Gretsch Limited Edition Abbey Road Studiomatic Hollow Body Electric Guitar with Bigsby

Nestled in St. John’s Wood, London, Abbey Road Studios has been a cornerstone of music history for nearly a century, shaping the sound of generations and redefining what’s possible in a recording room. More than just a studio, it’s where groundbreaking albums were born and where engineers pushed the boundaries of audio technology itself, a place synonymous with timeless artistry and technical mastery.

To celebrate that extraordinary legacy, Gretsch has partnered directly with Abbey Road Studios on a stunning limited-edition guitar: the Abbey Road Studiomatic Hollow Body. Co-developed with the studio’s own legendary engineers, this instrument is equipped with bespoke Filter’Tron pickups and an exclusive Rumble Filter circuit that captures the character heard on countless classic records. It’s a masterful blend of vintage Gretsch soul and the sophisticated, nuanced tones that only Abbey Road could inspire, an instrument built for players who want both historic vibe and modern flexibility in every note.

Full Video Transcript

Overview

Hey, James G here with Tarpley Music in Fort Worth, Texas. And if you need to find us late at night online, just go to tarpleymusic.com and you can check out there and you can order and all that kind of good stuff. So I got a really cool Gretsch guitar today, and I'm very, very excited because it's one, it's kind of full of Beatles, right? This is the Gretsch L.E. Abbey Road Studio-matic and it is just a hats off to a lot of what happened in the magic of the Abbey Road Studios, right? It's just a really, really cool thing, and we will get to why it is so cool, but let's start with just the guitar itself.

Construction and Hardware First of all, double cutaway classic walnut stain. This is all laminated maple with the gloss finish, so very, very bright, cuts really, really well. It is a 24.6 scale length, which the scale length of course is our measurement from the nut to the saddle here, so your playable area. Maple neck with a very classic C feel to it, extremely comfortable C. It's got a 12-inch radius, 22 medium jumbo frets with an ebony fretboard. We got the really cool thumb, this just screams Gretsch, right? We got these like pearloid style fingernail, uh, thumbnail inlays. And on the back of there, here we do have Luminlay dots, all right? So in case you're playing "Hey Jude" in the middle of a very dark studio or a dark stage, you can light up and you can see those fret markings there. Very, very cool. And it is a Graph Tech nut with an Adjusto-Matic bridge, of course with a Bigsby B60 cutout vibrato tailpiece, very classy. It's awesome! And of course, all this hardware as you can see is gold. Even got the G-arrow knobs, the Gretsch classic G-arrow knobs there. Diecast locking tuners, killer, right? So the guitar itself just great nuts and bolts to the thing. It plays really, really well. It's going to stay in tune. It's got the right hardware. It's got the great, perfect vibrato to get you.

The Filter'Tron Pickups and Rumble Filter But tonewise, this is where it comes in really, really killer. The custom, these are Filter'Tron pickups, of course, just screams Gretsch sound. These sound really good. And it is Filter'Tron pickups in both the neck and the bridge. However, they have put in this rumble filter here. So, what is the rumble filter? So, if you're in the studio world, there's something we've always called the Abbey Road trick, where they used to go into EQ before the reverb, right? So when you start getting all these guitar parts, it starts getting really cluttery on this. So they would literally go in and EQ the reverb before it goes in. And there's about 800 hertz it just starts going off a little bit. So it's a high-pass filter, right? So everything below a certain, the 800, starts going down to get rid of all that extra noise. Well, the filter on this, it goes down about 6 dB on one. On two, it takes it down about 16-17 dB, so you can really cut out a lot of that. Let's say you're on your fourth or fifth guitar part and you don't want it to get lost in all that reverb mess. You might do something like this. So this is really cool, but it's built right into the guitar. This heavily affects your reverb, which we will demo a little bit as best we can. And how that is turned on is each pickup has its own tone knob, as well as just popping that, and then that will turn the rumble filter on. So there's a lot of tonal capabilities. This is a really, really, really great studio guitar.

To try to stay within that British vibe a little bit, we're actually going through one of my amps here, the Artisan 10 Blackstar. This is an EL34, so we're going to try to stay with that whole vibe. I'm going to go through all these positions with clean, and then we'll go through it again with overdrive.

Takeaways

This is so fun. I would love to have this in the studio just because it makes a lot of sense. I'm also an audio engineer, so to kind of mess with that rumble Filter'Tron, it just really is kind of cutting out a step. As far as live, in a big tone where you got a lot of reverb going, it very well could help out a lot if you're getting crazy feedback, or maybe you're—there's a lot of guitar parts and you're kind of getting lost. But even without that, this is just a really cool double cutaway Gretsch with the right parts. For me, if you're a Beatles fanatic or an Abbey Road Studios fanatic, this would be a really cool collector's piece just to put on the wall, of course, because it looks gorgeous in the walnut stain. But from a player standpoint, yeah man, you could definitely gig. If you're doing some sort of a Beatles tribute band, this would look killer to kind of get in that realm of what they were playing. I'm really curious to know what your comments are about what you've heard on this guitar... If you like this video, just give us a like, please. It really, really helps us out and kind of drives us. We're dropping videos every week, so if you would like to know when we're dropping a new video, you just turn on that little bell right there and hopefully, we will see you on the next one.