Okay, this whole guitar-company thing started because I went guitar shopping and found out that guitars today suck.
I grew up playing a 1970s Electra Outlaw (pictured). Yeah, I know: very disco. But I bought it when I was twelve, and it was cool to me, so there. All my friends played mainstream guitars, like Gibsons and Fenders, and I thought my guitar sucked because it wasn’t one of those. For instance, I figured the gorgeous, multi-color abalone inlays were just a way to gild a turd, something lesser-quality manufacturers had to do to make their guitars attractive compared to those of the big American companies. Took me until I was 40 to realize how wrong I was.
Anyway, what turns out to be important is that, at the time, I couldn’t understand why all my friends wanted to hang out at the music store on the weekends, playing other guitars. I wanted to jam, not hang out in the store. I didn’t get it—made no sense to me whatsoever.
In addition, I was used to a guitar that had an enormous dynamic range: when I played my Outlaw, if I played softly, I would get a radically different sound than if I hit the hell out of the strings. The AR2000, by comparison, had a very compressed sound; made my runs much more even and fluid sounding (much better sounding than I can actually play, in fact), but I got frustrated at times when I wanted my notes to sound at different volumes.
So I did more homework on-line to see what was up with my ol’ Electra Outlaw: maybe it was not the piece of junk I had assumed? Or maybe I had gotten a bum version of the Artist? Turns out that Electras have a great reputation, and the Artist sounded just like it was supposed to. The Electras were built by Matsumoku, a ghost manufacturer and one of the original Japanese companies that brought Japanese guitar craftsmanship to the forefront (and ate the lunches of American manufacturers throughout the 1970s in the process). The other main Japanese firm of that era that shared those lunches with Matsumoku, and which still happens to be around today, is Ibanez. The Artist was Ibanez’s first departure from doing knock-offs of Les Pauls.
Okay, back to the story. I discovered I had a great guitar to begin with in the Electra. Its dynamic range is outstanding ... sounds like a semi-hollowbody in terms of its range. Here’s a link to a little info on their pickups. I also discovered that the huge, two-dimensional palette of sounds on the guitar was due to its innovative switching: the guitar would put different pickups in series or parallel depending on the position of the selector switch. This is engineering-speak for “the circuit would change, and therefore the sound would change.”
So, before we throw stones at the Artist, let me point out that it is representative of how nearly all dual-humbucker guitars are wired today: you get a total of four coils (two in each humbucker), and a three-way selector that gives you the following choices:
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•a trebly version of the guitar’s sound
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•a bassy version
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•a version somewhere in between trebly and bassy
That’s it. That is how many, many guitars are made. Owes its roots to the switching circuit of the Les Paul. My only two guitars prior to this, the Electra Outlaw and the Ibanez Roadstar, both offered fuller selections of sounds, because they offered different combinations of single coil, multiple coils in series, and multiple coils in parallel. I naturally assumed that all guitars were this flexible. It is like growing up, doing finger-painting as a kid using the whole rainbow of colors, and then when reaching adulthood being told to paint in black and white. I was stunned. I felt hemmed in, confined, claustrophobic (at least wrt the guitar). I immediately sold the Artist on eBay.
I did buy a few other Artists from the 1970s, all on eBay, because I really loved the shape of the guitar, and I decided that I would re-fit the new purchases to have a fuller range of switching. I have a whole post devoted to the beauties I purchased (“So I picked up a few 1978 Artists”).
My plans changed when I got the guitars, started playing them, and started reading more about them on the web. These guitars are very different from the late-90s reissue. They all have ebony fretboards, not rosewood (and, boy, the first time you ever play ebony, after a lifetime of rosewood, your fingers go wild … it’s like your brain can’t figure out what just happened; you do a mental and physical double-take—food for another post). The 2618 and 2618-12 models have 24 frets, not 22. Way, way cool (these were my first guitars with more than 22 frets). The body size of the 1970s Artists is larger—or, better put, the late-90s reissue shrunk the original body size to make it lighter—and the larger one is much more comfortable to play (e.g., I can rest much of my forearm on the body). I decided not to hack these guitars up, because they are classics, and the more I learned about them, the more I felt like keeping them exactly as I found them. I’m not alone in this sentiment: there is a whole group of people out there who collect these old Ibanez guitars and revere them for the gorgeous works of art that they are.
So, rather than hacking these guys up, I decided to make my own line of guitars. Really—it was more or less that simple. I decided that these new guitars would have all of the items I had come to appreciate and love in my guitars:
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•Multi-tone switching circuits (like the Outlaw)
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•Neck-through construction (like the Outlaw)
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•Ebony fretboards (like the 1970s/80s Artists)
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•24 frets (like the 2618 Artists)
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•Cool inlays using real abalone & MOP (both Outlaw & Artist)
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•A nice-looking wood top (like the Artist reissue)
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•Killer dynamic range (like the Outlaw)
Not many guitars have all of these features, and almost none can be found for under $2000 street price. Obvious business-plan material. And, naturally, the first body shape I wanted was something that looked like the Artist.
So why these features? Here’s a brief description; we go through each in more detail in the Specs pages.
Multi-tone switching circuits. I probably beat this topic to death already, but the fact remains: having a full palette of tones available to you is irreplaceable. There is simply no comparison between a guitar with a full range of switching and a guitar with a limited range of switching. None. Moreover, guitarists would like the largest available set of circuit topologies possible, with the smallest number of switches (who wants a gazillion switches on the face of their guitar?). This is exactly what we’re in the process of patenting: really powerful switching with a minimum of control hardware. See our Specs section for more details.
