For Three Short Months, Volkswagen Was Serious About Selling Guitars

When you buy a new car, you might expect the dealer to throw in some options or accessories to sweeten the deal. Maybe an integrated picnic table, an in-car fridge, or a nice set of wheels. Back in 2006, though, Volkswagen went completely off-book when they started throwing in electric guitars with their new cars.

It might sound like a joke, or one of Volkswagen’s famously poor April Fools gags, but it was actually totally legit. It was part of an advertising collaboration between VW and guitar manufacturer First Act.  From October 3 to December 31 2006, you could get a guitar with your new Jetta, Jetta GLI, GTI, Rabbit, New Beetle and New Beetle Convertible, whether you chose to lease or buy. [Ed note: This wasn’t VW’s first slightly out-there ‘collab.’ Remember the bicycle-included Volkswagen Jetta Trek, and later, the Golf Trek of the mid-90s?]

It’s one thing to throw in a guitar with a new car, but one detail pushed it over the top. You could actually use your car as a guitar amp!

First Act is no longer around as a guitar manufacturer, but it was best known for building instruments at the lower end of the spectrum. However, for this campaign, you didn’t just get some cheap run-of-the-mill starter guitar that you might find at Walmart. The First Act GarageMaster was built specifically for this promotion, with plenty of nods to Volkswagen itself. It came with custom VW logo knobs and guitar picks, along with a VW hand sign motif on the headstock. The included guitar strap was made out of seatbelt material, and the neck featured a mother-of-pearl inlay of the VW logo.

The general shape of the guitar is somewhat similar to Brian May’s Red Special. The guitar used a string-through-body design, and it came with humbucker pickups in the neck and bridge positions. No tremolo was fitted.

The guitar was never available at retailers—it was solely available with new Volkswagens. In fact, each guitar had the original vehicle’s VIN stamped on a plate on the back of the headstock. The pickguard was similarly matched to the color of the vehicle.

The whole campaign was advertised across TV, print, and the internet, with a website hosted at v-dubsrock.com. Sadly, that website is long gone, and remaining archives are difficult to parse thanks to the site’s use of now-ancient Flash technology.

The guitar could use a Volkswagen as a guitar amp thanks to some nifty design choices. Volkswagen had begun equipping its vehicles with auxiliary input jacks in this era. However, that alone wasn’t enough. A typical electric guitar only puts out a tiny amount of signal, far less than the output from an iPod or other MP3 player. The GarageMaster was equipped with an in-built preamplifier to boost the output from the pickups to a level that would work with the car stereo. It ran off a conventional 9-volt battery inside the guitar. All you had to do was set the stereo to the aux input, and plug in the guitar with a special adapter cable that went from the guitar’s 6.5 mm output to the 3.5 mm jack on the car.

Indeed, you weren’t stuck using the guitar with just Volkswagens. Thanks to the preamp, you could plug it into any car or other stereo that had an aux input jack. If you wanted to use the guitar with a conventional setup, that was possible, too. A switch on the guitar turned off the preamp, and you could hook it up to a regular amp with a standard guitar cable.

Since the guitar already featured powered electronics onboard, First Act saw fit to include some extra functionality. The guitar featured an onboard distortion effect that could be switched on and off, along with an EQ shift. This meant that you could hook the guitar up to a car and play multiple different styles of music right out of the box, from clean plucked melodies to crunchier rock and metal riffs.

It might have been a short-lived promotion, but there was serious money involved. Volkswagen tapped Slash, John Mayer, and Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap for the ad campaign. We don’t have any clear idea on what it costs to hire Slash to record a 30-second commercial, but it probably comes out to the price of a small three-bedroom house in a decent neighborhood.

Slash’s ad was probably the coolest of the three. Mimicking the traditional look of the Marshall amp stack, he’s flanked by two stacks of three Volkswagens each. He shreds away on the GarageMaster wearing his trademark top hat. Notably, his GarageMaster is black to match his outfit, with a black pickguard. Thus far, every other GarageMaster I’ve come across has been white, with only the pickguard changed to match the car.

