Overview: The Lightshow Guitars
I dunno…maybe somebody will buy it?
There are so many ways to tee up the story of the Lightshow guitars that it’s hard to know where to begin. Are they the strangest chapter in the history of a company with no shortage of strange chapters? Were they a desperate Hail Mary from a company teetering on the brink of irrelevance? Or were they a high-tech marvel—technologically ahead of their time yet culturally just a step behind it?
The answer, of course, is yes. They were all of those things at once—and that’s precisely what makes them so fascinating. So let’s talk about the Lightshow guitars.
But first, a little context. By the late 1960s, the British Invasion wave that had carried Rickenbacker through the mid-’60s was no longer cresting—it was receding. The Beatles had stopped touring. The Byrds had evolved. And the chiming sound of a Rickenbacker through an AC-30 was being crowded out by the snarl of a ‘59 Burst plugged into an overdriven Marshall stack. The formula that worked only a few years before was no longer enough. Something had to change if the company was going to survive.
And so we enter Rickenbacker’s “transitional era” (click to learn more)—a period largely defined not by sweeping reinvention but by incremental adjustments, cautious experiments, and attempts to find stable ground in a rapidly shifting market.
But the Lightshow guitars were decidedly not that. They weren’t a cautious step forward—they were a cannonball into the deep end.
And really, what did they have to lose?
So let’s define what the Lightshow guitars were and how they worked.
First off, the idea didn’t originate inside Rickenbacker.
Frank Zappa once told a great story about how some of the best and most original music came from an era when record labels were run by “old guys with cigars” who basically shrugged and said “I dunno…maybe somebody will buy it?”
I always think of that story when it comes to the Lightshow guitars, with F.C. Hall cast in the role of the cigar-chomping executive willing to greenlight something completely ridiculous just because it was interesting.
The idea was brought to Rickenbacker by Stephen F. Woodman and Marshall Arm—two figures I have been able to find remarkably little information about beyond their connection to the project itself.
Their original pitch was to incorporate the technology behind the Lightshow guitars into the Transonic amplifier line. But somewhere along the way the concept migrated from amplifiers to guitars.
Sources consistently say they licensed the concept to Rickenbacker for development, and period literature referred to the technology as patented—and the 331’s pickguard is actually marked “Pat Pending”. But despite a lengthy search, I haven’t been able to locate a corresponding patent filing or issued patent tied directly to the Lightshow guitars.
But the concept itself—of marrying music and color—actually dates back further than the psychedelic era. Much further back, in fact.
In 1725, French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castro designed what he called the “Ocular Harpsichord”: a mechanical instrument that paired notes with color. Behind the keyboard sat 60 colored glass panes concealed by small curtains, each of which would rise when its corresponding key was struck.
This was the first of the “color organs”, an idea that was dramatically expanded upon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when electricity made large-scale color projection possible.
By the mid-1920s, Hungarian composer Alexander László was touring Europe with an elaborate electric color organ system and publishing works such as Color-Light-Music, which explored the relationship between sound, light, and human perception.
The shift from mechanical systems to electronic methods of generating colors from music would occur in the mid-1960s, and these newer devices became more commonly known as “light organs”—although you will still see the color organ term.
At their core, light organs used electronic circuitry to divide an audio signal into separate frequency bands. Different portions of the sound spectrum would then trigger different colored lamps, causing the lights to pulse and change in response to the music being played.
If that sounds a lot like what a Lightshow guitar does, that’s because it is. At its core, the Lightshow is really just a light organ stuffed inside a guitar body.
Which probably explains the apparent lack of any Lightshow-related patents—Woodman and Arm simply dreamt up a novel new application for existing technology.
So let’s talk about the guitar itself.
The first prototype was built in July 1970. Factory invoices referred to it as the “Xmas Tree Special,” which feels pretty appropriate in hindsight.
A standard Rickenbacker 330 (click to learn more) served as the starting point, but extensive modifications were required to transform the concept into a functioning instrument. Let’s start with the finished product and work our way through exactly what was changed.
