Mosrite Bluesbender

Semie Mosley is my new guitar hero!
I found this 1971 Mosrite Bluesbender Serial Number #N0041 (probably the 41st Bluesbender ever made!)hanging in the vintage section of Guitar Center in El Cerrito, California. I wasn't looking for another guitar, but after playing this one...bought it immediately. A description: Les Paul single cutaway body with German Carve, Weather-checked black laquer finish, four awesome chrome "Mosrite" knobs, two 12-pole humbuckers made from the original single-pole plastic covers, stop tail, tortise-shell nitro-cellulose pickguard. Brazilian Rosewood fingerboard. Push button phasing switch that actually works well! A wide variety of rockin' tones available.

This guitar is on my short-list of best sounding and feeling guitars ever made. The pickups are amazing...think of a Les Paul with Gibson burstbuckers on steroids. Clean and very deep with great cutting highs. The fingerboard is pure sex with perfect frets, spacing, and touch. The phasing pushbutton allows a stunning variety of tones. The tone can be clean or crank up the knobs to eleven and overdrive even a Fender Twin Reverb! Many Mosrite fanatics own the Ventures model for good looks, but most agree that the Bluesbender is the best-sounding guitar ever built by Semie Mosely.

Very cool Mosrite hardware throughout; the string angle of the bridge is superior to Gibsons, the stop tailpiece is simple aluminum and Rosewood-very nice. The pickups are well worth the price of admission; they are big, thick, black, and twelve polepieces. A beautfully made guitar with tight neck joint and excellent fret finishing. The neck is still like new with a touch which is unmatched!

This is a tank of a guitar-excellent for jungle warfare!

Semie Moseley has been gone for quite a while...but I bet I would have liked him. Another 10 for good measure!

This is the first complete set of 10's I've ever given in a review. Prices on vintage Mosrite guitars are very high...for a good reason. The Bluesbender is quite rare on the vintage guitar scene; I attend shows regularly and have never seen one before...they are not even listed in Vintage Guitar Priceguide. Guitar Center had this one listed at $1300...
If you find one...play it...buy it...love it.
See images of this guitar at www.flatearthguitars.com

The previous reviewer did a good job of covering most of the details, so I won't bore you. Mine is apparently pretty much the same guitar. These were made roughly in the early 70's, up through around '76. They were actually a cheaper version of the "Brass Rail", which was one of Semie Moseley's most interesting creations, a Les Paul type guitar with a neck-thru design & a brass rail running the length of the neck, under the frets (supposedly to help sustain). The brass rails were very expensive to make & came with a wide assortment of electronics configurations, including a "deluxe" version, with active electronics -pretty high tech for 1970's. I've owned a couple of them, they are unique, to say the least. The Bluesbender is a very similar guitar, only with a bolt on neck & no brass rail. For those familiar with Mosrites, the first thing you would notice when you pick up one of these beasts, is this is not your typical Mosrite neck -known for being thin, skinny & almost fretless. This neck is wide, thick & has serious jumbo frets, no doubt this is why it's called a Bluesbender. It's very similar to a Les Paul in its' basic design, but has a totally different character.
The two pickups are controlled by a 3 way toggle & have separate volume & tone knobs for each pickup. Then there's a weird button that acts saomehow as a in phase/ out of phase coil tap, which somehow relates to each pickup having 12 pole pieces instead of 6. I'm not quite sure of how or why this feature exists &, on mine, it really doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe it's broken..........
The neck is maple with a bound rosewood fretboard, the body is probably alder, but is very heavy & has a really cool looking tortoise pickguard, a round matching tortoise access cover on the back & a small diamond shaped tortoise guard behind the side mounted jack.

I play a lot of surf along with blues & rock. I use a whammy bar a lot & the Bluesbender doesn't have one, that alone probably limits its' playing time with me. I have a Mosrite Ventures Model, & several Fenders which I play through a Fender Vibroverb amp. The Bluesbender was kind of adopted by my son, who used it for several years in a punk/ alternative type band in Southern Cal. He loved the Mosrite pickups, cause they distort easily when cranked. You can get pretty much any type of sound you want out of this guitar though, & it actually plays quite well.

