Honey SE-DX B

I've written about Honey guitars a few times before. I've owned quite a few considering how rare they are outside Japan. They're even quite rare inside Japan and along with Firstman, Excetro and Idol (more on them soon) are some of my favourite Japanese electric guitars and basses. Of course, all 4 of these brands were made in the same factory at the same time and shared many features including sometimes bodies and necks.

That factory was of course the Teisco-Gen-Gakki factory, and the time was between 1967 and 1969. All of these brands were started by ex-Teisco employees who left after the Kawai buyout and used the factory that Teisco had used prior to moving most of the manufacturing inhouse to Kawai. 

This factory, like most Japanese factories at the time made several different levels of guitars to suit the market. Lower end products were made to fit the "cheap" market to fill demand for electric guitars while mid and higher end stuff was built to fill the more professional market. 

These brands were high quality products and were reasonably expensive for locally made guitars at the time. The fact that most of them were very ... adventurous with their designs probably didn't really help their sales figures and by '69 all of them were out of business, although Firstman went on to become quite a large electronics manufacturer building Synths for brands like Multivox.

These SE-DX hollowbodies are quite rare even in the Honey range. This is obviously a copy of a Gibson ES175 with a full depth, arch top and back cutaway electric guitar with 2 humbuckers. Others copied this guitar with the most famous probably being the Ibanez 2355 which this guitar is very comparable with. The DX designation in the model number signifying "Deluxe".

The body is laminated like the real thing, and the arch top and back are superb. It has all the binding of the real thing. The set neck is multi laminated with thin dark timber stripes but is thinner than the Gibson version. Very shallow but very comfortable. The multi-bound headstock is angled like a Gibson, and the rosewood fretboard is bound and inlayed with split parallelogram inlays like the original.

The pickups are typical late 60's Teisco-Gen-Gakki with medium output and a great clarity. Not PAFs but have a great tone of their own. The floating bridge has a nylon saddled T-O-M bridge and the trapeze tailpiece has a wonderful timber inlay with the Honey badge attached which is a nice touch.

The controls are standard master volume and tone for each pickup and a 3-way toggle. This one is all original except missing the scratchplate (one could be made fairly easily) and everything works as it should.

This is a great quality, good sounding and playing ES175 copy. It's not a Gibson but then it doesn't cost anywhere near what a Gibson version (or Ibanez version for that matter) costs and feels and sounds like an old jazz guitar. I'm not personally a fan of full depth hollowbodies and prefer thinlines for playing as they're more comfortable for me, but this is great to play.