Yeah, we do get questions, and we try to answer most of them here—at least the ones that might be interesting to more than just a handful of people.

What is the audio on the front page (and here)? 

The hastily-written and even more hastily recorded riffs here, on the front page, and on the Specs page let you know what the guitars will sound like when they arrive on your doorstep.  Unless otherwise indicated, the recordings were done on a 25.5" scale pre-production model (Ronin). The riff on the front page cycles through the seven different sounds available on the base model (a "split-personality" between Schaller Megaswitch E and P model switches):

1. •neck humbucker (both coils in series)
   

2. •bridge humbucker (both coils in series)
   

3. •inner coils in parallel
   

4. •outer coils in parallel
   

5. •outer coils in series
   

6. •neck pickup, single-coil
   

7. •bridge pickup, single-coil
   

(not exactly in that order ...)

The cheezy lounge music on this page ("Like a Barfly") only uses three or four of those settings ... it is meant more for humor and entertainment value than anything else.

How do we record our audio? 

Unless otherwise indicated, all mp3s on our website are just plain raw guitar, a single guitar track recorded mono, with or without a single GarageBand drum loop behind it. All guitar samples are recorded direct to disk via a simple Mbox—no amp, no preamp, no effects, no mics, no pre-production, no post-production, no coloring of the guitar's raw sound whatsoever.  Guitar cord goes straight out of guitar, into Mbox input.  Remember, our goal is to make a guitar that sounds decent without high-end equipment, without any effects or distortion—without any help at all—and, from my point of view, only if we can do that have we done our job.  Otherwise, what’s the point?  We want to make guitars that you can use to make excellent recordings right out of the box ... and if that’s the goal, then it makes no sense whatsoever to play you sound samples that have $10–100K worth of effects and audio processing on them (or a full band behind them, to hide the guitar’s sound).  We’re giving you audio samples that you should be able to reproduce exactly, without any special tricks or equipment.

Where are the guitars made? 

As we mention on the front page, the designs are entirely our own (designed in the USA), the woodworking is done by a Korean firm, and we do the electronics here in Maryland.  Most products built today are assembled from lots of parts that are made in lots of places, so the question where is this thing from? tends to get a hazy answer.  Ours is no exception.  If you want to fall asleep, try reading the federal government’s thoughts on what “Made in the USA” means.  I laugh when I see “Assembled in the USA” on stuff, because that really means anything you want it to.

For us, the guitar body comes from overseas (except for those veneers that we find in the US and ship to the woodworkers); Bartolini pickups are from California; hardware is from Japan, Germany, China, and Korea; the circuit boards are fabbed for us in Oregon; electronic parts (wires, resistors, capacitors, etc.) come from all over the world; and, as mentioned, the electronics and set-up labor (soldering & installing of circuits, final testing, trussrod adjustment, intonation adjustment, etc.) is all done in Maryland.  We spend 4–6 hours per guitar in Maryland doing setup and circuit stuff.

Does that answer the question?  I didn’t think so.

Where did the name “Coil” come from?

All good names or titles have to have at least two meanings, preferably three or more.  The word “coil” refers first and foremost to the electronics in the guitar, the heart and soul of the machine (most pickups are electromagnets, Tesla coils).  It also refers to the company’s logo, which is an abstract coil.  Lastly, it suggests a spring ... hopefully one that is compressed and has energy in it—not one that is all stretched out, bent, & ruined.  :)

What is that mascot thingy up top? 

As mentioned briefly above, it’s an abstract coil ... rendered in a sort of watercolor brush stroke.  More importantly, it’s a de facto Rorschach test, because everyone who sees it sees something different in it.  No lie, people have told me that they think that it is an apple, a cherry, a guy wearing a bandana, a girl with ponytails, a fetus (yes, a fetus), a planet (with rings?), the sun in eclipse with two solar flares, and the calligraphic letter “C” ... my favorite was an email from our web designer right after he first saw the mascot, asking, “bunny?  WTF?”

The answer: yes.  It’s all of those things, and others as well.  The design intentionally has no concrete, definitive form, because as soon as you define something, it no longer interests; it loses any mystique it may have once had.  That’s one of the reasons Science makes so many people unhappy (I’m aware of this; I’m a scientist): Science likes to put absolute definitions on things, but in so doing it destroys a little of their essence.  This is one of the reasons we have so many scientists and engineers working at Coil—this is a place where we can do just the opposite for a change.  So the logo embodies that, to a degree—it suggests but does not become absolute.

