***NOTE: The dark color around the guitar itself is NOT part of the guitar***

In 1987, Rickenbacker dressed up the 360/12 with an eye-catching black-and-white color scheme known as the Tuxedo finish. The company produced, appropriately, only 12 of these “formal” 12-strings.

The body and neck – including the fingerboard – were white, while the plastic and metal parts were all black. The binding was black, too, but on this “New Style” body with curved top edges (introduced on the Capri 360 series late in 1964), only the back of the body was bound.

Rickenbacker 12-strings had a different sound than those of other makers, and the secret was in the stringing. From the days of the first acoustic 12-strings, the octave pairs had been strung so that the player’s downstroke hit the high string first and then the low string. Conversely, the upstroke hit the low string first, exphasising the low octave, and the result was an accented off-beat when players alternated up- and downstrokes. Rickenbacker reversed the pairings, so that the low octave was struck first, giving greater power and depth on downstrokes and relieving the “wrong foot” sound of conventionally strung 12-strings.