For the last few weeks, after viewing a video of Edmonton singer-songwriter Michael Rault playing on a old mail-order catalogue guitar (Stella, Harmony, Silvertone... one of them), I have been looking for a cheap guitar. I once owned two guitars but sold them to keep the family larder full.
The Canora Guitar is a Canadian guitar brand of the mid- to late- 1960s. According to Eugene Trademan, who was in charge of musical imports for Great West Imports of Vancouver, the brand came about when the company's electronics buyer, Dave Willis, returned from a trip to Japan.
Canora is one of those mystery brands. Only a few thousand of these guitars emerged out of Japan and possibly from Korea. Later on, according to Trademen, the line of guitars switched to the more common Raven brand. There are scant references to them and very few images.
Vintage Canora Classical Guitar Model 1867
The guitar here was originally a fixed bridge model. The guitar top had settled into a pronounced bulge below the bridge and a caving in of above the bridge.
The repair technicians at Rufus Guitars discouraged me from making them repair it. I could easily buy a very pretty Suzuki Model No. 9 (nylon strings AND a pickguard) for less than it would cost to repair.
In short, they pretty much had no time for the Canora. I also felt they had no time to discuss the finer points of guitar repair with a person who would fall in with a crap guitar. I had fallen on the wrong side of the us (keepers of the guitar flame) and the thems (those who diddle on guitars and then leave them to languish in the corner of a basement or those who wish to learn enough chords to play Lady Gaga or Black Eyed Peas tunes).
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I had said the right magic words. Chuck, one of them was Chuck, said, French CBC has some of the best music.
I resisted the urge to tell them, I once worked for the Mother Corp - any how it wasn't needed. Joe Pass had opened the door. His name, me knowing it, meant I listened to guitar, maybe even knew how to play it well. I was not them, or at least, not completely them. Joe Pass let Chuck know I was a little bit of us.
Chuck put down the wet banjo skin he was tugging on, Let me see it. He groped around on the inside. Ladder bracing.
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No. It's steel. Then Chuck began to rummage on his work bench. He showed me a fancy tailpiece for an archtop guitar but it was too long. But he kept on digging. He kept on saying, I have a Dobro tailpiece. You can have it. ($28)
When I got home, I realized I didn't have a chisel. So I tried a knife and ended up gouging a part of the guitar top. I wasn't really well-equiped to take on the project. But then I remembered what the sales clerk said at the shop - somewhere in our point of sale chit chat he assumed I was going to plane down the faulty bridge. And why not? I own a plane.
So there on the living room rug, with Melissa trying not to lose her temper, I began to plane down the rosewood bridge. I worried immensely about harming the top anymore than I already had. It worked.
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I shaved the bridge down and attached the Dobro-styled tailpiece. The saddle Rufus sold me stood too high and I hadn't the heart to mutilate the new saddle with vigourous sanding. Instead, I used the original floating metal saddle. With its two flat-tipped screws, I could adjust the height.
The instrument is actually quite playable. The neck hasn't suffered any bowing and the action has been set quite low without fear of buzzing. The intonation is surprising in fact.Artists often feel a sentimental attachment towards the first tools they ever held in their hands. It’s a connection that can not easily be eroded by success, fame or money – and never has that been more apparent than with the $59 that helped launch the career of Alex Lifeson.
It was a red 1967 Canora hollowbody, a Christmas gift to Lifeson from his parents when he was 13. Soon after, Lifeson got together with his childhood friend Geddy Lee, who had received a Canora bass, and started jamming. They formed a band the following year. You know them as Rush.
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It was on that humble red Canora that Lifeson learnt to play and discovered a passion that would last a lifetime. He and Geddy painted their respective instruments with Testors model enamel to make them look like those used by Cream. Lifeson even painted the fretboard and pickups to really make it his own. Lee has stated that he doesn’t know what became of his first Canora bass. But Lifeson remembers his well.
Canora s were a lesser-known Japanese-built brand whose instruments were imported to Vancouver, Canada before being sold to conservatories, and almost exclusively sold in the country. They were marketed as entry-level student s with a shorter, 23.5-inch scale. The proportions of Lifeson’s Canora were similar to those of an ES-339, making for a smooth transition to the slightly larger ES-335 he would adopt in the early days of Rush.
After Lifeson and Lee formed Rush, Alex put the Canora aside. Later, it was given to a tech and sent to the Rush warehouse for four decades before it recently wound up back in Lifeson’s possession. By that time, it had had several coats of paint over the original enamel paint job Lifeson had applied in 1968, and was more of a collection of parts than a functioning . Still, Lifeson gathered them up, put them in a box and brought them to Garren Dakessian at Oakville, Ontario-based Loucin s.
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“When I stripped the paint, I saw glitter paint, I saw the original model paint, it looked like someone had painted it with a roller at one point, ” Dakessian tells us of what awaited him and his lifelong friend Geoff Currie when they began to strip and sand these layers.
Generally when restoring vintage instruments, parts are somewhat easy to find, even though they can come at a hefty price. But Canroa being a rather obscure brand, this restoration was no simple task. Fortunately, structurally the had held up well over the years, and the only original parts that were missing when the box was delivered to Dakessian’s shop were the control plate, the bridge and the tuners.
The tuners had been bored out to ⅜-inch holes, so the now features Gotoh Tuners. As for the missing bridge and control plate, one of Dakessian’s regular customers, a man named Stan Kaszecki, offered his vintage Canora as a donor for the restoration of Lifeson’s.
Japanese Guitar Brands
The weakness of many s considered ‘entry-level’ is often the pickups, and the Canora was no different. The original single-coil pickups had corroded so much that they were barely functional. So Dakessian enlisted Smitty from MJS Pickups to rewind the old pickups, using the original housing, and they were wound in a stacked configuration to reduce hum. The restoration team also gave the pickups a little more wire to beef up their original thin, shrill tones.
In the interest of playability, Dakessian also slightly reshaped the fretboard. “The original fretboard was a 7.5-inch radius, ” he says. “It was way too round, so I levelled that off to a 12-inch radius, like on a Les Paul, to make it easier to play.”
The colour was matched from the two existing photos of the prior to Lifeson’s enamel paint job, from 1967 and 1968. The first colour that Dakessian used, Flame Red, was too light, so he went over it again with a slightly darker red, which would become the finished colour, Tornado Red.
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Dakessian’s shop has become a hotspot for those in the Greater Toronto Area looking for custom instruments. Of all the s he has built over the years, no two are the same. His customers include Zakk Wylde, Richie Faulkner, Jason Hook, Serj Tankian and Ian Thornley, and he’s currently building a custom for Rik Emmett. Dakessian also offers -building classes out of his shop – check out build.ca for more info.
For now, Lifeson’s Canora has been completely restored, and to such a prime condition that it’s possible we might hear it on future Lifeson projects. Lifeson recently auctioned off a large part of his collection but he couldn’t bear to part with the Canora.
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