The brief from F.C. Hall was pretty clear: make me a 12-string guitar without that stupid long 12-string headstock. Well, maybe not those exact words—Dick Burke recalls it was something along the lines of “could we come up with a configuration to make it not much bigger than a regulation six-string head.” Same thing, basically.
What Burke came up with was pretty ingenious—three “normal” tuners and three “sideways” tuners per side, with slots routed into the headstock so you could reach those sideways posts. There was just one problem with that: the truss rod cover didn’t fit.
That’s a bigger problem on a Rickenbacker than it would be on most other guitars. Not only does the truss rod cover carry the guitar’s branding, its shape itself is an important part of Rickenbacker’s brand identity. A cover that doesn’t fit is kind of a big deal.
How big of a problem was it though, really? How off the mark was it? Well, you be the judge. Here’s a stock truss rod cover laid on top of an early 12-string headstock:
I’m sorry for the watermark on this photo, but as it so happens I don’t have a very very early 12-string Rickenbacker laying around to take a better one. But yeah, you can still see that’s a problem. A “two-out-of-three-sideways-tuner-posts-on-the-treble-side-are-inaccessible” problem. A solution was required.
For the early prototypes and pre-production models, Burke—or someone Burke handed a truss rod cover and a hacksaw to—made them fit, “visual identity” be damned. The preferred method—as reproduced on the 360/12C63 copy of George Harrison’s 1963 360/12OS prototype—seems to have been to cut a small triangle from the base to change the angle, then whittle away the curves until it fit the space between the routs.
It fit, sure, but it completely lost its shape in the process. When the Rose Morris 1993 entered production in early 1964—the first production 12-string Rickenbacker model—they needed something better. Enter the “stubby.”
Well, there was something else that made the stubby possible that we can’t leave out. Here’s another one of the early preproduction models—Pete Townshend’s 1964 360/12S.
Now I know that picture isn’t great—and sadly that guitar met an untimely end so it doesn’t exist today to take better pics of—but look closely at the routs for the sideways tuners. They’re dead straight. And it’s very clear how the truss rod cover was modified to clear those routs.
As much as the 360/12C63 got right, one thing they got wrong was those routs. The routs on Harrison’s guitar were as straight as Townshend’s. See for yourself:
Now let’s look at the 360/12C63 again.
Notice how those routs flare outward slightly at the bottom? Burke made that subtle change for the 1993, and it gave a little more real estate for the truss rod cover. It still wasn’t enough to use the stock cover as is, but it gave Burke (or Burke’s man with the hacksaw) room to get a little more…creative.
“Oh. ‘Stubby.’ I get it.” Yeah you do.
Cut the base at an angle—that’s obvious when you look at the “MADE IN USA” imprint that is normally perpendicular to the nut. Cut the bottom straight, then pare down the top and turn its gentle downward curve into an abrupt downward curve. It’s closer to the original shape than the “stairstep” on Harrison’s guitar…but it still could use some improvement.
It was still done by hand, and each one was a little different, but all guitars produced during that first July 1964 production batch got variations on the same stubby theme.
When the next production batch of 12-strings rolled around in October—the first batch of the New Style 360/12—the shape got refined again.
The bottom still got straightened out, and the top still got reshaped slightly around the rout’s flare, but the overall shape was a lot closer to the target. The space available was still the space available. And that’s more or less how they still do it to this day.
That one batch of 1993s from July was the end of the stubby. Well, almost. There was one other guitar you’ve probably heard of that got one too. Kind of.
A custom 12-string short-scale 325 was built for John Lennon in February 1964—before Burke had flared the routs—and its truss rod cover certainly has a stubby look to it, although more shaping was required both top and bottom. It’s probably not unfair to call this one the “stubby prototype.”
And because all Beatles guitars eventually got a reissue—even a one-off—25 copies were built in 1986, and you’d better believe they got a stubby.
Oddly, the next run of reproductions—136 in 1999—didn’t bother with this detail. Cut 25 of those suckers by hand? Sure, I guess. 136? Yeah, I got better things to do.
So, why “stubby?” I mean, I think you already know the answer. Some collector coined the term, everyone else kinda said “yeah, that fits,” and here we are. That’s just how terms like this work. And now you know too.