It's my pleasure to introduce the 1958 Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman, otherwise known as the model number 6122.

Chet Atkins was, by all means, a virtuoso, and he was one of the first celebrity musicians to endorse a guitar company. You can see his influence in guitarists like Tommy Emmanuel, Brian Setzer, and Paul Pigat, and his legacy as a sonic innovator lives on in the Filter'Tron pickup.

Chet sported the first guitars Gretsch produced early in the 1950s, but they came equipped with DeArmond single-coils. This posed a problem for Chet, as he was playing a big, hollow body guitar. When you see Chet playing a few feet away from his amp, he's playing very loud and very clean. The point of Chet's picking is to be clear and concise, which doesn't work when you have to combat hum from the single-coil pickups. So in '56 or '57, a man named Ray Butz came along and worked in collaboration with Chet to build a pickup that would combat that hum, and the Filter'Tron pickup was born.