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Charley Wirz


This is a list and description of the guitars and other equipment played by musician Stevie Ray Vaughan. Vaughan played a number of throughout his career, one of which, a 1963 body and a late 1962 rosewood (curved fingerboard) neck, became "the most famous battered Strat in rock history." He was notoriously hard on his guitars, and many of them required extensive periodic maintenance. He used a limited number of (mainly vintage) effect pedals, and favored Fender and Marshall amplification.

Vaughan was hard on his instruments and his equipment and was reported to hear even the slightest malfunction, even when, for instance, he was running 32 amplifiers into the mixing console for the recording of In Step. His guitars were serviced by Charley Wirz of Charley's Guitar Shop in Dallas, Texas, and especially Rene Martinez, who worked in Wirz's shop for a while. Martinez also built guitars for Carlos Santana. His amplifiers were tuned and serviced by César Díaz, also the guitar technician for Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan.

Number One (also known as Vaughan's 'First Wife') was a used by Vaughan for most of his career; it was "rebuilt more times than a custom Chevy." Vaughan always claimed it was a 1959 model, since that date was written on the back of the pick-ups; Rene Martinez, who maintained the guitar since 1980, saw the year 1963 stamped in the body and 1962 on the neck. The guitar was given to him by the owner of Ray Henning's Heart of Texas music shop in Austin, Texas in 1973 and was his main performing instrument and companion. Vaughan used the guitar on all five of his studio albums and on Family Style. The distinctive cigarette burn on the headstock comes from an incident when Vaughan had left a burning cigarette tucked under the sixth string for too long while playing.

"Number One" had a neck relief of .012" at the 7th and 9th frets, and leveled out through the remainder of the fingerboard. The fingerboard radius when new would have been 7.25 inches as were all pre CBS curved fingerboard Fenders but SRV's guitar ended up after many refrets and sanding of the fingerboard as 10" and used Dunlop 6100 fretwire. String height was measured to be 5/64" on the high E string and 7/64" on the low E string. Each string had 3 full winds for the best angle at the bone nut.


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