Ovation Adamas Longneck (built for Preston Reed) 1999 - Burgundy Red

This burgundy-red Adamas longneck (headstock serial #14145 USA) is one of my three Ovation Adamas Longneck guitars. It was built for me as a “spare” in around 1999. I played only one show with it while waiting for the factory to repair my blue-green longneck, so it is essentially a new instrument. 

There are a number of modifications to the guitar. If you have seen how I play guitar (there are many videos on YouTube) you can imagine why the modifications were needed. The Ovation factory back then (1996) had a very good custom shop and worked with me to optimise the guitars for my playing style. 

It is important to point out that the guitar works perfectly well as a “normal” guitar — and with the special electronics and fiberglass back, certainly sound better than the stock Adamas.  

As Bill Kaman — the head of the company back then and the originator of the longneck — put it in a recent email, the Adamas longneck is a “rare animal”, which makes these three customised — and definitely improved — variants special, exotic, one-of-a-kind instruments. 

The guitar is a cutaway, with a  “deep bowl” back and comes with a custom built hard case.  Custom modifications to the guitar include:

• Smooth top edging (to accommodate right arm percussive movements without scraping) 
• No sound holes on the front half of the upper bout (holes were left uncut to accommodate left hand percussion hits)
• Custom pickup system combining the Ovation piezo bridge pickup and a Seymour Duncan SA-2 piezo contact pickup (glued to the inside top 1.5 inches behind the treble end of the bridge) controlled by an Ovation-made onboard blender. The dual pickup system was my idea and the first issue that needed to be worked out when I signed on with Ovation. Bill Hudak, the Ovation tech guy at the time, modified the existing “OptiMax” pickup system to work as a blender between the two pickups. Both pickups are “active” and work off of the same 9V battery. The output jack is a normal mono guitar jack.
• Front strap lug placed in the center of the the base of the neck rather than the side of the neck to avoid strap interference with left hand percussion.
• The pickup blender console and battery compartment may have been moved (?) to a more out-of-the-way location on the top side of the guitar.
• Special back made of fibreglass (outsourced from a custom plant in Ohio, I was told by Don Johnson, the factory head at the time) rather than the “Lyracord” plastic, for improved sound.
• A round steel counterweight inside, attached to the inside end of the guitar strap lug, to compensate for the added weight of the longer neck