Kurt Cobain's Least Known Guitar (I got it)

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Kurt Cobain’s Ferrington Custom

This guitar was custom built by Danny Ferrington, who allegedly met with the band backstage during the SNL gig in January 1992. He kept in touch with Kurt while the band went on tour in Australia, and he was sent drawings from Kurt via fax on how he imagined this guitar to look like.
The Ferrington guitar is modeled after a Fender Mustang for the most part but features a few important differences. It holds three pickups compared to Mustang’s two. The bridge pickup is a humbucker, while the neck and middle pickups are single coils, with the middle one being angled. They are made by a company called Bartolini, and the humbucker had a coil split – giving Kurt more control over the tone. The guitar was also fitted with a Gotoh Tune-O-Matic bridge and tuners.
Although it is very hard to actually see the guitar just from the video recording of the show, it appears that Kurt did play the guitar live at least once in Dublin at Point Depot on June 21, 1992. The cable does seem to come out at an angle when compared to Mustang models, and Kurt’s didn’t really have a similar-looking Mustang around that time as far as one can tell.

Kurt’s Ferrington Today
It seems that the guitar is still around, as it was recently displayed on Nirvana: Taking Punk to the Masses exhibition – which seems to travel all over the world. (pic Kurt’s Ferrington guitar photographed during an exhibition in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Photo credit: Bruna Val Magalhães)

Danny Ferrington:

“Kurt is left-handed, and he really likes the Fender Mustang he’s been playing for a few years. But his playing style is so rough, and left-handed Mustangs so rare, that it was beginning to look as if his favorite guitar was going to break apart right out from under him. I’d talked with Nick Close, one of Nirvana’s roadies, about trying to find replacement necks for the Mustang, but finally Kurt called me to talk about ordering a new custom guitar.

Nirvana left for Australia a few days later, and Kurt faxed me a great little picture showing where he wanted the pickups to be and what shape to use for the body. It was the first time I’d collaborated by fax, and I thought it was real fun to be designing a guitar by long distance using such a modern communications technology.

I built his guitar to be a lot like that old Mustang, except we used a Gibson-style bridge that’s better at keeping the guitar in tune, and I made the neck a little straighter so that it won’t be so apt to break when Kurt plays it hard. It’s tricky making left- handed guitars, though, because everything on a left-handed guitar is counter-intuitive for me. Right off the bat I made a few mistakes on Kurt’s guitar, so finally I took to labeling all the parts ‘This Side Up’ to remind myself that I needed to do everything backwards. The guitar turned out real well, and a few months later Kurt came by with his wife to pick it up. Just after he started playing it he stopped dead in his tracks and said, 'This is like my dream guitar!’ His wife asked, 'Honey, are you gonna trash this one too?’ but Kurt got this horrified look on his face, and in a solemn voice he said, 'No, this one’s going to be my recording guitar.’ I was tickled to death, and it was incredibly satisfying to hear that I’d hit the nail right on the head”.