With its Gretsch-y color pallet and TV Jones TV Classic Filter’Tron pickups, this Pensa MK Diet mixes a whole lot of 50’s Rockabilly cool in with Pensa’s trademark Boutique-build solidbody aesthetic. It’s a unique guitar and one we’ve really fallen in love with here.

Pensa Guitars are hand built in New York City under the tutelage of Rudy Pensa, the long-time owner of Rudy’s Music on 48th St, and now in the city’s SOHO district. The company took flight in the mid 1980s as a partnership between Pensa and John Suhr, and enjoyed much publicity after Mark Knopfler began a long partnership with Pensa in the late 1980s. Knopfler was after a guitar that would offer both Strat and Les Paul tone at the flick of a switch, and Suhr was able to accommodate the request in his design. Today, this functionality is still a foundation of Pensa wiring.

This MK Diet It features a lightweight swamp ash body with a Cream Yellow and Smoke Green nitro lacquer finish, a ‘natural binding’ treatment, and a matching headstock. The maple neck is carved with Pensa’s Standard C shape and features a 25.5” Indian rosewood 22 fret fingerboard with 6105 frets and generously rolled edges. The nut measures 1-5/8”.

The pickups are TV Jones TV Classics wired to a 5-way switch. Positions 1,3, and 5 are wired with standard-style two-pickups/3-way switch wiring, but positions 2 and 4 offer more of a Fender-like Neck and Bridge mixed tone. Position 2 is neck + bridge inside coils, wired in parallel, like a Stratocaster’s mix position; and position 4 is neck + bridge outside coils, in parallel, which is more like a Telecaster’s middle position sound.

This example is in near mint condition and has been carefully set-up in our shop with 10-46 strings. It weighs 6.8 lbs.

With original custom Cedar Creek hardshell case