Guitarist Kenny Hill asked me to make a lightweight 7 string to his specs. I used a pawlonia body reinforced with a walnut block so the tremelo posts wouldn’t ‘drift’. Roasted maple neck with carbon fiber reinforcement, rosewood fretboard and EVO frets. Topped off in Mopar Plum Crazy!
Always liked these scroll basses and decided to have a go at building one.
A client wanted a build that was close to the old 1963 Fender® with the correct color blonde.
Fun build, swamp ash maple and rosewood.
We needed a lap steel in the studio so I knocked one up out of Black Limba with a wenge fretboard. I used actual frets for markers.
Client asked me to build a left handed Explorer-type for his son. Always glad to oblige, turned out great even though I couldn’t play it!
Along the lines of the Bubble Wand T style I built this 8 string bass from Black Limba, Mahogany and padauk. Pickups are EMG passive “Geezer” signature. Light weight, sounds great! For sale!
This started off as being a normal T style build with some heavy Ash… really really heavy ash. The body, once shaped was close to 10 pounds by itself. I used a lighter piece of wood for the build and came back to this one with the idea of making it somewhat lighter and this is the result! It’s very lightweight, but sounds GREAT. Vintage 65 new bridge pickup by Fender® and the neck pickup is a Fender® Custom Shop Robert Cray Strat pickup. It’s stronger than it looks and sustain is just fine.
Want it? Let me know!
A friend asked me to make this, it was a little more labor intensive than I thought but turned out great.
Let me know if you’d like me to build one for you!
I built this guitar a few years ago for my friend Billy. It was my first neck-through and it utilized EMG 81/60 pickups and Billy really loved it.
Billy regularly played it on stage with his band in Mississippi.
Then, in December 2018, it was stolen out of his vehicle.
We launched a nationwide hunt, posting pics everywhere and scanning craigslist posts for months. Nothing, it was gone without a trace.
Almost exactly one year to the day that it was stolen, Billy was outside working on his house when his dogs went crazy. He walked around the front of the house to see what the commotion was and there was this crackhead-looking kid walking by the house WITH THE GUITAR!
Billy chased him down and demanded he turn it over, the kid dropped the guitar (which fell out of the case.. which fell apart) and took off running. Billy pursued him with righteous indignation and caught him. Billy demanded an explanation whereapon the kid pulled a gun out and Billy decided that retrieving the guitar would probably be enough today.
He went back and retrieved the guitar. Apparently, the original thief (or thieves) had stashed the guitar in a drainage ditch, perhaps intending to retrieve it later, but who knows.
It lay in a drainage ditch in Mississippi for 12 months. It was dripping wet and was somewhat worse for the wear.
The pic in what’s left of the case shows how it was then. Check out the slug on the back of the headstock.
After it dried out, he sent it to me to see if I could do anything with it.
The fretboard was half off so I steamed the rest off. Amazingly the neck below was still dead straight. I pulled the frets out of the board as some of them had lifted.. and it was just nasty. After a sanding I figured the board could be saved so I filled the crack and refretted it. I soaked the tuners in ‘metal rescue’ which is something I’ve used for rust removal on motorcycles in the past. I also socked the trussrod end and most of the screws in it.
The electrics.. I popped the cavity cover off and it looked pretty good in there. I plugged it in and tapped the pickups with a screwdriver.. they worked! Even with the rusty 9v battery that spent a year in the ditch. What a testament to the resiliency of EMG pickups, something to be said for sealed pickups!
I had to clean the contacts on the jack socket and lube the selector switch but other than that, we were good.
Billy said he wanted to retain the black staining as he thought it was now part of the ‘mojo’ of the guitar (he’s Native American and very spiritual). I glued on the board, put a new nut on and set it up. Plays and sounds just as great as it did when I first built it. Tuners work fine after lubing. The apparent deamination on the neck and headstock seemed to be caused by swelling of the woods at different rates. Once dry, it looked was better and the joints are solid. I’m just applying Tru Oil to the back of the neck to make it feel better and then I’m mailing it back to him.
Chalk up a win for the good guys!!!
This guitar was commissioned by a customer who wanted one of the Bigsby reissues that came out a few years back. They are very hard to come by, so he decided to have me build one for him.
All maple construction, birds eye maple top, big leaf maple body and rock maple neck. The accents are done in wenge. Pickups are Seymour Duncan Phat Cats in one-off aluminum surrounds. Bridfge is Schaller and the tuners are Schaller DaVinci. Rosewood fretboard with real MOP inlays and 12″ radius.
