The Steel Guitar Forum

I recently bought a sho bud maverick, the contact paper," ash tray" neck style . I think it is a pretty good guitar for a guy like me, a long time listener but still a newcomer to the instrument. Hearing all the negative comments from guys who obviously know much more about the topic than me is disheartening. Some people would say that I obtained a piece of junk. I always wanted a steel guitar and usualy am short on cash. I was lucky enough to make a trade for my Maverick so I am going to put one foot in front of the other and do my best.

For all the negative stuff that may or may not come with Maverick ownership It has a beautiful,heart touching tone whenit is played through a halfway decent amp. It reminds me of the "real Country" sound I love from the old Johny Paycheck and Buck Owens and Satrday Collections which made me love the instrument in the first place.
And with a little imagination it could be a great blues 'voice " or fit into music not always associated with the PSG.

There is a certain Romance at least for me in the Shobud logo The ace,heart, diamond, and club fingerboard decorations reminds me of the Pedal Steel Porter Wagoner's steel guy played and My old Pete Drake of Talking Steel Guitar fame 45's were played on a Sho Bud . When I was a kid this was the " real stuff" and many years later it still may be. That is what drew me to the Maverick.

lived in or around Boston most of my life. It is a great city but hardly a steel guitar mecca. You don't come across PSG's every day. An opourtunity presented itself and I would have always regretted missing a chance of getting in on the Steel Guitar fun. So Im not looking back.

I have experienced a few tuning problems and until I find a teacher the going has been slow as far as learning . However if I really put some time into my studies and make the effort this old guitar will be suitable for learning on. Im concentrating on chords,blocking, grips and scales for now.I have the Winnie Winston method book, some old Steel Guitarist Magazines and some photo copies of old Guitar Player magazine steel guitar articles. These are good sources of instruction. and the Steel Guitar Forum is a good source of help once i know enough to ask sensible questions..

Who knows, before long I may be playing with some other guys and having some real fun!

This afternoon I am going to a meeting of the Rhode Island Steel Guitar Association where I hope to make a start at finding some people who share this interest . That is probably the best way to find a teacher and all the steel guitar stuff that is going on in this part of the world.

So i think this old Maverick will be good enough to get yours truly started in the Steel guitar game. So

Joe

Hey Joe, what a great post, and maybe it will help some naysayers to back off and keep their negativity to themselves. Your fine post will encourage some who own Mavericks to enjoy their guitars.

It ain't the arrow, it's the Indian.

Years ago... mid 80's... I got a gumby-keyhead Maverick in a trade for practically nothing. Three peds, 1 lever. I set it up and marvelled at the sweet tone it had. Since I learned to play on a guitar with no levers, there was no problem with the Maverick and I realized I could play a whole evening of traditional country on one, no problem. Basically, the changer is the equivalent of a Sho-Bud Permanent.

If I'm not mistaken, Bobbe Seymour did a whole tour with Ray Price on a gumby-Maverick.

I occasionally play my Bigsby on selected gigs. It's got a similar changer and 2 fewer strings. Works fine and sounds fine. And it's the most expensive door stopper I've ever owned.

Danny has it right on. Ever since I was a teenager I've been fascinated with stringed instruments. When I visited the Music Museum in Den Haag, Netherlands, back in the 60s, I was fascinated by all the mediaeval instruments, so I asked the curator how they sounded. His response was that they were too old to be brought up to concert pitch without cracking or the glue coming loose, so I set out to build an example of each, and that set me out on a forty year task which I'm still working on. Every time I ask myself, why is an instrument built like that, I experiment and build one differently. At the Northern California Association of Luthiers I have a reputation for experimenting, and the other luthiers, most of whom are too busy building guitars for customers to experiment, are always interested in how my experiments turn out. As an example, here's an experiment I did to create a better Hawaiian guitar. I built as big a body as I could get the wood for, and built a stubby, short neck, moving the bridge to the end, as in a mountain dulcimer. The result is an instrument which has a lot of built-in echo.