How do we come up with our guitar designs? 

Come to think of it, there is probably enough material on this to make a blog entry, with sketches, blueprints, photos, etc.  I’ll have to work on that.

Where do we get our model names? 

Form follows function, and label follows form.  The shape of the thing tells us its name.  But, of course, it also has to be a name that you would actually want on your guitar.  The “Wooden Curvy Thing” model probably would fail to sell many units, even if it looked great.  So would, I imagine, the models “Kitten,” “Summer Breeze,” and “Doorknob.”

The first family of models was the Bushido line, mainly named as a nod to the great Japanese guitar manufacturers of the 1970s and 1980s (read through the various blog entries, starting here for more on the topic).  Bushido translates roughly to “path/way of the warrior,” and we really felt that this was exactly what we were enabling with our guitars: you, the guitarist, are a modern-day warrior (mean, mean stride), and these new designs of ours, from their shapes to their electronics and construction, are your battle axe, your broadsword, your katana or tachi (thank you Frank Milller).  Moreover, we’re trying very hard to make these guitars disruptive technology, so that we’re putting into your hands something no other warrior out there has.  We liked that analogy a lot, so the name stuck.  Bushido: way of the warrior.  Obvious models within the family would be Samurai, Ronin, Shogun, Poet-Warrior (a double-neck design), etc.

The next family of designs to come about was the Renaissance family, which really started because I was intrigued by the shape of the violin.  I grew up playing the violin at age five (stopped playing at age twelve when we moved away, and the new school district had no orchestra—thus began my training on guitar and bass).  So I’ve always known and loved the shape.  Over the years I have seen lots of attempts at making guitars that look like violins, but very few of them actually succeed (McCartney’s Rick is one of the few successful designs, IMHO).  So I attempted to do a design or two myself.  The result: the Renaissance family, including Hammer, Enlightenment, Aria, Merc, and Monarch.

The Angel is part of the Nightmares & Dreams family, which started because a friend really wanted me to do a single-cut design.  It turned into a number of related designs, some suggesting monsters (Medusa and her sisters), some recalling the designs played by rock’s greatest legends.

And the story continues ...

What is/are our favorite design/s? 

This tends to change as we come up with new designs—if we didn’t think new designs have the potential to be even better than existing designs, we wouldn’t come up with new designs.  As of January 2008, I’m a big fan of the Shogun-28: a baritone-scale version of the large-body design.  I’ve been playing it for a month now, and I like the looks, the feel, and the sound of the thing a lot.  Here’s a pic, taken by my 6-year-old son with his Christmas present, a 3/4 scale guitar by Dean:

I’m really warming up to the baritone scale—I find it really, really playable (remember, though, I started out playing bass before I played guitar), and its tone just stomps all over the 25-inch guitars.  Hard not to, with three extra inches of string—note that I tune it to the same scale as a 25” guitar: E-A-D-G-B-E; I don’t tune it down.  Another aspect I like a lot is the really big body, because it resonates like hell, and I can rest my entire forearm on the face of the guitar, which is really comfortable (for me, at least).

Why do we take so many pictures outside? 

Why don’t we do studio shots of the guitars, in particular with professional lighting? Because I prefer natural/outdoor lighting.  Yes, working outdoors is a pain for a photographer—they typically hate the outdoors when doing subject photos (as opposed to photos of landscapes), because it is unpredictable, and the light casts weird shadows & so forth.  However, natural sunlight tends to be excellent for color reproduction—meaning that the colors in the picture are a good representation of the colors seen in real life.  I have seen studio pictures of guitars that make the guitars look absolutely nothing like they do in real life.  I don’t think it is done on purpose, to fool people or anything.  I’ve just noticed it enough times as a guy buying guitars that I wanted to make sure I didn’t make the same mistake when becoming a seller of guitars.  Artificial light can dramatically change the colors of a guitar in a photo (example: the pictures of my own guitars that I take hanging on the walls of my office with a flash because I don’t have time to carry them outside and get a good shot—the colors are completely wrong); natural light can serve to prevent that.  So: most of our photos are outside, or inside lit by a big picture window.

Got any more questions?  Send ‘em to info@coil-guitars.com, and we’ll put answers up here.