1970s Ural 650 (Soviet) Electric Guitar

Unfortunately, this got scooped-up before I could do a video. It's a very hip guitar and, apparently, these were widely-produced and available throughout the USSR as a "Soviet Strat" back in the day. This one looks mid-'70s to me and has all sorts of innovative features that are lost on a modern audience.

Work included swapping a 5-pin jack to a normal jack (our buddy Justin did that), a level/dress of the frets (Ancel), and setup work (Ancel). I added side dots to replace the wonk side dots and then fit a replacement whammy bar. The original, Jazzmaster-style whammy actually works really well.

It has a plethora of wiring inside that's all very tidy but also fairly useless in the context of a modern rig. The controls are a bit overwhelming and, I think, add to the noise floor and subtract from the pickups' clarity. It would probably do this guitar well to simply remove all of the switches and tone controls and whatnot and use a modern setup (5-way, tone and volume), but it is sort-of fun to not quite know what's going to happen when you turn a control or hit a switch.