Alvarez Dana Scoop AE650TRW mid-1990s extreme cutaway guitar wih Tri-Force pickups

guitarz.blogspot.com:

It's funny, these Alvarez Dana Scoop guitars with the most extreme cutaway imaginable were everywhere for a brief period in the mid 1990s and then vanished almost without a trace. I can only assume that the styling dated very quickly and players didn't want to be seen with such guitars. I'll wager there's a lot of these cased up under beds and in attics.

Despite their prolonged absence, a couple of these guitars have turned up on eBay recently. This white example is, to give it its full name, rank and number, an Alvarez Dana Scoop AE650TRW featuring a licensed Floyd Rose trem and TriForce pickups. According to the seller, the "Tri-Force/single coil system [...] produce[s] humbucking, single coil and 2 single coil tones". I guess that means there some series/parallel options in there, as well as coil tapping which is implicit. Of course with no physical space in which to mount a neck pickup, a system such as this is desireable so as to squeeze as many tones as possible out of this guitar.

This guitar is currently being offered for sale on eBay for a not unreasonable $549 (so long as this guitar isn't too mid-1990s for you).

See also this post which generated quite a few readers' comments when we looked at a similar guitar.

G L Wilson

© 2011, Guitarz - The Original Guitar Blog - now in its 10th year!

Alvarez Dana Scoop

guitarz.blogspot.com:
I was beginning to think I'd dreamt this guitar years ago, because I've been trying to find a photo of one for years to put on this blog and could not find a trace of it. OK, it would have helped if I could have remembered the name of the instrument. I had it in mind it was something like an Aria; it seems that I got the initial letter correct, for it's an Alvarez Dana Scoop with a Modulus graphite neck, and was a model made between 1992 and 1995.

At the time this design was being hailed as the next big innovation in the world of guitars. And then it was never heard of again.

The lower cutaway of this could be described as extreme. The "scoop" cutaway actually extends beneath the strings at the top of the neck. (No room for a neck pickup, you'll notice.) It supposedly enhances the guitar's sustain and resonance properties, and eliminated phase cancellation between the neck and body resonance.

Personally, I would have thought a lot of those qualities could have been enhanced by the use of a graphite neck, rather than the eccentric body design.

I'd like to know where these guitars have been since the mid 1990s? Were they so embarrassing in appearance that they were hidden away never to be seen again?

G L Wilson

NB: There are a lot of blogs STEALING content and bandwidth. If you read this anywhere else but on guitarz.blogspot.com then you are reading a blog that STEALS content. Please support original bloggers!