Short Takes: The Noir Special Runs
The Noir guitars didn’t just come out of nowhere!
For the past thirty to forty years Rickenbacker has quietly set aside a portion of their capacity for “special” guitars. In the 1990s, the Signature Limited Edition models (click to learn more) filled that slot. In the early 2000s it was “Color of the Year” (click to learn more). Since then, it’s been “special runs”.
Special runs come in two flavors. One—and Andy Babiuk’s Fab Gear is the king of these—is a guitar built to meet the exact spec of a specific dealer: color, pickups, binding, etc.
The second and more common flavor is that Rickenbacker dreams up a guitar with unique specs and/or features and then offers them up to a handful of U.S. dealers or one or more of their international distributors. The Noir guitars are…both!
And “blacked out” guitars like the Noir are not a new idea for Rickenbacker. Indeed, the 1986 Shadow 4003 (click to learn more)—arguably the first “modern” non-dealer-specific special run guitar—is very clearly the Noir guitars’ great-grandfather.
And of course you can’t discuss blacked out guitars without mentioning the “none more black” 1988-1990 4003S Blackstar with its black painted fingerboard.
So in many ways, the first Noir guitar—a 2016 4003–was just a variation on a theme. Except this one went to eleven.
The 4003 Noir featured a matte black finish, black plastics including two-ply black/checkered body binding and black neck binding, matte black hardware, and a Macassar ebony fingerboard with black and white “bullseye” position markers.
Matte black (the modern iteration, anyway) had first appeared in 2009 on a 4001C64S as part of “special-run run-out”of that model. Reaction to that model had been muted, but reaction to the Noir guitars was so strong that it became a “production” color (click to learn more) on the 4003 and 330 in 2018.
The last special feature of the 4003 Noir was a brand new truss rod cover, with a laser engraved outlined logo in white.
Twenty-five were produced in June and offered to high-volume US dealers. Most were sold before they reached the dealers’ showrooms.
But guitarists weren’t left out of the Noir goodness, because the twenty-five 4003s built in June were immediately followed by twenty-five 360WBs produced in July.
The 360WB Noirs were specced identically to the 4003 Noirs apart from being double-bound as opposed to top-bound only: matte black finish, black plastics including two-ply black/checkered body binding and black neck binding, matte black hardware, Macassar ebony fingerboard with black and white “bullseye” position markers, and the laser engraved truss rod cover.
Like the 4003 Noirs, twenty-five were produced, offered to large retailers, and mostly sold out before they hit the showrooms.
And that would be the end of the Noir story if U.S. retailer Sweeteater didn’t beg for more and Rickenbacker’s Japanese distributor didn’t beg for their very own 4003 Noir for the Japanese market.
And so an early 2017 run produced more 4003 Noirs—about twenty for Japan and sixteen for Sweetwater—which likewise sold out almost immediately. So that’s the end, right? Well, remember how I said the Noirs represented BOTH types of special runs? We haven’t talked about a dealer-specification run yet.
In 2022, to celebrate their impending sixtieth anniversary, Swing City Music requested that twenty-five 620s be given the Noir treatment. And so they were!
The 620 Noir had a couple minor differences from the earlier Noir guitars—and the one you’re probably guessing at from the photo isn’t it!
While the actual wood used for the fingerboards is much lighter than the earlier guitars, it is still Macassar ebony, not the standard Chechen. What is is not, however, is bound like the earlier guitars.
Additionally, the laser-cut truss rod covers—that had appeared on the earlier guitars and had gone on to appear on several other special runs and one-offs—was no longer being produced. In its place was a black back-painted plexi truss rod cover.
And we should probably mention the Eddie’s Guitars 2017 360WB special run here as well. Not technically a Noir, it took the Noir template and tweaked it—removing the checkered binding and bullseye inlays while adding a Rose-Morris style f-hole.
And that’s what makes the Noir guitars interesting. They ended up being an idea—one that proved flexible enough to move between factory-driven concepts and dealer-specific requests. What started as a limited, all-black experiment quickly demonstrated that Rickenbacker’s “special runs” could be more than novelties. In the case of the Noirs, they became a template.
Want to learn more about ALL the special run guitars? Click here for part one (1983-2014) or here for part two (2015-present)!
Being the proud owner of one of Mr. Babiuk’s 1-of-25 Jetglo 360’s, I love seeing and learning about the special run stuff.
In fact, I adore all of these articles that you publish, Mr. White, and I thank you profusely for them.
Love the look of them, but I’d probably replace the chrome screws with black ones,too…..
Really really love the laser etched TRC.