1962 Framus Electro Universal

From the front, this Framus Electro Universal looks like a double-neck lap steel guitar, a fairly common configuration in the Hawaiian guitar world. But if you flip it over you’ll see it’s actually a square-neck/round-neck combo, which is a very rare bird indeed. The most famous player of this style of guitar is Junior Brown, who probably didn’t know this guitar existed when he and luthier Michael Stevens created the Guit-Steel back in 1985. Which is not surprising as the Framus model is pretty scarce and, as near as I can tell, the German company never exported them to the US. I’m not sure how many of these Framus built, but it looks like they were only made for a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One confusing thing that turned up as I was researching this guitar is its actual name. Right there on the cover-plate it clearly says it’s an Electra but the Framus site calls it an Electro.

I had a chance to play around with one of these a few years ago (it might actually have been this very guitar) and I recall the steel neck worked better than the standard guitar neck. The big issue is that the scale length is about 22.5″, which is fine for the steel but a bit too short for the guitar neck, at least in standard tuning. Perhaps tuning it to a higher pitch would help. It sounded pretty good, as I recall, though, and it was well constructed. This might be a good guitar for someone who wanted a cheap way to experiment to see if the Guit-Steel concept was right for them. A new Guit-Steel from Michael Stevens starts at $14,500 while this Framus is on eBay with a bid of $200 as of this writing. I suspect it will sell for way below four figures.

Click here for the original listing.

UPDATE: This guitar sold on April 27 for $577.33.

We wrote about Michael Stevens in Issue 27.