Elvidge Amazon Guitar
Elvidge Amazon 'Mean Green Phoenix Machine'
The Elvidge Mean Green Phoenix Machine
I often get asked about the green sculptured / carved guitar that I play so thought I would dedicate a page to giving the full run down of this very unique guitar.
This guitar was built in Leeds, UK by a very good friend of mine and excellent luthier, Dennis Elvidge.
The Elvidge “Amazon” guitar AKA “The Mean Green Phoenix Machine” was one of the first guitars of its kind to be built by Dennis and is around 25 years old.
Only around 10 of these guitars exist and every one was hand built and lovingly carved by Dennis in his home workshop.
The guitar features:
-Carved rock maple body
-Rock maple set neck with ebony fingerboard
-24 Jumbo frets
-Gibson USA pickups
-Volume and Tone controls
-Fixed wrap over Schaller bridge with adjustable intonation
The Gibson humbuckers were added by myself and were originally from my ‘94 Les Paul standard. I removed the nickel covers and also flipped the magnet inside the neck pickup to give the Peter Green “out of phase” tone when both pickups are used together.
Elvidge Amazon guitars were originally fitted with Kent Armstrong pickups with a push / pull tone pot to split the coils for a single coil sound. I also removed this function from mine and installed Gibson volume and tone pots.
The guitar has an incredibly sweet clear glassy tone when played clean and when overdriven becomes very smooth with an mid range bite that cuts through a mix with excellent definition - somewhere between a Les Paul and Strat.
With Wishbone Ash I have mainly played this guitar live on the song “Phoenix”, it’s way out there looks, tone and playability make it perfect for this track but I could play a whole show just with this guitar and get a great tone all night.
Miniature Replica Models
This guitar became known by many Wishbone Ash fans as 'The Mean Green Phoenix Machine' and every night i would be asked 'What the hell is it?'
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In 2018 i worked with a company in Indonesia to produce a detailed miniature replica model of my Mean Green Phoenix Machine which were sold on the Wishbone Ash UK tour the same year, i also received orders from fans as far as Canada and America!
