I came across this old Ritchie Blackmore guitar collection video again and thought it might be interesting to share it here. Maybe most of you already know it, but there are some really nice details in it which are easy to forget.
The footage is from Japanese TV around the Shadow of the Moon period in 1997. For me this is already a very interesting moment in Ritchie’s career. Rainbow had just more or less come to an end, Stranger in Us All was only two years old, and at the same time he was moving into this completely different world with Blackmore’s Night.
What I really like about the video is how relaxed Ritchie is. He sits there with Candice and just picks up different guitars from his collection, electric and acoustic, talks about them and plays a little bit. It is not really a technical guitar interview, more like somebody showing you the instruments he has collected over his whole career.
And of course there is this fantastic story about one of his old main Strats.
Ritchie had sent the guitar away to have it refretted. The repair guy apparently looked at the fretboard and saw these huge hollows between the frets. But he didn’t know that Ritchie had deliberately scalloped the neck.
So he thought:
“Jesus, this guy has really worn out his fretboard…”
And he very helpfully planed the whole thing flat again.
When Ritchie got the guitar back the guy even told him, more or less proudly, that he had also levelled the fretboard for him at no extra charge!
Imagine Ritchie’s face. 
The funny part is that what the repairman thought was 20 years of wear was of course exactly how Ritchie wanted the guitar.
According to the detailed research by Bernd Meiser/BSM, Ritchie then tried to scallop the neck again. But the rosewood board had already been made so thin by the repair that when he started scalloping it again, he actually reached the maple underneath in places. The neck had basically been ruined and became extremely thin afterwards.
So one of Ritchie’s important old Rainbow Strats was more or less retired because somebody tried to “repair” the very thing that made it a Blackmore Strat.
I always loved this story. It is almost unbelievable today because every guitar builder knows what a scalloped Blackmore/Yngwie neck is, but at that time it obviously wasn’t something every normal repair guy had seen before.
Another interesting thing in the video is Ritchie talking about doing some of the scalloping himself. He once said it could take him around three days to do a neck, and his scalloping wasn’t simply the same depth everywhere. The lower frets were scalloped relatively lightly and it became deeper further up the neck.
That probably explains a bit why simply buying any heavily scalloped neck doesn’t automatically feel like Ritchie’s guitars.
And I also like seeing all the acoustic instruments around him in this footage. Knowing what came afterwards, you can really see the transition happening. This is still the guy who had just been playing Strat, Aiwa and ENGL with Rainbow, but his interest is already going more and more towards acoustic guitar, Renaissance music and those older instruments.
In hindsight this little video almost catches Ritchie exactly between his two musical lives.
One thing I would be interested to know: Does anybody here know for certain which exact white Strat was the one that had the scalloped fretboard accidentally planed flat? There are so many neck, pickup and pickguard changes in Ritchie’s old guitars that it becomes quite a detective work trying to follow them through the years.
Anyway, I thought some of you might enjoy seeing the video again. I can watch Ritchie talking about old guitars for hours, to be honest.
