Canadian manufacturer Eastwood Guitars is adding to its hot streak of recent vintage-inspired builds by crafting the Micawber, a five-string T-type inspired by Keith Richards‘ iconic Tele and his trademark open G tuning.
Keef famously removes the sixth string entirely for the tuning, as he finds it superfluous. The decision has yielded enduring guitar riffs like Start Me Up, Jumpin Jack Flash, and Brown Sugar.
Eastwood is taking things a step further by releasing a 25.5” scale T-type with a natural blonde finish born to have only five strings from the factory.
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The Micawber looks like a classic Tele at a glance, but is anything but after a closer inspection, with a custom Gotoh T-Style bridge with individual string saddles and a quintet of Gotoh tuners in place. It also has a slightly thinner fretboard – it’s 1.343″ at the nut – making the axe tailor-made for Stonesy playing.
It has a custom-wound single coil blade pickup in the bridge and a neck humbucker, wired to a three-way switch. Position one, which is the bridge pickup, is also aided by a Blend dial, with a low-pass added to position three.
The tonewood recipe, meanwhile, marries an ash body with a maple, modern C-shaped neck, and a maple fretboard with 21 medium-jumbo frets.
Coming in at $1,299, you could argue it’s not exactly a bargain – and people will constantly ask you where the rest of the strings are. But this is a specialist build. It was always going to raise the price, rather than slice one-sixth off it.
It follows Eastwood remaking Mike Bloomfield’s crudely modified folk-killing Tele earlier this year. However, the launch of an Angine de Pointrine-inspired microtonal double neck shows that contemporary trends are on its mind just as much.
Like the double neck, the Micawber is available now for preorder via a crowdfunding campaign. Deposits are $200, and at the time of writing, it’s bagged eight of its target 12 pre-orders to go into production.
See Eastwood Guitars for more.
Five-string guitars, of course, aren’t wholly new to the market, with Jacob Collier’s signature Strandberg proving that. It’s also been outselling the six-string variant, as players invest in the jazzer’s unique D-A-E-A-D tuning.
Newman also dropped a similarly Keef-inspired build in 2024.
