I bought this truly strange guitar in the early eighties. While playing in a band called Super Suzy in the later 1970’s I often used an Ovation 12 string guitar. Since Super Suzy was a very adventurous group I frequently experimented with various tunings on the twelve string – tuning the string pairs in fourths or fifths was my favorite. These days I have a few patches like that in my VG-8 guitar synth. That Ovation hadn’t been cheap and to this day I could slap myself for trading it in for a black Ibanez acoustic/electric guitar I was never happy with and eventually sold.
This used Framus popped up at Musicland in Germany one day for a ridiculously low price. I thought I couldn’t really go wrong. Well, while the guitar has twelve strings and the famous Framus laminated neck, it soon turned out that it really didn’t sound too good. For some reason the pickups were not only very low output but also actually picked up when you talked into them – I guess you call this feature ‘microphonic’. Since other parts of the electronics were compromised too, I rebuilt the wiring and put in new pickups which of course needed custom made frames because, just like on my other Framus guitar, the measurements are not quite standard. It sounds better now but I rarely play it, although the fake, glued-on F-hole is a hoot.