Just like a standard 330, the top and sides of the 331—as the guitar was officially designated—began as a solid two-piece body blank. But the 331 was about a half an inch thicker overall than the 330—around 2” versus the 330’s 1 1/2”—to allow room for the internal electronics.
On a conventional 330, the body blank is routed out from the rear, and then sealed with a solid back panel to create the semi-hollow construction. Both the top and the back are roughly 1/4” thick.
The 331 followed the same basic approach, but with one major difference: much of the “top” was hollowed completely through. Only a solid center section was left intact to provide mounting points for the pickups and the bridge.
You’ll also notice that the 331 does not have the signature “tailpiece ramp” found on virtually every other full-size semi-hollowbodied Rickenbacker. This wasn’t an aesthetic choice—the ramp simply consumed too much real estate that the electronics package required.
Most of the top was covered with two mirror-image pickguards. But these weren’t conventional guards. Each assembly was actually made up of two layers: a clear Plexiglas top layer and a thin backing sheet of Rowlux—a lenticular film that produced a shifting moiré effect as light passed through it.
The guitar electronics themselves were fairly standard for the era: transitional Higains (click to learn more) with their threaded polepieces, the familiar 5 knob/1 switch control layout, and—somewhat unusually for a 330-derived instrument—Rick-O-Sound stereo wiring (click to learn more).
Also unusual for a 330-derived guitar, the 24-fret fingerboard was bound—although the guitar retained dot inlays rather than the triangle inlays (click to learn more) usually paired with bound necks.
Fun fact: 330 sales were so low during this period that the handful that were built around the same time simply used the 331’s bound fingerboard for simplicity’s sake. We highlight one such example here: Short Takes: 1971 330 with Bound Neck.
But then there was all the other stuff. Because the 331 wasn’t just a guitar—it also had to function as a self-contained light organ.
It actually took two tries. Which is to say there were two distinct versions of the 331’s electronics package—a first, rudimentary version, and a far more sophisticated second design.
All of the photos of 331 internals we’ve seen so far have shown the first version of the electronics package that entered production in March 1971. And from those photos, it’s obvious that the setup was fairly rudimentary…six lights arranged in a straight line on the bass side, and three on the treble side.
The entire assembly was hand wired—even the bayonet bulbs themselves were hardwired directly into the system. An additional knob by the tailpiece controlled light intensity, and the whole setup required an external transformer for power, connected to a separate input mounted below the jack plate.
One feature that has been modified on the first-generation example shown above is the lightbulbs themselves. The bulbs in that guitar have been painted, but as stock the bulbs were clear and fitted with colored, cone-shaped diffusers, as seen below.
The second version of the electronics package appeared in August 1971 and was clearly a much more thought out system. For starters, printed circuit boards replaced the hand-wired assemblies used in the original design.
It had more lights, too: still six on the bass side, but now five on the treble side. And instead of being arranged in straight lines, the lights were arranged to more closely follow the contours of the body.
The colored diffusers were also replaced with colored bulbs, and in a major serviceability upgrade the bulbs were now fitted into sockets—meaning they could finally be replaced without breaking out the soldering iron.
Hidden in the middle of the guitar is one of the most important parts of the whole assembly: a heat sink—because stuffing a light organ inside a semi-hollow guitar body turns out to generate a fair amount of heat. This nondescript bent metal panel was designed to absorb and dissipate as much of that heat as possible.
So after all that…did it actually work?
It did indeed. This video from Elderly Instruments gives you a good idea of what it all looked like:
But that’s not the really important question. Did it sell?
Well, no. Not really. The guitar was clearly designed with the psychedelic ‘60s in mind, but by the time the 331 hit the market in 1971, psychedelia had mostly passed its sell-by date.
Weird? Sure. Cool? To some, sure. Compelling enough to justify a $140 upcharge over a standard 330—almost $1,150 today? Not really.
