil with a bar magnet running the length of the pickup. Then the poles were little screws that you could move up and down toward the strings, but from what I could tell, moving them closer to the strings just moved them further form the magnets, so the only two effects you got were A) you were constantly cutting your hand on the pole pieces, and B) bottom the strings out across the pickups became gut-wrenchingly easy. Tons and tons of hum, hiss, crackle, &c. When you tried to play anything like chords or clean stuff, it was really weak and thin and actually hard to hear. It took a ton of gain and distortion to get anything out of this guitar, but when you did...I'll get into that under durability.

Again. Department store guitar, and not a top of the line dept. store guitar. The action was miserable, the intonation was awful. My 9th grade brother did a better job putting it back together than it had been assembled originally. Ditto the finish. Strings had a tendency to fall off the bridge. You had to use needle nose pliers to turn the tuning machines, and it fell out of tune in 30 seconds any way. The pickup switches worked about 10% of the time. The pots were scratchy and didn't do anything anyway. Not put together well at all.

Ok. here's the whole reason why I'm submitting this review. Part of this really should go under the Tone section, but I'm going to do it all here. It took my about 30 seconds to realize this was going to be a noise guitar and nothing else, so I plugged it into my trusty Big Muff, cranked everything to 10, ran a line into the beat little Musicman RP65, turned that to 10, made a little under-my-breath apology to the people in the apartment next door, and set about giving this weak little guitar a last hurrah. I wove screwdrivers into the strings. I lay it on the floor and stood on it and pulled the neck up toward me. I smashed it into the floor jamb. I wrenched and mauled and molested that guitar in every way i could think of for for a solid half hour, a little Radio Shack tape player recording the whole thing. And I will never be able to describe the undogly squall that POURED out of the amp while the Hi-Lo protested its mistreatment. Howls of agony. Shrieking harmonics that couldn't even stay in tune with themselves. Torrents of feedback. A strange, crackling, grinding hum that didn't seem to have anything to do with what I was playing. A non stop heavy metal/horror movie/auto accident/industrial site cacaphony. And after that half hour was over, I sat there sweating and in bad need of a drink, and the Hi-lo was unharmed. So of course I took it out for another round a few days later. This time I attached a pair of vice grips to the tailpiece to use as a whammy bar. Same thing. Pure, unfilter, nonmusical noise from stop to start, and the guitar survived again, though the tail was little bent up now. So I took a second pair of vice grips and attached the to the headstock. By thispoint I was twisting the guitar like i was wringing out a wet towel, and still the noise poured out, and still it held up. Finally, after about an hour and a half, after I had propped it headstock-down on the floor and was leaning with all my weight on the vice grips at the tailpiece, the bridge fell out. I still had string tension, and the noise just changed tone a little. Then eventually the tailpiece itself fell off and one would thing that would be the end. Nope, kept feeding back and howing and squaking, same as ever. I had to physically rip the pickups out of the body before it stopped making noise, and even then you could still play around with the leftover hum by jiggling the patchcord in the jack a little. I have honestly never seen such a crappy guitar put up with so much in all my days.

Who knows? And I'm sure I voided pretty much every warranty the company could have ever possibly offered.

I miss that guitar so much. I should have put it back together and kept it going. It would be making noise today if I had just thought to take the time and effort. It was so unplayable that it just begged you to abuse it, and then it stood up to you like it was expecting it all along. If you need some noise. All out, unreasonable noise, and you see one of these things, grab it. I bought a little Silvertone a year or two later, thinking it would be the same, and it's way to wimpy to take what I dished out to the Hi-Lo. And it had absolutely no other redeeming qualities, so it wasn't like I even felt bad about torturing it. An absolutely amazing little period of history for me. Well worth the try. i can't imagine anyone ever trying to sell one for less than 20 bucks, and for noise stuff, it's well worth that. A real gem. I'm only giving it a 1 because I want the what a hunk of junk caption in stead of the fantastic value. It was the nicest little piece of junk I've owned in a long long time.