Budget psychobilly guitar vol.2

Gretsch Pro Jet 

Coolest guitar in the history must be the Gretsch Duo Jet.
Played by great guys like Cliff Gallup ,Roy Orbison ,Neil Young to Joe Perry and Billy Zoom.
But there's a catch.
Not all of us can afford a real Duo Jet, even the newer re-issues cost you an arm and a leg.

Fortunately for us - psychobillies with low budget, Gretsch has released in their electromatic series an affordable workhorse called Pro jet.

It comes in many different configurations. With or without bigsby vibrato, single and double cut away and 3 different finishes: gold and silver sparkle and black gloss.

Im referring to my G5235 which is black with a single cutaway and bigsby .

Gretsch has done its very best in carefully choosing the electromatic Pro Jet’s features. There is very little to be wished for.  
It has chambered mahogany body with set-in mahogany neck, dual Gretsch mini-humbuckers, and Bigsby® B50 vibrato
I got it second hand, but i assume its set-up and ready to play out of the box if you get it brand new.
Its built like a tank and is very tolerant to abuse and stays tune well.

Sound of this guitar is pretty unique, thanks to the chambered body and special designed mini-humbuckers which are not featured in any other guitars. Between the two pickups you can get a huge range of tones. Varying from soft n' warm neck pickup to cold n' crunchy bridge pickup tones.
Its not hard to get a decent distortion sound out of this guitar. I've done some really heavy grunge stuff on this guitar and it still sounds good.

Its my favorite guitar and
Its been serving me well on stage and in studio. It's definitely built to last.

Little bit about cons and mods.

As im a rhythm player, I prefer a bit higher action. That makes the string angle on the bridge a bit smaller. And using bigsby frantically might result in string breakage, usually when you least expect it.
Changing the bridge will cure that. It's an easy job because the original bridge is a standard tune-o-matic which means you'll have many options.

For example you can replace it with a roller bridge, although many people don't like roller bridges as they supposedly eat up the sustain. I've put a roller bridge on my guitar and haven't notice any loss of sustain.
Also you've got an option of numerous bar bridges like Compton and Tru-arc or even gretsch space control.

There are other mods that you can do to make it look and sound more like a real thing.

Common mod that people like to do is changing the pickups in order to improve the sound.
There's quite a selection out there but most respected name amongst rockabilly and psychobilly guitarist is Tv Jones.
To change the mini-humbuckers to Tv Jones pickups 
requires a bit of woodworking and wits, but its not that hard.
They've got instructions on Tv Jones website on how to do it.

Another easy mod to commence is to change the bigsby (or add one if you got the stop tail version).
Most people don't like the B50 (also known as horseshoe) bigsby system . As it gets squeaky rather fast and don't look right.
This mod is not hard to do either. Only thing you have to note is to get a bigsby system with a string tension bar - B7 or B12 style.
B3 style bigsby will work, but might result strings poppin out of their place on the bridge and loss of sustain.

Other mods include adding the extra volume knobs and a "mud" switch, but these require a bit more serious skills so i wont go into that.

Hope that you found something useful from above
And don't forget to stay psycho !