Audition Electric (pre 1978)

I bought this guitar second hand from a friend for $20 sometime in the late seventies. The brand is Audition and I think it originally came from K-Mart. A truly awful guitar, but my first electric, which I used to play through and old stereo amplifier attached to an old dog wee stained hi-fi speaker!

As you can see it has lead a hard life and isn’t really a guitar any more!

The first modification was made by my electronics loving friend Tim, who installed an LED chaser into the scratch plate. Alas the lights don’t chase any more, but I managed to get most of them lit up to give you an idea of the effect;

(hey, I was only 16 and it was the seventies!).

Some years later, when I was singing with Flex, I played the intro for the INXS song Don’t Change on my Yamaha CS01 synthesiser and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to convert this old guitar into a key-tar! Drummer Doug & I took off the strings, bridge and scratch plate, attacked the end of the neck with a router, added a couple of supports and voila!

And for the last 30 years or so it has been sitting in a dusty case under the house, where it will probably stay!