A re-issue of the 1962 Bison guitar, celebrating the 40th anniversay of the classic Burns body shape with its inward curved body horns and advanced pickup selection system.

With its distintive batwing headstock, this guitar was Jim Burns' greatest creation and this re-issue retains its strong look,sound and character. Already the recipient of great praise from the music media, it has a punchy vintage tone but delivers great modern sounds with its unique Wild Dog and Split Sound settings.

Features include:

• One tone control
• One master volume
• A/B pickup selector
• Wild Dog/Split Sound setting
• Three Burns Tri-Sonic pickups
• Burns deluxe tremolo unit
• Indonesian nato body
• Bi-flex two way type truss rod
• Neck binding
• Scale length: 24.75" 22 frets
• Bolt on hardrock maple neck
• 43mm nut width
• Classic polyester finish
• Burns deluxe machine heads
• Batwing original headstoc

Each pickup was actually two pickups with two separate coils and these were switched via a complex arrangement of the rotary control. So with three double pickups there were six coils to switch, sadly the designers limited the outputs of these to just four options.

So, “Wild dog” was actually an out of phase sound with very high treble, “Treble” was the bridge pickup, “Jazz” was the neck and centre pick ups and “Split sound” was a something quite original. The coil under the treble three strings on the bridge pickup was paired with the coil under the three bass strings in the neck pickup. Thus the sound was “split”, the treble strings were very treble and the bass strings very bassy. Actually Gretch once made a guitar with two bass strings and four normal and Chet Atkins made an album with it, just sounded like two separate guitars.

These pickups were actually low impedance with a matching transformer built into the instrument. The coils were not wound onto the magnets as in a Fender Strat type design but were wound separately and then placed into the housing around the magnets. Because of this loose design the pickups could be quite microphonic but they do have a sound of their own, Brian May used Burns pickups in the famous guitar he built and plays.

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