Plus, it was probably kind of a pain to build. That extra $140 likely didn’t generate much extra profit once all the extra parts and labor required to put it all together were factored in.
And so the 331 ended up with one of the shortest production runs in Rickenbacker history: preproduction models in late 1970, first production batch in March 1971, and last production batch January 1972. Just over a year.
Although, to be fair, it remained on the price list through 1975. But during the F.C. Hall era that can usually be interpreted as “there was at least one still sitting in the warehouse”—F.C. seemingly operated on the theory of “you can’t sell it if people don’t know you have it”.
But let’s talk about that name: “Lightshow”. Those of you paying close attention may have noticed I have not used it to refer to the 331 itself. And that’s because Rickenbacker never did.
On price lists, in advertisements, in brochures—it was always just “331”. So where did the Lightshow name come from?
I can’t be 100% certain, but I’d be willing to bet it came from this 1971 brochure:
“The Model 331 combines a fine musical instrument with the thrill of a lightshow.”
That’s the first usage of the term I have been able to find. And because collectors know a snappy name when they see one, over time the 331 became the “331 Lightshow”—or simply the “Lightshow”.
You may have also noticed that the title of this article is “The Lightshow Guitars”, plural—and so far I’ve only shown you the 331. While the 331 was the only “official” Lightshow model, it wasn’t the only Lightshow instrument built. Including, as the brochure above proudly states, a “lighted hollow body bass”.
Well, there’s something like five to ten of them out there.
Using the 4005WB (click to learn more) as a foundation, a handful of 4005 Lightshow basses were built in 1971. The major difference between them and the 331 was the pickups. At that point, the only Higain bass pickup in existence was the large bridge unit, so the 4005 Lightshow retained the same toaster pickups used on the standard 4005.
You may reasonably ask if the 4005 Lightshow received its own dedicated PCBs. It did! Don’t make the same mistake I did and assume the guitar below is original. It’s a “Frankenstein” rebuilt from leftover bits.
And if that greenish PCB material looks familiar to you, it should—it’s the exact same material Rickenbacker used for Higain pickup bobbins.
Now you’ll notice I refer to this guitar as the “4005 Lightshow”. It was never an official production model, so it did not get a unique product designation like the 331. Both the Smith and Kelley books (click to learn more) refer to it as the 4005LS, and given that both authors had access to factory records that designation is probably correct.
Oddly enough, however, Smith refers to it as a “Lightshow” and Kelley a “Light Show”. Make of that what you will.
It seems like almost every modern six-string Rickenbacker eventually gets a twelve-string counterpart, so naturally the question becomes was there a 331/12?
Indeed there was, although there are almost certainly fewer of those than there are 4005 Lightshows. Like the 4005LS, the 331/12 was never a production model.
But even that’s not the rarest Lightshow guitar. That would be this one:
That is a one-off three-pickup 341/12 with slanted frets custom built for Roger McGuinn. With Byrd wiring (click to learn more) to boot. It really doesn’t get much weirder than that—although McGuinn has a second 341/12 without the slanted frets.
So perhaps equally as rare, but not nearly as weird.
There’s a truism in the collector world that rarity alone does not necessarily create value. Some things are rare for a reason, and the factors that made them undesirable in the first place haven’t changed.
But sometimes rare does equal valuable, and few Rickenbackers are considered as valuable today as the Lightshow guitars.
So what changed? What makes this slightly ridiculous, perpetually anachronistic instrument so desirable today?
Precisely that, I think. In this age of data science and focus groups and target demographics, the Lightshow guitars are a reminder of a time when cigar-chomping executives were willing to take a chance on something they didn’t fully understand and say, “I dunno…maybe somebody will buy it?”
Plus, silly or not, how cool is it?
If you enjoyed this story on transitional-era weirdness, you’ll probably like this one on slanted frets:
Definitely "jumping the shark" here.
Cool article, fascinating history. Only Ric...!