Renaissance Unknown Guitar

I paid a Bundle for this guitar and finally ended up getting a hard fight for the refund that I justly deserved. This guitar failed to hold up for a month, it wouldn't stay tuned because the neck would not stay tightly bolted to the lucite body. I saw the company disappear probably due to this problem. It was a beautiful guitar but apparently , no Dan Armstrong.

Made in the late 70's in the USA (from what I've read, the factory was in CT). 24 frets, Dimarzio Super Distortion/PAF pickups, multi-laminated birdseye maple/rosewood/some other wood bolt on neck, active electronics with bypass switch. Phase switch, active electronics bypass switch, and active tone controls with center detents. The nut, bridge, tailpiece, strap buttons & truss rod and electronics cover plates were all brass. Gold plated Grover tuners (nice!). A hippie scientist quintessential 70's guitar! Freaky shaped plexiglass body!

This is a category the guitar does not score well in. The tone could be described with adjectives such as thin, sterile, & brittle. A dry, brittle tone like this might be good for 70's funk. It doesn't really work for rock n' roll. I guess brass hardware and a plexiglass body aren't a recipe for resonant, full tone.

With the phase switch and active EQ, you could get a variety of tones, but none of them fat or chunky.

The Rennie does not fare well in this area either. There were frets that were either not seated all the way into the fretboard, or they had lifted slightly off the fretboard due to wood expansion/contraction. Sharp edges at the ends of the frets. A couple of frets were uneven and caused buzzing.

The neck was big and chunky. Awkward for me to play on. But we were a couple of years ahead of the era of skinny necked guitars when this instrument was built.

A bit of an enigma to me was why the nut and the bridge were set up for different fretboard radii(!). The fretboard was fairly flat, and the nut was shaped to correspond to the fretboard's radius. The bridge however, was intended for a much smaller fretboard radius! The middle strings were significantly higher than the outer ones. There was no individual height adjustment for each bridge saddle, only a screw on either side of the bridge for height adjustment. It was impossible to adjust the bridge so all the strings were at the same height. The middle ones were always too high.

I finally took matters into my own hands and sanded down the middle bridge saddles. They're solid hunks of brass, so they could be sanded down. I got the height of the strings to finally be pretty even.

The instrument has been owned by me and two friends in the time since I first bought it in 1980. It's still in excellent condition. It hasn't really been gigged, but it feels like it would stand up to rigorous use. The brass hardware is indestructible, as is the plexiglass body.

Renaissance was out of business by about 1981.

This guitar was my second electric. I'd been playing a couple of years in 1980 when I bought it. I had a Str@t and wanted a dual humbucker axe to get humbucker tones. It's aesthetics make it cool in a "That 70's Show" kind of way, but the (lack of) tone and playability make it about my last choice for recording or gigging. A friend of mine now owns it, so it's still in the "family". He always thought the guitar was kinda cool, so he appreciates it. It was just languishing in its case when I owned it.