Volkswagen didn’t stop there, either. Keith M Scott, a creative director who worked on the campaign, noted that the company also enlisted street musicians to promote the offer. They were sent out with the First Act guitar and a new Volkswagen, using the car as their amp while they performed out in public.

The guitar also came with a booklet to educate owners on how their guitar worked. It included a guide to basic chords and playing techniques, as well as rock tips on wearing the strap right and naming your guitar. The tuning instructions are pretty basic, with Volkswagen hilariously suggesting that you could use the horn to tune your guitar in a pinch. Apparently, Volkswagen’s horns in that era delivered a C note. Realistically, this would be a terrible technique for a beginner. New musicians often struggle to discern pitch well, and tuning a guitar can take some practice if doing it by ear. Sitting in your driveway mashing away on the horn while you tune your guitar is a surefire way to get your neighbors to call the cops.

The campaign didn’t make huge waves in either the automotive or musical worlds at the time. For a start, it only lasted for three months, and First Act was by no means a guitar manufacturer of note. However, the guitars remain a notable curio and tend to trade for a few hundred dollars on the second-hand market.

Contemporary reviews were relatively positive. Motor Trend did a full “Test Drive” on the model, playing it through a Volkswagen Golf GTI. Hilariously, the article was published three months after the guitars were available to the public. The reviewers credited the guitar’s decent build quality and playability. Sore points were the finicky pickup selector and tuning machines. As for the sound, we’re told it was remarkably versatile. In the outlet’s own words:

The soul of the GarageMaster is encased within the vintage-voiced Alnico V “bikini-clad” humbucker pickups that provide the guitar’s native chimey sound. The full tones from the neck pickup have a jazzy flavor while the bridge position pickup yields a more concise and focused tone with a surprising amount of single-coil twang for a humbucker. Mixing them creates a warm, round tone with high-end bite. The tone shift switch changes emphasis to either the highs or lows-similar to the old rhythm/lead switches of 1960s Japanese imports.

After meeting the GarageMaster’s Dr. Jekyll, it was time to hear from Mr. Hyde. A slide of the distortion switch significantly alters the mood. Notes that once sang now screamloud. The pickup volume knob acts as moderator, dialing in more or less aggressive tone. Turn it down for a trickle of bluesy overdrive or crank it up to release a flood of sustainable hairiness. The Master volume now controls the gain or output to the amp. This preamp rocks!

Realistically, very few serious musicians would find themselves playing a GarageMaster. Similarly, it’s hard to picture someone purchasing a new Volkswagen in their late 20s and suddenly finding themselves touring the nation a few short years later.

And yet, what makes this promotion stand out is how much love and effort clearly went into it. First Act and VW could have just slapped a VW badge on an existing guitar and called it done. Instead, they went deep. They made custom knobs, custom straps, and custom guitar picks. They wrote a whole guidebook full of amusing quips. They shipped these things with custom cables and electronics so you could plug this thing into a car and rock out. Nobody’s ever wanted to do that before, or since, but the two companies made it happen.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that all that effort went into a campaign that lasted for just three short months. All that custom manufacturing and three celebrity appearances for a single season’s sales.

We’ll likely never see a campaign quite like this one again. Rock is dead, but perhaps we’ll see Roland start shipping drum machines that mount neatly into the center console of your Nissan Kicks or something.

Until that happens, I want to issue a challenge. Many of these guitars have been separated from their matching cars over the years. Go out and purchase one of these guitars on the second-hand market. Then, buy the used Volkswagen that matches the VIN tag on the back of the guitar. Take it to a local car meet, rock out, and send me the video. I’ll reward you with a year’s membership to The Autopian out of my own pocket. Pulling this feat off should only cost you a few thousand dollars, so it is in no way worthwhile. Regardless, it would be a grand achievement to wear on your sleeve as an enthusiast. Happy hunting!

Image credits: Volkswagen, Reverb