Description

This 34 year old Brummy is in totally amazing condition.

It has hand-wound pickups signed Magnum by John Birch on neck pup and and Biflux by John Birch on bridge pup. The bridge is stamped John Birch. He clearly liked seeing his name on his guitars, as it appears again on the headstock!

Front-most knob is a master volume; top-most knob is a 12 position rotary switch (yes!) It mainly seems to control the bridge position and probably also switches into stereo too.

That maple neck just seems to go on forever, there’s clear access to all 24 frets and it’s fast and low all the way up (and down!)

Sadly we don’t have the original case, in fact it would be nice to find a hard case that fits it – let me know if you have one. Meanwhile, we’ll ship it in a hard case that has plenty of padding inside.

John Birch JB-1 features

• Unbound double horn solid body electric guitar
• Full-sized access panel at back
• Bound maple fretboard
• Clear access to 24 frets
• Dot fret markers
• Schaller tuners
• Adjustable compensated John Birch chrome plated bridge
• Pickup selector switch
• John Birch Magnum pickup
• John Birch Biflux pickup
• Individual tone and volume knobs
• Master volume and 12 position rotary switch
• Non original hard case

John Birch Magnum and Biflux pickups

Keywords: Birmingham, John Birch, JB, JB1, JB-1

Comment: About the John Birch J1

It´s a J1 (not a JB1) built at the earliest 1978. I´ve heard, John Birch ended the production of building guitars in 1983 and concentrated his work on Guitar to MIDI-systems / Guitar-Synthesizer (without much success).
The J1 was as any JB Model completely handcrafted and made of the best material one could get. The wood used was very old Maple-Tone-Wood, which is absolutely impossible to get nowdays (one should not compare this to the "look-a-like"-maple that is used today).
The pricing of JB-guitars started without custom-modification at about 2300.- € new. A Gibson Les Paul Standard was at that time priced with about 850.- €, a US Stratocaster Standard had a price of ca. € 600.-. So you can imagine, that JB Guitars (among them the J1-Standard) stood in a row with Veillette Citron, Alembic, early B.C.Rich (Seagull, Eagle,Mockingbird).
JB was called "the father of the European Custom Guitar", as he was the first one to exclusively make first class guitars according to customer orders (regardless of cost) in order to produce the "Rolls Royce" of the electric guitars.

Every guitar could get ordered with freely to choose Pickups, that were handwired by John Birch himself. He offered a line of different pickups (Superflux, Hyperflux, Biflux, Magnum) that could get ordered as single coil or Double Humbucker-versions.
The combination of this J1 is very usable for all styles of Rock - however with a JB-guitar you can achieve a suitable first class sound for any style (maybe except typical dump Jazz-sound).
You will not find a serial-no. on JB-guitars for the simple reason, that these guitars weren´t produced in series. It is said, that all in all JB produced not more than about 1000 guitars in the time between 1970 - 1983. One should compare this number with the Millions of guitars that were made by Gibson, Guild, Gretsch, Fender etc..
Try handing the guitar to someone who plays a Gibson LP for testing. I´ve seen Gibson players testing my JBs (SCSL, J2 and J1) with eyes wide open and willing to immediately sell their LP if they could get a JB.

I´m sending enclosed a catalog of JB from 1977
(Many thanks to Rolf, who collects JBs, for this info, and do contact us if you would like the catalogue)