by RickJ » Sat Feb 19, 2011 1:09 am
I have couple of S100 Shadow guitars .. both black, both new, mothballed. Despite the popular believe .. and the Shadow Guitar Co's insinuation, that these guitars were made in West Germany and later on in Germany [after unification] .. they were not! In general the electric guitars made prior to spring 1990 [e.g. S/No.s 1000 to 4000 were made by Eko Racanati on the East coast of Italy. Anything made after spring 1990 was made by the Czech company located in North Bohemia [their sister company made Kramer guitars, I believe].
Looking at my two guitars .. the 1989 S100 was made by Eko and was equipped with 3 humbuckers [the neck and middle humbacker disguised as single coils] the pots were rated at 250k which didn't work too well with 3 humbuckers [the entire setup was mismatched] ... I've changed the comlete installation for DiMarzios [humbuckers and pots]. The other guitar was made by Jolana and it had the same Shadow HHumbucker at the bridge, but it came with 2 single coils at mid and the neck positions. Slightly better setup, but to tell the truth ... the second S100 would sound 2 notches better if I spent a bit of money on Seymour Duncan or DiMarzio pickups and invested in push / pull pots to split the coils and reverse the phases. Shadow are known in Europe for their acoustic guitar pickups, not much for the electric guitar pickups ... Otherwise .. both guitars came with Schaller tuners, Schaller Floyd tremolo [made of the same zinc alloy, that Matchbox use for the toy cars] etc. Frankly ... after I got these guitars, a thought came to my mind, that I would have been better off by buying the Mexican made Fenders and changing the basic tuners for Schaller or Gotoh locking tuners that would have saved me lot of time and money. Since then, I have build my own guitars based on Japanese strat bodies and necks .. stuck in Malmsteen DiMarzio pickups ... and have more or less forgotten about Shadows.