Guitar

Tantra Hamsa - a very rare electric guitar from France

guitarz.blogspot.com:

Here's an email from Maxime:

Hello

I'm French, sorry for my bad English.

I have a guitar brand "Tantra":

Model: Hamsa
Color: Red
Dates of manufacture: 1981 to 1983

I wonder if you could give me an estimate of the price at the time and now. Thank you,

Maxime BAUCOUR

Rather than try to make uninformed guesses about a little-known French guitar brand, I decided to ask Hervé Le Garsmeur, one of the founders of Tantra guitars, who just happens to be a Guitarz reader and who has sent us info on Tantra before. Here's his response:

This is a very very rare model. We only made 5 of those. The fretboard is painted (though being in purple heart) there are sparkles in the varnish and it's kind of "basic sunburst". The pickup is the first generation we made, single coil with a grey touch in the middle. So I can assure that this guitar is one of the very first ones of our production (1981). The latter models had two single coils in the same box you could switch either in parralel or series, in or out of phase for humbucking or "Dire Straits" type of sound (but the real big sound was in parallel), the fretboard was natural and had round dots and wider frets.

By the way Hamsa means "swan" in Sanskrit; it's the shape of this bird that inspired this guitar. Concerning the price I really have no idea. If it still plays well I'd say 1500 € because of the rarity, maybe more for a real collector. We stopped making "painted" fretboards because it was really fragile on the edges. There were also two types of wood used. Without looking under the pickguard, you can tell by the weight; if the insrument is really stiff and rather heavy it's made from oak, if it's lighter and you can slightly bow the neck, it's made from mahogany.

Hope you have all the answers you need.

I'd like to thank Hervé for supplying the above information, and also Maxime for showing us these photos of this rare guitar.

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