From £899 - “For every stage of your playing and every stage you play on” that's my slogan and i'm sticking with it!
So how can I make such a great guitar for so cheap I hear you say. Well, read on and hopefully I can shed some light onto my design and build process for these guitars.
These are my cheaper range with some outsourced bits and not as fancy hardwear but with all the same sound, playability and cool looks.
It all starts with the neck. This is the most time consuming part to make in a custom guitar which is why they are the price they are. It can take me between 2-3 days to make one. So to make a guitar for under £1000 I needed to address this. For the first generation of these guitars I bought aftermarket necks and upgraded them to my specs but I still wasn’t totally satisfied with the design so I decided to cut out the middleman and go straight to the source. I have been working with a factory for the past few months to get the necks exactly as I want them. They still take a bit of work to get up to my standard once I receive them though such as rounding the fretboard edge and a full fret level and redress. This is the essence of a great playing instrument - having a great feeling neck. I feel I have now achieved that!
The next thing to look at was hardwear. For my Custom range I use quite expensive branded hardware such as ABM and Gotoh. These are nice to have but in my opinion not entirely essential for a great guitar. I have used loads of different tuners, bridges etc - as you can imagine I've got enough experience to know what works and what doesn’t. I put this experience to use to choose great hardwear at a decent price. These bits will last a lifetime and are work horses. I’ve also designed a new top loading control cavity cover. These are so much easier to install and being a standard size and layout across all guitars means I can make them in bulk - more timesaving!
Pickups were next - in Gen 1 I used Iron Gear pickups but my assertion is that a great guitar needs great pickups and I wanted to add an element of uniqueness to these builds. So i worked with Leigh of Green Pickups and we created a slightly more budget version of my A Line Pickups - still sound the same but use some imported components to keep the costs down.
Another time saving device (and therefore cost saving) is having no fancy carves on the lightweight Obeche body. I actually love how clean it makes the design now though.
I'm really excited by these guitars and I hope you are too. The first few will go on sale 8am (UK time) on Friday 9th August and they will be offered to mailing list subscribers first.
Let me know what you think of these new guitars!
Dave
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