Yamaha SSC-500 Blonde

These guitars are highly underrated.

A fairly obscure Yamaha model, this one was made in Japan was only 4 years in the early 1980s. It looks a bit like a Fender Strat and an Gibson SG put together. It is fairly thin and light, has a set-in neck with 3-on-a-side tuners, and has a hard tail -- all qualities of a typical SG. Yet, it has a 25-1/2" scale, 21 frets, and three single coil pickups -- all qualities of the classic Stratocaster -- including a basic body outline like that of a Strat. However, there are some unique features as well.

Instead of a typical Strat blade style pickup 5 way selector switch, there are three individual ON/OFF mini-toggle switches, each dedicated to a pickup. These mini-toggle switches allow for any combination of pickups to be selected, including the very useful "all on" and "all off" selection. There's just one volume and one tone control, but with the tone control potentiometer doing double-duty as a push-pull switch that switches the pickups between parallel and series wiring. The single coil pickups are a departure from the typical Stratocaster pole piece design, being of a blade design. The SSC-500's single coil blade pickups have a sound that is basically a morph between the Strat sound and that of a Dano lipstick tube (bar) type of single coil pickup. These large Yamaha single coil blade pickups have more output than standard Strat pickups, but they still exhibit great harmonic content. The Fretboard, neck profile, and set-neck joint are heavily influenced by the Gibson. A heavy one-piece bridge / tailpiece is a solid piece of hardware allowing easy and accurate intonation.  The Bridge assembly may not be original to the guitar.

This one had a Roland GK-2A pickup on it at some point but it has been removed leaving a couple screw holes.

A tonne of guitar for very low dollars.