Neck-through construction. Here’s the back of two guitars: one with neck-through construction, the Electra Outlaw (left); the other with set-neck construction, the Ibanez Artist (right).
Note the difference in how much wood is directly behind the neck where it meets the body. When you are playing notes high on the neck, you’ve got to grab a relatively fat chunk of wood if you have a set-neck design (right) or, worse, a bolt-on design. However, with a thru-neck design (left), the neck is just as thin there as it is further out; access to higher frets is easy, convenient. It also tends to give you better tone & sustain (material for another post). Why do so few guitars use neck-through construction? Expensive to manufacture: requires one long piece of wood that stretches from headstock through the body, and that long piece of wood is harder to machine than a separate short neck + body.
Ebony fretboards. There are two main fretboard woods out there: rosewood and maple. Rosewood is nice because it has friction: when you bend notes, you can be very precise because your fingers and the strings don’t slip around. Maple, unlike rosewood, is generally finished, so your fingers don’t actually touch the wood; they touch a glossy surface. It lends a great, bright, percussive attack to the guitar, but I personally can’t play it well because my fingers slip all over the place. YMMV. Ebony represents the best of both worlds: the grain is exposed to your fingers, so you get the tactile feedback of friction, but the grain is so tightly compressed that it feels like playing smooth rock (the mineral, not the genre). Like maple, it has a nice percussive attack. Best of all worlds. Why do so few guitars use ebony fretboards? Expensive to manufacture: the wood is so hard that it requires you to put the frets in by hand, otherwise you run high risk of cracking the fretboard … and nobody wants to pay a laborer to put in frets by hand.
24 frets. Why do I like 24 frets? Well, beyond the obvious of having two full octaves to play with on each string (isn’t that enough of a perk?), I like being able to intonate my own guitars, and with 24 frets, doing that is trivial: you hit the harmonic over the 24th fret, sound the note at the 24th fret, and go back & forth until you can hear whether one is flat relative to the other. If they are not in tune, adjust bridge until they are in tune. :) Plus, we decided to use 27 frets, to put the 24th way out on the neck where it is really easy to play (i.e., no reaching your hand over the body to get to it). Is it a big deal? Depends on how often you like using the high frets. Why do so few guitars have 24 frets? First of all, it’s difficult to balance (makes the neck a bit longer), so it requires some engineering to make it work. More importantly, it is expensive to manufacture: requires a longer piece of fretboard material. They say that the reason for stopping the fretboard at 22 frets is for better tone, but that’s crap: the tone is no different; it’s just an excuse to use shorter wood and shave dollars off the manufacturing expense.
Abalone inlays. They’re just cool, that’s all (gorgeous reds & greens & blues) ... they’re not there for the sound but rather for the looks. And I’m a stickler for real materials: that fake mother of pearl everyone uses reminds me of the plastic mat that my grandfather had under the casters of his office chair. Looks obviously fake, cheap, like neither the manufacturer nor the purchaser thinks enough of this guitar to put the real thing on it. Why do so few guitars have real mother of pearl and/or real abalone? Expensive to manufacture: the real stuff costs ten times as much as the fake stuff.
Wood tops. Again, they’re just cool, that’s all. If you want something painted, then paint it. I like natural wood—there is definitely something enticing and satisfying about real wood grain, kind of like looking into a fire, it calls to the human soul to just stare at it. At any rate, wood is cool, and I like seeing it. However, whereas decorative stuff like inlays affect your sound only slightly, decorative stuff like thick figured wood tops affect the sound of your guitar dramatically. Many people have wood tops that they don’t actually like in terms of sound (for instance, people on-line frequently claim they like the sound of their guitar better a few days after they’ve put on new strings): thick maple tops are beautiful, but they give a nasal sound to the guitar, and that nasal sound goes away as the strings become dull. So you paid an extra $300 for something that makes your guitar sound like crap. Well, that’s one way to do it ... another way is to use thinner tops, so they affect the sound of the guitar less. They also affect the price of the guitar by reducing the materials cost.
Dynamic range. If you’ve ever played an acoustic guitar, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s hard to play acoustic guitar well, because it exposes all of your mistakes, rather than hiding them the way most electrics do (especially when distorted), but if you are good enough to play acoustic, you can make the thing sing in ways that most electrics can only dream of. Enough dynamic range in an electric guitar, and you can hear the very grain of the wood coming through in the guitar’s tone. This is the holy grail: clarity of tone. It’s a big deal, and once you’ve heard it you will never, ever want to go back.
Dynamic range is also about expression: the more dynamic range you have, the more expression the guitar gives you; the less range you have, the less capability for expression you’ve got. Compress the sound enough, and every note sounds exactly like every other one. Makes for very fluid-sounding runs (perfect for shredding), but it gets really boring after about 10 minutes. Compression is best left for stomp boxes and post-production—not in the guitar itself, where you can’t turn it off. It’s a great effect, and it has it’s place, but not all the time, on every riff. So what solid-body electrics come close to that holy grail of dynamic range and clarity of tone? Pick up a really high-end bass, for starters—what electronics do they use? Bartolini is in just about all of them. These guys know tone better than anyone in the world. Why doesn’t everyone use them? They cost an arm and a leg ... but worth every penny, believe me.
So—bottom line: modern guitars don’t have cool electronics, and they tend to avoid construction techniques, materials, and electronics that give you good sound and convenience of play, if those techniques, materials, and electronics cost more. To me, that sucks. A lot of modern manufacturers have evidently decided they’d rather make money than guitars (to steal a phrase). It’s just a matter of time before somebody, probably in China, eats their lunch.
