Billy Duffy and Gretsch have teamed up for the G8424T signature Falcon, a limited edition hollow-body electric guitar that celebrates not only his long-standing relationship with the brand but the Cult's 40th anniversary too.
Duffy has played a lot of guitars but it is the Falcon he is most associated with. Little wonder. There are few cooler sights than a Falcon in Vintage White light up under stage lighting, and the single-cut semi-hollow seems such an old-school rock ’n’ roll choice in the modern era, where the solid-body electric reigns supreme.
Now, think of Gretsch guitars and you might think Chet Atkins, Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy or one of the O.G. endorsees of ‘That Great Gretsch Sound’. But you will have to go far to find a more passionate advocate of the brand.
Duffy once told – warned? – MusicRadar that we would regret it if we never had the pleasure of owning one. “Do you really want to go to your grave having never owned a Gretsch? It should be on the bucket list!” he said.
Duffy got the Gretsch bug by seeing Neil Young with one. But there were others who fully turned him onto the brand.
“The first would have to be Neil Young in my pre-punk high school group, the late, great Four Way Street Band,” he said. “As you can imagine by the name, there were a few Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fans in there! I was fascinated by Gretsch guitars, they looked magical. I saw some pictures of Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls... his guitar was enticing.
“The final straw was seeing Bow Wow Wow’s first-ever gig at a roller-rink in Hammersmith and Matthew Ashman, who’d been in Adam And The Ants, had one. I knew I had to get one. I liked AC/DC too, obviously Malcolm had one and I always thought the tonality of their guitars were great.”
Duffy’s new signature Falcon celebrates 40 years of The Cult, hence the designation, G8424T. It is finished in Vintage White. The hardware includes a Bigsby B6GW vibrato tailpiece with the super-cool, super-svelte wire arm, an Adjusto-Matic bridge, and a set of Grover Imperials FTW, and is finished in gold.
There is a gold commemorative plate on the truss rod cover to mark the Cult’s anniversary. The neck heel plate is gold sparkle. Hey, the Falcon has always had fancy feathers.
Fundamentally, the G8424T has a body of laminated maple on top, back and sides, with parallel spruce tone bars and sound post. The body measures 17” wide and 2.75” deep. Meanwhile, the neck is maple, glued to the body, and has Gretsch’s crowd-pleasing Standard U profile. It is topped with a 12” radius ebony fingerboard, with 22 “vintage small” frets, zero fret, and large pearloid block inlays.
Come to think of it, there’s more gold here too, with gold sparkle and with black-and-white purfling around the neck and the headstock. But this is not altogether that different from Duffy’s most-famous ‘Sanctuary’ Falcon.
It has a pair of Duffy’s custom-wound Black Top Filter’Tron humbuckers, each of which has its own volume control, with a master tone, while the three-way pickup selector is mounted on the shoulder of the guitar.
You will have no trouble nailing his tone on this but the big lesson that Duffy took from playing Gretsch was that it allowed him to find his own identity on the instrument.
“The Gretsch allowed me to create, what I think is the most important thing for any guitar player, and that is to find your own sound and your style,” he says. “That’s what playing a guitar with this certain set of attributes did for me.”
Made in Japan, this is one serious high-end electric guitar, shipping in its own commemorative hardshell guitar case. Priced £4,349/$4,499, the G8424T Billy Duffy Signature Falcon is available now. See Gretsch for more details.