Mavericks are limited but they have great tone. My first steel was a Maverick. It was enough for me to learn the basics, go out and sit in with a band regular, they hired me for a steady Wednesday night gig, then got a steady weekend gig with another band before I got my first 'pro' guitar.

I rather like that birdseye maple finish on the Maverick. Is it real maple or some sort of vinyl/formica ?

I have a maverick just like this. It is standard maple wood with a kind of woodgrain formica on top. There is a rebuilder that can covert these to 3P/4K with a new changer. I have heard that it equals a PRO I but with triple raise and lower. Not sure how much a conversion from a maverick costs. Anyone have experience with this?

Those old Mavericks were, in the big scheme of things, pretty low cost/quality guitars. However, mine allowed me to learn lotsa good stuff ... such as bar slants,which I probably would have not explored,if I had started with a pro model instrument from the beginning. I also really loved the tone that it produced. I still have my old Maverick, and although I never use it, I will likely never part with it... it's kinda like my 1st true love :0) I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to a curious beginner with a limited budget... great place to start !

This thread has been a fun one and I'm glad Alan started it.

I have a question for you all.---If your playing a Maverick or your playing the finest double neck 10 string with 8 pedals, and 5 knee levers,----If your doing a good job and the song sounds great and the audience loves it and gives you a big hand of applause,----what difference does it make which guitar it is played on????

Joe, I wonder if that's my old Maverick you're playing. I played a Maverick all over the North Shore for a few years....The Blue Star in Saugus....Patti's Lounge in Beverly.....The Wagon Wheel in Rowley. It was a great guitar to learn on. Eventually traded it on a Sho-Bud Pro I....I think it was a music store in Danvers. So yeah, it might not be the best guitar out there but it has it's purpose and it serves that purpose well IMHO.

I wish I could have started my journey on PSG with a Sho-Bud Maverick. Instead I started on an MSA Sidekick. Major issues with keeping the thing in tune and it always seemed to be a compromise what would be in tune, the strings with the pedals/knee lever depressed or not engaged.

“Tom” sure brought out the quality of the MAVERICK when he took part in the recording of “Together Again”! Hard to knock that!

If you like your Maverick, I think that's great. If it does what you need, you should not feel funny about that - just go with it. I think a real good player could put tuners, a bridge, a fretboard, and a pickup on a 2x4, tune it up, and make it sound good. It doesn't make it a great guitar to me, but if that works, great - there has been good music made on all manner of crude, homemade instruments, as well as all kinds of cheap factory instruments.

But my initial comment was intended as a 'factual' response to Alan's question about a 'very old' (and by implication, valuable) Sho Bud. Maybe I'm too literal, but I thought it was an honest question. I have actually seen some Mavericks like this go for pretty big money on ebay - enough money to buy what I consider a good, professional model steel. Back when I was thinking about starting in on pedal steel in about 1973, a new one was about $450 - over $2000 in today's money. My comments should be taken relative to that - my sense is that there are people out there who actually believe these are, in fact, valuable and very old Sho Buds.

This auction started out at $300. But now it's almost $600 with 15 bids and a couple of hours to go. I think a used Carter Starter 3+4 can be routinely had for that kind of money right on this forum, and IMHO blows any Maverick I've played away - I've played some of each. I have seen other used modern starter steels and even older pro-model BMIs and MSAs go for not much more than this. I almost bought a real nice late-model MSA Vintage Pro D-10 the other day for $1300 - I mean, this is a really nice pro D-10. I see deals like this all the time on this forum and elsewhere. All of this tempers my view about these old wallpaper Mavericks. But everyone has their preferences, and I think we all get that.

I guess I should always just state it clearly - my opinions, YMMV.

I learned how to play on a Sho-Bud Maverick, with in six months I went to a D-10 Sho-Bud Pro III custom. I had the Pro III for about 18 years. I bought my Maverick in 1979, and paid $450.00 for it. My good friend and mentor told me I would be upgrading to a D-10 after about six months. He was right.
Tommy Shown
SMFTBL

John Bechtel wrote:“Tom” sure brought out the quality of the MAVERICK when he took part in the recording of “Together Again”! Hard to knock that!