These things were built like tanks. Electronics tend to get noisy with age, unless cleaned & maintained, but the body, neck, etc. are top quality & built to last. The hardware is of very high quality.
Semie always used very thick lacquer finishes which were known for "checking", This one has plenty of that, but I think it adds character.

see previous section

With Mosrites, you don't concern yourself with mundane things like customer support. Semie is dead.

I've been playing for over 30 yrs. I have always been a Mosrite fan, & have owned probably over 50 of them over the yrs. My all time favorite Mosrite is a Japanese re-issue "Royal '63" Ventures model, I bought a year or so ago. I will write a review on that when I can.
The Bluesbender is a very rare & unusual guitar. I never really played it a lot, but my son absolutely loves it & made me promise to never part with it. I've been messing with it some lately and it's starting to grow on me. You can definitely do things on this neck that you can't do on a regular Mosrite. I do need a whammy bar, though. Because of its' extreme rarity, these are bound to appreciate. I think now, they are very underrated.

I just bought this guitar yesterday from Black Market Music in Los Angeles, CA. Prior to seeing it (for the first time) yesterday, I had no idea what a Mosrite Bluesbender was. The only knowledge of Mosrite guitars that I had was of "The Ventures/Johnny Ramone" type model that most people associate with Semie Moseley's guitar company. I think most of us also tend to link the name Mosrite with "surf/garage/power-pop/punk" musicians as well. This Bluesbender has made me reconsider my previous assumptions about Mosrite guitars...

It has a serial number "branded" at the edge of the 22 fret rosewood fingerboard: N0141.

First off, I wasn't looking for it. I was actually in the market for an old National/Valco map-shaped electric or some odd-ball Teisco electric. My last guitar was a Gibson SG Standard and I enjoyed the dual humbucker configuration of it, but it just felt too pedestrian and common for my creative needs. Don't get me wrong: SG's are amazing electrics; just not what I personally want.

So I saw this black guitar with a red tortoise-shell pickguard that had the carved-top contours similar to that of those old National/Valco guitars hanging on the wall behind a bank of old Fender silverface amps. As I got closer, I noticed the Mosrite headstock and my interest was piqued. I asked the guys at Black Market what they knew about the guitar and all of them were like, "Dunno, man. It's a Mosrite but it doesn't have a model name or anything. Weird guitar, but way cool tonally-speaking. Plug it in and hear it for yourself!"

Essentially, my guess is that Semie Moseley was trying to come up with a Mosrite "answer" to Gibson's Les Paul/SG line of solid-body guitars, but with his own design concepts and innovations. Among them:

Mosrite humbucker pickups with the actual polepieces (12 per pickup) screwed directly into the plastic pickup casings. I am not a guitar tech, so I have no idea whether this fact has any bearing on the tones they produce, but these pickups BREATHE and SNARL! The closest thing I had heard/felt from previous guitars that I had played would be the old Gretsch Duo-Jets with the 1960's Filtertron type humbuckers. I was plugged into the bright channel of a silverface Fender Deluxe amp (for those of you reading who are interested), no effects, no pick, just hands and guitar.

I have no idea what type of wood constitutes the body. My guess is that the neck is maple with a rosewood fingerboard.

The bridge is Semie's version of the Tune-O-Matic system... but compared to my ex-SG guitar's, this one is superior. The most obvious area would be that the individual saddle pieces are machined with rounded edges AND the "break point" is not a sharp edge with the potential for burrs (read: string breakage) that sometimes occur on improperly setup Tune-O-Matic systems. The second one is that the actual "break angle" between the saddles and the tailpiece is a lot steeper than the Tune-O-Matic. Again, I'm not a tech... but speaking as a musician, my guess is that it contributes to the "spankier" vibe of the string feel. Compared to my old SG, this thing has a tighter feel (almost like a Telecaster with string-thru-body design) than the "spongier" feel of Gibson Tune-O-Matic guitars. So in terms of musical interfacing/responsiveness between guitar and player, this bridge design almost encourages you to dig in (or not) for greater dynamic tonal rewards...

