EKO 12 String - 1960’s Made in Italy 🇮🇹! - 60’s Italian Jangle! - Ciao Bella! - Best 12 String!

Ciao Bella! This guitar is the very definition of a fantastic 12 string. Enormous tone, jangle and chime for days, lightning fast action, great vintage history, and awesome acoustic tone.

These Italian-made 60’s 12 strings can be so unbelievable and inspiring. As an instrument, this thing totally kills. Huge tone, deep rhythm chords come shimmering out of this guitar. The Byrds jangle lives inside this guitar. The action is smooth and beautiful, low and bouncy. Neck is straight as an arrow, it plays effortlessly, especially for a 12 string. With a soundhole pickup (I use the Bill Lawrence acoustic pickup and they're 50 bucks and they're amazing) there's an incredible electric tone when you play through a tube amp. There’s an incredible unique saturation to the sound that is amazing to record with, could be a really cool studio secret weapon, and it would obviously make a super incredible and beautiful live guitar to perform alone or front a band with.

I grew up at a store that had a lot of these Italian EKO’s. I’ve worked on a lot of them and definitely speak their language (I actually do speak pretty alright Italian and my family is Italian, I think I have an ancestral connection to these things lol). The Italian guitars have their own personality and quirks that I learned how to speak, I love working on them and I got it this one playing super beautifully. A lot of these have fallen by the wayside and don’t play that well, but I’ve been working on these Italian guitars for a long time and it’s seriously one of my specialties to get these playing super great. People bring me their Italian guitars and I literally speak Italian to them while I nurse them back to health lol.

I absolutely love acoustic guitars with bolt on necks, I think they have incredible tone that records so beautifully and uniquely. Jimmy Page used Italian made Vox’s and EKO’s, and they have such a cool presence on record. Seriously point a SM57 at the 12th fret of a 60’s Italian acoustic with a bolt on neck and that’s it, that’s the sound of so many classic records.

This one has the classic “crazing” on the finish that you see on all the European guitars from this era. All guitars that were made in Italy, Sweden, Germany, and England from this time have this crazing to the finish. I think it looks super awesome. The tops and bodies are thick laminate and they’re super strong, they hold their shape really well, it’s only the finishes that crack and craze in cool unpredictable patterns. The neck is in fantastic condition, especially the back that your hand runs over while you’re playing.

Overall it's way more playable and healthy than most of it's type from the same era. One of the tuners is having a tough time, so right now it's an 11 string, but there's more than enough jangle in there and you'd never really notice. I tried to repair just that one tuner, but the tuners are all original and beautiful with the classic pearl-shaped metal buttons that I didn't want to change them from being original, so right now it's an 11 string. There's a bump on the side that someone filled with epoxy, and it's not the most beautiful repair but it's doing a good job. It's a really sturdy guitar just as it is, this was my personal one for the last few years but it's time to let it go. I'll miss it.

A good twelve string can open up and inspire new and unexpected parts of your mind that only a twelve string can get to. There’s a hugeness to the sound and feel that makes you write parts with bigger and broader strokes, it can get you out of the weeds and writing straight from the core of an idea. This one has some great songs in it!