EBAY YAMAHA PACIFICA 1421

Rich Lasner on the Yamaha Pacifica Series Rich Lasner, the man behind the Yamaha Pacifica and Weddington series guitars was kind enough to answer some questions related to his involvement with designing guitars for Yamaha in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. This is the first of two entries, focusing on the Pacifica series. Q: I understand you worked with Ibanez in the mid ‘80s, then worked for Yamaha in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. After leaving Yamaha, you went to work with Peavey then became president of Modulus Graphite in ‘95. Now, you’re working with Line 6 on their Variax guitars. Do I have that right? That’s a very impressive career designing guitars! A: I was at Line 6 from March 2003 until June 2006. After that, I started a guitar business and design consulting company called G-Rok in Marin County, CA, 20 minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. I do overall planning and product line development work, Eric Kirkland (he was the designer at Line 6 for all of the Variax stuff and spent 10 years at Gibson prior to that in the Custom Shop) does computer 3-D CAD modeling and design and Bob McDonald (head engineer at Modulus with me for 8 years, then at Line 6 as the proto builder with earlier stints at Tobias, Taylor and Performance Guitar) runs the CNC machine, builds prototypes and does production programming. We’re working on some interesting guitars for Winter NAMM release. Q: What was your position at Yamaha? A: Senior Guitar Designer Q: What was Yamaha’s design department like in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s? Were there a number of people working on guitars, or was it a smaller shop focusing just on design and prototyping? A: In the States we had Leo Knapp building and I was designing. Yamaha had a guy there to run the paperwork end of the shop. In Japan, Yamaha had Jackie Minakuchi as the head of Guitar Engineering, with a staff of about 4-5 guys to translate the designs (which I did with pencil on paper, then transferred to the computer laboriously plotting each line). Jackie is a very cool guy who gets guitar. He was very helpful and supportive. Q: Who else was working with you at Yamaha during this time? A: Leo Knapp, possibly the greatest builder I ever worked with, who I mentioned, Ken Dapron from Yamaha USA, a receptionist and me. That’s all. Q: Were you encouraged to work on “clean sheet” designs, or were there design targets and constraints you had to work within? A: Jackie wanted to test the communications and translation issues between our shop (using AutoCad in English) and his engineering department. We decided to do two guitars- A Les Paul done the way we thought it should be and a Strat, again done as we thought it should evolve. Neither design was ever supposed to be seen by anyone outside the company or sold commercially. They were merely a test project. Japan really liked the results and told us they planned to release them, which made Leo and me completely crazy at first. Q: Were there any projects that never reached production? image A: I did the Weddington, Pacifica, AES1500 (internal anti-feedback bracing system) and Attitude basses while there. All were produced. I came up with a series of guitars called Tek Tone, that we were going to promote as a recording musician’s toolbox. The series comprised a regular 6-string, a baritone 30” scale guitar, a 12-string electric and a mando guitar, much like the old Vox one, but playable. Leo made about 6 of the Baritones, nearly all in big flake candy colors, and gave them to artists, but the project never got off the ground. I attached the drawings for the series. They look kind of “cute” today, but the retro thing hadn’t happened yet back when we did them in around 1990-91. I grew up not far from the Danelectro factory in New Jersey, so I always had a soft spot for slightly off-kilter guitars. Q: While with Yamaha you designed the Pacifica 1412 and 1421 series guitars, correct? A: Correct. Q: I can see some ‘family resemblances’ between the 1412/1421 and instruments you designed for Ibanez. Were you encouraged to work on similar designs, competing with Ibanez, or was it more of an evolution of ideas you were already thinking about? A: The 1400 series guitars were instruments I envisioned as what might have come next if I stayed at Ibanez. They were more sophisticated than the Ibanez JEM and RG guitars being carved-top, neck-throughs with very complex neck joints and some with chambered areas in the body. It hurts that all of them were fitted with a Floyd Rose style tremolo (the bridge was the rule in those days for any guitar with modern Rock pretensions). Without it, I think they could still be viable guitars today. Q: The 1412/1421 has a very wide, thin neck (1-3/4” at the nut), was this also an effort to capture some of the superstrat market? A: I saw this neck shape as a Jackson-style design, which I liked very much. Being freed from the Ibanez JEM and Wizard neck shapes while at Yamaha made it possible for me to use the wider flat design. Q: Unlike the bolt-on Jems and RGs, the 1412/1421 is neck-through. Was this also a nod to the superstrat crowd, or something you had wanted to experiment with? image A; I grew up with a Gibson Reverse Firebird as my main guitar, so I was very familiar with neck through designs. I perceived neck through guitars as having a less vibrant range of dynamics and overtones than the typical bolt-on or set-neck but with a really even sound at any point on the neck. Since we already had a bolt-on Pacifica and the set-neck Weddington series, the neck-through was an interesting challenge. Q: Where did the idea for a heavily chambered body come from? A: A few years before at Ibanez I designed the Maxxas guitars which featured a clamshell construction with fully hollowed out wings. I was going for a guitar that would be good at developing a responsive tone at medium volume levels, like a Gibson ES 335, but without the bulk. Q: The Ibanez Jems and RGs have stayed exceptionally popular but the 1412/1421 was never a hot seller and has largely fallen into obscurity, despite being an excellent design. Any idea why? Was the 1412/1421 too upscale, or did Yamaha have problems establishing themselves in a niche market? image A: The Pacifica 1400s were tremendously hard to produce (look at the precision level of the various pieces of wood at the joints where they intersect other wood in the joint in the prototype photo!) and the fall-out rate in production was prohibitive. The guitars were also frankly too pricey for Yamaha’s guitar brand to support, as they never grew the image in the States that other Japanese brands enjoyed. In the European markets where Yamaha electrics received high visibility and respect, the retail cost was so high that no one could afford them. Q: Even scouring the internet, it’s exceptionally rare to see a Pacifica 1412/1421 - any idea how many were made? A: No idea. All I can say is that it was not many. Q: What other Pacificas did you have a hand in designing? The bolt- on 1212/1221? Others? What were the major differences between the Pacificas at the time? imageimage A: I did all the 700, 900, 1200 and 1400 series guitars while at Yamaha. They broke down into: 700s were non-locking tremolo bolt-ons; 900s were locking trem bolt-ons with DiMarzio pickups; 1200s were square-edged locking trem guitars with DiMarzios; 1400s were carved top, neck-through guitars with either solid body wings or chambered body wings, locking trem, DiMarzio-equipped instruments. Some series include single- and double-cutaway shapes as well. I don’t recall exactly where the split was in the line, but I developed an aircraft aluminum extended bolt-on joint for Yamaha too. I think it started at the 900 series level on up.