EKO Rio Grande VI - 1960’s Made in Italy 🇮🇹! - Multa Bella Chitarra! - Beautiful Guitar! -

Ciao Bella! What a beautiful guitar all the way from 1960’s Italy! All the charm, sparkle, and beautiful jangle that you only get from a classic Italian guitar. It has an unmistakeable sound and feel that you can hear and distinctly make out on a ton of early Zeppelin and David Bowie albums, they have their own special tone that records really nice.

The Italian guitars are much like Italy itself, and that is that they have a lot of heart. They have a very fun spirit to them, all the emotions are there in extreme form. Are they perfect? No (I am Italian). Do the trains run on time? Of course not. When the trains aren’t run on time, sometimes that’s the world telling you that you need to slow down. When something makes you slow down, that’s when you actually realize you’ve been running too hot. The trains are right. Listen to the trains. You don’t get to be a 110 year old Sicilian by worrying about being on time when worrying won’t make the train appear.

This guitar has that quintessential 60’s Italian feel and sound, and it is totally a thing all to itself. The bolt on neck acoustic is such a great sound, and there’s some amazing quality to it where it records like absolute magic. It’s bizarre and hard to explain, but I will go to my grave saying that the bolt on neck acoustics from Italy are some of the best and coolest studio guitars out there. They sound like nothing else and sit in a track amongst other instruments really nicely without much EQ, they sound kind of exactly how I want a guitar to sound right away when it’s under the mic. They say that’s some sort of quality of the bolt on neck construction at work.

As an instrument, this thing totally rules. Multo Bello. Sounds fantastic, plays fantastic, and feels fantastic. Neck feels great, I put in a nice walnut shim to raise it up to where it should be for nice low action. On these Italian guitars I always have to shim the neck which is essentially performing a neck reset! Instead of a neck reset being a prohibitively expensive repair it’s a fun and easy shim experience, that’s part of why these are great guitars! It sounds great with a beautiful mid range, similar in a way to the Goya and other Swedish family of guitars, and it would be dynamite in the studio. There’s a few surface finish cracks, but these are heavily laminated and the cracks are only through the surface - also a solid reason why these are epic guitars, they’re super strong! They really are kind of more “built to last” more than a lot of their American counterparts, a thinner wood guitar will fold in on themself a lot faster than this one will.

Condition wise, I think it looks really good for being 65+ years old. Looks like the original pickguard fell off, but it did so on it’s own without being yanked and came off really cleanly. At the very top of the neck the neck kicks up a bit, and the frets about the 14th fret or so don’t really play which is not uncommon on these. Where I have it set up now gets the best of all the worlds with a balance of playability and tone, I experimented with where it should sit and it’s feeling really good! Other than that there’s some regular wear that you may expect, but nothing too out of character with the age. Great instrument, would make a great studio or live guitar!