1948 NATIONAL 1100 LEFTY ARISTOCRAT Blonde Hollowbody Archtop National California 17" body electric archtop in its original Blonde finish which shows off its amazing flame maple back + sides. It has a great playingstraight neck with great frets. All original electronics work and sound great. All original, no crack or other bad situation. Come with non original Hard Case. The National model 1111 Aristocrat is a Gibson-built 17” archtop featuring a tone-bar-braced maple ply body and a bolted-on Valco-style neck. This model was built for a short while through the late 1940s and early 1950s during a time when CMI was the parent company of both Gibson and National. It is unique in that it was originally set up with a dual pickup system that comprised of a single-coil neck pickup and a piezo bridge pickup with on-board blending control.  It has the lusty lines of the Gibson-supplied ES-300 body combined with the Chicago-chic National "Stylist" neck and its kick-butt deco inlay scheme. Mix and match that with the Gibson-supplied deluxe tailpiece and a pair of weirdo National electric pickups (one of which was an in-bridge "acoustic" unit) and you have an inspired design that was ahead of the curve for the time. A quick note on the National-built neck is that it has a big metal core running all the way through it and into the headstock right to the top of the National logo inlaid in it. The mahogany exterior is almost just a "veneer" as it's 1/4" thick at most at any point. The neck is thus pretty durable and this construction affords the use of the awesome, 3-point adjustable-heel gizmo that lets one set neck angle on the fly and gives neck access all the way to the 14th fret with no heel interruption. Specs are: 24 7/8" scale, 1 11/16" nut width, 1 7/16" string spacing at the nut, 2 1/8" spacing at the bridge, 17" lower bout, 12 1/2" upper bout, and 3 1/4" side depth at the endblock

LARRY CORYELL