I am so thankful you did this project. I found a 1962 Kay archtop at a pawn shop that was a little worse for wear. High action and the neck was caving the top in much like this guitar. I offered the guy $75 for it and he was good with that. Has all the original hardware and single pickup. I've been wanting to get into making/fixing guitars and figured this might be an interesting project. Sounds really good and clear when plugged in too. So thank you for this!

Thank you for showing the Prep..found a similar Harmony locally less the label...similar painted markers...

15:00 Mine has "painted on bindings" too, which I wouldn't call bindings, more like decorative paint, really. Not very protective, since they didn't have flex-seal back then, thankfully. I need to either mic the guitar or get a pickup, but it doesn't have much room under the strings to fit a pickup, much like the blond guitar you showed right before the one above. But now I really really want to play it thru some fx pedals. I've been having trouble learning blues guitar, and I was worried it was feels so a week ago I turned on the digital piano and played the most slidey bendy Riders On The Storm-ish blues jam, no issues. Probably the bluesyiest thing I've ever played on a piano, maybe even TOO bluesy, if it had sounded like a piano, which it didn't, because Some of it might be due to life circumstances, but mostly it was the fx pedals. I'm serious! Piano doesn't have any pitch bender. 12 inflexible notes, and some sustain pedal overtones. So, 2 of the fx pedals were bending the pitch in different styles and with different timings, and there was a phaser doing its own thing. Chorus and drive (and phasing effect from splitting the signal into parallel fx chains at one point) kept turning the piano timbre into other blues instruments (?!) and there was a delay, from the reverb pedal, that made it seem like there were at least 2 of us playing. Without the fx pedals, I never would have played what I did, and I'm sure that what I actually did play wouldn't sound like much without the fx, either. Coming from synths and digital pianos, I want to have that with acoustic guitar too. 2 problems - 1: I can't just stick a dummy plug into the guitar's headphones jack to disable its internal speakers (which is what I have to do with the digital piano, even when using its line out). 2: there isn't a line out, so if I don't mic it (and use headphones or else get a feedback loop), I'll have to add a pickup to the H1214 Archtone. I seem to like the sound of goldfoil and p90 and paf, but I'll probably end up using it either with tons of fx or very raw. So the main criteria is it has to fit in that tiny space in front of the fingerboard. That's more important to me than the specific type of magnetic pickup. I should've gotten to the point sooner, sorry... What Slim pickup would you recommend for a guitar like the one at the above timestamp, or especially the one right before that? Mine's all original as AFAICT, so at this point I would rather have ugly wires exposed and a cable coming out from under the pick guard, rather than drilling extra holes, if possible. If there's no pups that would be just right, I do have a mic, and I could get a stick-on piezo and an IR pedal, etc, so nothing's etched in stone right now. I'll try to remember to look for an answer here, and I'll also watch the rest of this playlist. And I'll check your past vids with an ear for what the thinnest pickups sound like, on these guitars. I've watched some already, but I wasn't really listening for whether they'd sound good raw AND as a base for fx. You had some good players for the road tests, so I don't mind going back for another listen here and there.

???????

I tried desperately to watch but getting back from 4 to 3 proved impossible. Playing 3 impossible. Your link in the top right corner got me somewhere else EVERY TIME. I'm giving up!