The string tuners are Grovers. (Interesting sidenote: it says "Patent Pending", so I wonder if Grover was founded in the late 1960's or early 1970's. Another guess of mine is that Semie might have hooked up with Grover and decided to implement these at that time "new-design" tuners. I guessing that Grover has a patent on their tuners by now!)

I think the scale length of this guitar is slightly shorter than my old SG. Not sure in terms of numbers, so I can't be more

The sound inspires me to keep playing it. For guitarists who have been playing for some time, I'm sure this statement is something you all can relate to.

Tonally, the best word I can think of to describe this guitar is "alive". If a reference is necessary, again I'd point to Gretsch Duo-Jets with Filtertrons as the closest thing I've played in the past that compares to the Bluesbender.

At the store, I plugged straight into a silverface Deluxe. Played it at low volumes for clean tones. Then I cranked the amp and tested the volume/tone knobs for their dynamic capabilities when playing through a "wide-open" amp. (Oh... by the way, this guitar has 2 volumes, 2 tones AND a coil-tap button that kicks in when you set the 3-way toggle switch to the middle position). It didn't respond quite like a Telecaster or Strat where you could ride the volume to vary the amount of "clean" or "dirtiness", but I found that using the coil-tap allowed me to have a preset "out of phase" tone (where the volume level was lower) and then switching to neck or bridge opened up the guitar for a full-on roar.

Overall, I'd say that this guitar exudes a vintage vibe... but I can't really link any particular genre with it. As guitarists, we tend to associate guitars with particular songs the more we play in different situations with different guitars/amp setups. With this Bluesbender (the name is a mystery to me- it's a bit like Fender's "Jazzmaster" where I've hardly ever seen a jazz guitarist play one), there isn't much of a recorded history (at least to my knowledge) and until yesterday I didn't even know that they existed.

So I'm looking it like this: "I've discovered a fresh new musical tool without any past idiomatic tendencies to pigeon-hole my mental approach with it. Now go play it. Be inspired by it and come up with new stories to talk about. And be glad that it's a relatively unknown instrument. For now, at least!"

At home now, I'm running it through a Line 6 POD Pro and MESA 20/20 (EL84) power amp. I enjoy it even more than yesterday at the store. This is a keeper.

Hehe...

The action is fine. It had 10's at the store. I will put 11's on it today or tomorrow. Haven't opened up the back control plate yet. But so far, everything works, sounds and feels like an old guitar should!

This guitar has stories of it's own. The body has battle scars left and right (dings and lots of finish scrapes). The coating of the finish is crackling- I think people use the term "checkering" <--- (?). Again, it's an older guitar with some history. Just not a popularize old guitar that is a common household name with fame. But that's exactly the best part of this whole find to me...

It has survived 30 some years and sounds amazing. Judging from the scars it carries already, I'd say it's a proven "road dog".

I'd depend on it- I pretty much have to since it's my only electric guitar now and I'm gigging without a backup. Doubt that I'll find another one in the near future since I pretty much stumbled blindly upon it by chance to begin with!

Sadly, Semie Moseley died a few years back. I just found a link to Bill Gruggett (http://www.gruggett.com) who used to work for Semie at the Bakersfield, CA shop back in the 1960's. But upon reading about him, it sounds like he's not doing so well these days, unfortunately.

So I'm pretty sure there is no warranty on this guitar.

I have been playing for about 17 years. This is my only electric guitar now and I don't really have a desire to play any other guitar after finding this.

In a strange way, before yesterday... guitars were like, "temporary girlfriends" (they were all learning experiences). But dare I even suggest the possibility that I've found a (gulp!) guitar that is more of a "wife" now? Any other guitar just seems so generic and commonplace.

By the way, here's a link to a photo (of someone else's Bluesbender) in case you are wondering what it actually looks like. Mine looks pretty much like this one...

http://club1.s-direct.com/users/ymochizu/kiyoshi/mosriteowner/images/bb-N0162.jpg