Glen Campbell and Ovation Guitars
Glen fan and guitarist Wayne Reid has managed to acquire some of the Ovations that were owned by Glen in the past. We will feature five of these Ovations over the next few months. The following section is being used with permission of the authors.
Glen Campbell and Ovation Guitars
“A major helicopter manufacturer loses his main client. It happens that the market is booming for a totally different product–the guitar. Coincidentally this man (Ovation founder Charles Kaman) had played guitar in his youth. He decides to apply some of the technology and materials he used in building helicopters to making a new kind of guitar. And it happens that as this new guitar is struggling along, one of America’s most popular entertainers adopts it. By the time the company celebrates its thirtieth anniversary, it is established as the biggest maker of acoustic guitars in the United States. This is the history of the Ovation guitar. Who would believe it if it weren’t true?” – from “The History Of the Ovation Guitar” by Walter Carter.
Through the sixty odd years Glen Campbell has been playing the guitar he has been seen with virtually every major brand of guitar at one time or another. However, the brand most folks associate Glen with is, of course, Ovation. Ask any 40+ year old guitarist to recount his first recollection of the Ovation guitar and it will almost always be having seen Glen play one on the “Goodtime Hour”. The procurement of Glen as an endorsee was a major coup for Ovation; fifty million viewers watching one of the world’s hottest guitarists and most popular new stars play these untraditional looking guitars literally contributed to the sale of thousands of instruments over the years.
Glen didn’t just play them. He had ideas about how they should be built. His likes and desires resulted in not only his own signature series model that was produced for over twenty years but his suggestions were sometimes implemented into other models and occasionally through the entire Ovation line. His long-time association with the Ovation company, (which continues to this day) has resulted in quite a number of instruments being built specifically for Glen. Many of these guitars were prototypes or “custom built” to Glen’s specifications or desires at the time.
1981 Ovation Adamas GC Prototype
Since 1976, the Adamas model has been the flagship of the Ovation line. A decade after the successful introduction of his fibreglass backed guitars, Charles Kaman took the concept of non-wooden guitars one step further with the introduction of a composite top consisting of a layer of birch veneer sandwiched between two layers of carbon fibres. This unique construction, as well as replacing the traditional sound hole with multiple holes in the upper bouts of the guitar, resulted in a louder, more responsive sound and fantastic tone.
The tag inside the one-of-a-kind Adamas shown here reads, “Special guitar built by the Kaman Music Group for Glen Campbell, completed 7-8-‘81 – C.W. Kaman II". Custom features include top mounted volume and three-band equalizer controls (Ovation never did this on any production acoustic guitar) and Glen’s name in gold “old English” script under the clear pickguard. The most unusual feature is, however, is the fact that it has a super-shallow bowl and was one of the very first such guitars to leave the factory. It would be another two years before this option was available on any production models and a full thirteen years before it was added to the Adamas option list.
The case for this guitar was custom built as well. As there were no shallow bowl guitars before this time, there were no cases to fit. Therefore a deep bowl case was used but two extra pads were added to the bowl support area to accommodate the prototype shallow bowl size.
Two videos featuring this guitar are the pilot episode of the “Glen Campbell Music Show” which aired in 1981 and a “Country Comes Home” special out of Nashville that was shown in 1982.
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Ovation Bluebird 12-String Electric
Glen Campbell Classical Prototype
Glen Campbell Signature Series 6 String Prototype
Ken
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