Neko Case

In this picture Case can be seen playing a Hummingbird.

"Case admits she stumbled upon the tenor guitar by sheer luck. “It was 2000, and I had made part of Furnace Room Lullaby at my friend Don Kerr’s studio in Toronto,” she says. “He had a tenor guitar and I had never seen one before. For years before that I had tried to play six-string guitar, but I have really tiny little hands and I could never really get going enough for it to sound like music. It was really hard for me to stretch my fingers like that. I just remember picking [the tenor] up and my hand fitting around the neck so perfectly. So I went home to Seattle and I bought a tenor guitar [a Gibson TG-0].”

After playing the Gibson acoustic for a while, Case went after something a little harder to find: an electric tenor guitar. “I realized on tour that I was having a hard time being heard amongst my amplified brethren and I thought I could really use an electric guitar,” she recalls." - Neko Case on her tenor guitar collection: Fretboard Journal #2 cover story (Summer 2006)

“I went to Vintage Instruments in Philadelphia,” she says. “They set me up with this Martin guitar (a 5-17T), the luthier put in a pickup for me and she was ready to go.” - Neko Case on her tenor guitar collection: Fretboard Journal #2 cover story (Summer 2006)