prowla

Necrothread time... There's a "Tokai" Rockinbetter RG43 up for sale at the moment, so I was looking up some info and happened across this thread. Some facts: Tokai is a place in Japan and/or a translation of "city". The word is not copyrighted. Tokai Gakki is a Japanese guitar maker founded in 1947, who brands their instruments "Tokai" and is commonly called "Tokai". Tokai UK is a UK importer of guitars, including (but not limited to) Tokai. Tokai Gakki did list Rickenbacker 6-string guitars (RG43) in their catalogue, but never a 4-string bass; the fact that they listed is 6-string guitar is no proof whatsoever that they did a bass. Now, with a quick sleight-of-hand, Tokai UK commissioned a run of Ric bass copies, branded them Rockinbetter, and sold them as Tokai (UK) and plant the seeds for people to infer the link. Likewise they a run of 6-string guitars, even calling them "RG43" to hint at continuity, or even to satisfy existing orders? This is not much difference to Rose Morris being the importer of Rickenbackers and also having their own Shaftesbury branded copies (made in Italian or Japanese factories), apart from the suspiciously not-dissimilar company name similarity. To show how easy it is, anybody can set up a UK company for fifty quid and can commission a run of a hundred instruments from a factory in the far-East. So, suppose I don my entepreneurial hat and create a company and called it "Tokai GB"; I could then get a batch of "Ronniebarker" basses made, say £10k for a run of 100, and flog them on. If I planted a few whispers here and there and gave a nonchalant shrug of my shoulders and knowingly tapped my nose any time someone asked if Tokai was involved, then hopefully the myth would perpetuate. As for the Rockinbetters themselves, IMHO, they are adequate instruments but pretty dire copies of Rickenbackers, being the wrong scale, having dissimilar hardware, and being oversized. The irony now is that, once they shifted production from Indonesia to China, the plans got out and everybody started making them (with fake "Rickenbacker" logos on them), to the point that the Chickenbackers became a cuckoo which pushed Rockinbetters out of the nest. And now we have a proliferation of mediocre copies of Rockinbetters (not Rickenbackers) on the market at ridiculously low prices.

Well, I bid on it, but stopped at my limit.

Well, the finish is quite jazzy anyway. But yes - spraying a cheap guitar doesn't suddenly add £200 to its value. Plus, my Orange P is nicer!

I've got an Elf amp and a stupidly small Eden 1x10 cab; a nice little setup.

The 5-string is an interesting one - the neck is a bit chunkier, but it is very playable; I really need to put a new set of strings on it to see where it takes me.

That’ll do nicely.

And it's only a 9 hours 27 mins - 460.0 miles trip to collect (including ferry trip)...

Yes, a slight hiccup!

I really don't get instrument models and it bugs me when they turn up in my search results.

It's a nice looking guitar - it's sometimes difficult to fathom how they can do them at that price. I guess you'll have to see how the bridge/tuning mechanism works (good to see it's now one of the awful "Overlord of Music" headless systems!). I've got a Steinberger Spirit headless guitar and is it stupidly small.

Is standing on it an option?

I did contemplate buying that 64 off Chris.

Hmmm - I bough an Ashbory a couple of months ago; it's quite a fun little thing...

Well, it's travelled: George Gruhn is in Nashville and now it's in The Canaries.

Nice armchair.

Nice to see it's got fanned tuners too. (Even if they are a bit random...)

Ah - a rebadged CIOKS DC7.

Are there any mains-powered pedalboard power supplies which have a USB output too?

Once again I marvel at the creativity of the human brain!

More Wally than Wal.