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.
Glen Campbell Classical Prototype
“Glen Campbell and his TV show had the power to make a minor brand into a major brand almost overnight. And vice versa. No one was more aware of that than the people at Ovation...With Glen and his musician friends playing Ovations on national television every week, Ovation was sitting on top of the world. Then in 1970, that world cracked.” – “The History of the Ovation Guitar” by Walter Carter.
In 1970, about two years after he had become Ovation’s top endorser, Glen appeared on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” playing a Baldwin nylon string classical guitar. The Baldwin belonged to Jerry Reed, and Glen tried it simply because it had a pickup built into the bridge, which allowed a freedom of movement not possible while playing an acoustic guitar into a separate microphone while singing. To say that the top brass at Ovation were not very pleased about the possibility of Glen switching loyalties is a huge understatement.
The ensuing furor led to the development of Ovation’s own version of an acoustic-electric guitar pickup, which was to become the first commercially successful pickup to be able to amplify an acoustic guitar while retaining a basically acoustic tone. Within ten years, ninety percent of the Ovations being sold were equipped with this system. Being able to play an acoustic on stage with lots of volume, real acoustic tone, and not having to play into a microphone, became one of the biggest chapters in Ovation history, and acoustic guitar history as a whole.
Development of this new pickup took time, and rather than take the chance of losing Glen’s endorsement, Ovation opted to make several interim instruments for him to use. Most of these were fitted with the Baldwin pickup like the one in Reed’s instrument that Glen liked so much, but this instrument was an exception.
The classical guitar pictured here (Model # 1123-4 E, Serial # X010) was built with a prototype Barcus-Berry stereo pickup system. This is a passive system, featuring a top-mounted volume control and a four-pin XLR output jack. It has a solid cedar top, and an Artist depth (5 1/8”) bowl. Another non-standard feature of this instrument is the nineteen-fret, 1 7/8” width fingerboard, and also features a signature truss rod cover.
Glen apparently didn’t like this guitar much at the time, preferring the Baldwin equipped instruments to this one. He noted that there were “hot spots” or louder notes in certain areas of the neck. Although it is a very live instrument when plugged in, it works well and is quite balanced when mated with a modern outboard pre-amp.
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Ovation Bluebird 12-String Electric
1981 Ovation Adamas GC Prototype
Glen Campbell Signature Series 6 String Prototype
Ken
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