In all of Tom's interviews he said that was recorded on Buck's Fender 1000. That it was just a few days after joining the band and he had to play the Fender 1000 that Jay McDonald trashed (when he was fired from the band), and it only had two pedals working for the "Together Again" session.
Was he wrong about what guitar he used?

It sold for $620.

That huge Hawaiian is really cool, Alan. Not what you'd call pretty, but it looks like a very fine piece of craftsmanship.

So what is old about this guitar? It's a 1983, not old for a Sho-Bud. Just a two hundred dollar Maverick!

Per Berner wrote:That huge Hawaiian is really cool, Alan. Not what you'd call pretty, but it looks like a very fine piece of craftsmanship.

Tack så mycket, Per.

I didn't realize at the time how lucky I was to have the opportunity to rent a Maverick like this one from a nearby music store back in '83. I wanted to see if I could make a few simple country-sounding noises to add "authenticity" to the country songs the group I was in was doing. I played it every chance I got every day for three or four months till I was thoroughly hooked, then bought a Sho-Bud single-neck pro model. The Mav worked okay, as I recall, and sounded good, and it only set me back maybe $80 tops in rent. A heck of a deal.

Excellent joe, i agree the hearts and spade, really had a romance with me wanting a sho-bud,along with that tone thing of charm from our famous magic players, and that's what i got and still play.
I started out with an 'Emmons student model' and even used it for road work for 3 years, nobody knew any different until i started telling them that it was a 'student model' that was my biggest blunder, because then the lips started turning up. I soon realised the heat and stopped talking about it. It fed me for 3 road years before i could afford the 'sho-bud'.
The 'maverick' is a great guitar, the 'tone' will be in 'you' not in 'it' and you will be just fine brother, don't feel pressured to buy a D10 loaded with gismo's that just boggles the brain.
There's 'more player' that have 'more' than they need, than 'great players' that need 'more' to succeed.
3+1 goes a looooooong way, know what i'm saying bro! God bless me mate!!

P;S Dont forget joe, why you chose Sho-Bud!
'Hearts' to love her
'Diamonds to marry her
'Club' to kill her
'Spade' to bury her.

Then there was the "lefty" model.

About six years ago I had a phone call from a music store in Bradenton Florida. The owner said he had a really nice Sho-Bud guitar and he thought I might be interested in it. I went to his shop and it turned out to be a Maverick. Then he said it was a great bargain at twelve hundred dollars.I told him he would be lucky to get five hundred. He produced a written appraisel by someone in Nashville at fourteen hundred dollars.I don't recall the appraisers name but it was on a great looking letterhead and was very descriptive. I ask if he was there when it was appraised. He said it was done over the telephone. So there are appraisels and there are appraisels.

Many years ago , my first pedal steel was a Maverick ....I could not afford anything better, I knew NOTHING about pedal steel guitars except that I LOVED the tone and the sound they made , and I wanted to learn to play one ..... It's bad enough that the Maverick model is not all that good to begin with , but to add insult to injury, the one I bought was in TERRIBLE condition, and I knew NOTHING about pedal steels at the time .... I worked on that pedal steel for quite a while to try to get it working right ....In the end, my POS Maverick was now a POS Maverick that had a LOT of work done to it .....It actually soured me on pedal steel guitars and I did not pick up another one until running into this forum !!!.....Now at least I can play some of the tunes that I loved listenning too for so many years .....I wish I had a dollar for every guy like me that started out playing a Maverick , or at least TRYED to play a Maverick !!!....Jim

I watch these minor question deteriorate into a lot of blather sort of like "my Dad can Whip your Dad" or "I wouldn't own one of those things." Can we just sound out the big words in a question asked and watch or listen for some intelegence to come forth from those who may really know or have usefull answers. Just Sayin'. A few of us wouldbe steelers are not so smart about these subjects, or we wouldn't be seeking answers.