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Vincent Berton maker of Vline
guitars, France
updated 23/3/2011

Information and images (Lyre and
Sword) courtesy of
Romain Bidaut
and
Daniel, France (March 2009).
"Vincent Berton was a French Avant
Garde luthier in the early 1980s. He made guitars in Chalais,
France.
In December 1979, he lived
in Othis (north of Paris). His motorbike a Guzzi 850 Le Mans had a car
radio on the fuel tank.
The first guitar Vincent
made was the VLINE, ‘ La péniche’ (the sword). During a TOTO concert
he gave that guitar to Steve Lukather. [Source: Daniel]
Eric Lovett reports seeing
the Sword in the Lead Guitars store in Paris in the late 1980s and
communicated with Vincent in the mid 1990s. At that time Vincent was
working on a flying car.
According to Romain Bidaut of
Foxyguitars
"He was the protege of James
Trussart, who recognized his art was beyond anything that had
ever been done. He was completely brilliant, maybe too much for
sanity, as he would spend months building one a kind creations
and built every single detail by hand. He would build the knobs, the saddles, the control
plates all from solid blocks of brass. He also built his own
revolutionary pickups hiding the secret of his custom design by
integrating them inside the body, he also built his own cases,
but even down to the smallest of details like the hinges and the
handle, also built by hand from solid brass. The guitar bodies are made from resin.

Insanity caught
up with this genius, and unfortunately Vincent Berton,
after he built a reported 2 dozen instruments, all unique,
committed suicide in the mid 1990s.?"
Examples of his craft are
shown below: The thumbs will enlarge.
Also see
Violent guitars
V Line Lyre

VLine Sword



Evil rouge guitar (not its official title)

Black brother




Vline, Concorde supersonic jet guitar
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