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.

Kurt’s Ferrington guitar photographed during an exhibition in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Photo credit: Bruna Val Magalhães

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Dunxy
Dunxy
1 year ago

There’s footage of that concert floating about and i cant see the Ferrington?

Dunxy
Dunxy
1 year ago
Reply to  Dunxy

Never mind, i saw the part he maybe playing it. Footage so low-fi its hard to say. It is possible though!