(May 2008)

 Standard 6-string, Koa Top, Honey burst finish   New!
    It's getting hard to find any Koa, let alone nice Koa these days, but I found a few pieces that were lurking in my woodpile.  So it seemed high time to do a Koa top guitar!  It is, as always, lovely stuff!  There is such depth to the color of this wood.  It gives a solid Standard a slightly "warmer" sound compared to a Maple top, very sweet and melodic, and the Wolfetone pickups certainly make the most of it.  I used a Gabon Ebony fingerboard on this guitar to add a little "sparkle" to the sound.  The Tonepros bridge and Grover tuners are gold.
                   (available from Willcutt Guitar Shoppe)

       Click on Thumbnails!

  Highly figured Quilt top hollow body   
    Here is a rather special custom instrument.  The choice of materials for this guitar was left up to me, so I used a gorgeous  piece of Quilted Maple on the top.  For the body I used a very unusual figured piece of  Honduras Mahogany (which also made up part of the neck).  I used Brazilian Rosewood for the head  veneer and finger-board, and  I finished the whole guitar off with a multiple black and white binding with Abalone sandwiched in between.   A little over-the-top perhaps but quite stunning!  It has a pair of Wolfetone humbuckers, a Tonepros bridge and the amazingly good Gotoh 510 tuners.  The Honeyburst finish brings the whole thing to life.  And, yes, it sounds  as good as it looks!

                  


  Click on Thumbnails !

(April 2008)

 Giffin Standard, Quittle Maple Top, Honey burst finish
  I think this guitar came out rather nicely!  The Maple top on here is somewhere between flame and quilt, and sometimes known as quittle (don't ask me why).  It has no raised control panel which I don't often do on a solid body.  It gives the guitar a slightly different look.  It has a Honduras Mahogany neck and body and an Indian Rosewood fingerboard and head veneer.  I used a TonePros bridge and Grover tuners and a pair of great-sounding Zebra-coiled Wolfetone humbuckers.  Don't forget to check out the thumbnails!!

 Click on Thumbnails!

(available from Guitar Adoptions)

  Giffin Standard, Redwood burl top, Burnt Orange burst   

Straight from the 'weird wood' pile comes this Redwood burl top Standard.    It's the oddest piece of Redwood burl I've seen and quite fascinating!  It has swirls and dots and grain in every direction - definitely not your grandmother's tabletop!    Other than the peculiar wood, it's a regular solid Standard with Honduras Mahogany body and neck.  The fingerboard  is Gabon Ebony, but it's also a little unusual with a very distinct marbling pattern running through it.  Its good to be different, right..? 
I've used Lindy Fralin pickups, a Tonepros bridge and Grover tuners.  The guitar sounds completely different from the Maple top Standards, closer to a Spruce top sound than anything else.  Nice and sweet but with plenty of thump! 

(March 2008)

Click on Thumbnails!

(March 2008)

 The Baby T, Antique White finish   
  This guitar is a bit different......a Model T using a Micro body.  I've had an idea for a smaller T for quite some time, and as I got a request for a model T type guitar but with a smaller body, this was the opportunity to try it out.  The two different styles of the Micro and the T blended together very nicely as you can see in these pictures.
  As this is a custom instrument it has some special features that the customer requested.  It has a Maple neck which is particularly unusual in that it is extremely thick, is all one piece, and has no trussrod.  It relies on it's size and exactly quarter-sawn cut for its strength.  An interesting experiment!  The neck is also a 25 1/2 inch scale for extra sustain.  The mass of aluminum in the Skyway tremolo adds tremendous ring to the strings, and the Wolfetone pickup does wonders to bring it all to life!!   No chance of getting confused over the controls!! :)

        Click on Thumbnails! 

(The last picture
 is for size
comparison
with a regular
Model T)

Model T Deluxe 

The top on this guitar came from the same board as the top on the Model T Deluxe sold in July 2007 (further down on this page).   It is the last piece of this 100 year old Douglas Fir that I have, so there is not much chance of there being any other guitars quite like this. The body and neck are Honduras Mahogany with an Indian Rosewood fingerboard and head veneer. As with the previous guitar, I've used  Amalfitano pickups, this time with no covers. The tuners are Grovers and the bridge is TonePros.  Great looking guitar.  Killer sound! 
                                                                

Click on Thumbnails !

   

(Feb 2008)
 

 Custom standard, Maple top, Oil & Wax finish    Once in a while, somebody asks for an oil finished instrument which I am very partial to.  I think the oil finish has a really nice feel to it.  This Standard has a thicker body than normal (customer's request) to increase the low-end response.  The top is a piece of hard Eastern Curly Maple which looks really nice with its satin sheen finish. The top was actually finished with a clear oil, while the back was finished with a Walnut tinted oil.  It gives the Mahogany a really nice, deep color.  The pickups are Wolfetone custom humbuckers which, although they have cream pickup rings, are actually hard-mounted straight into the wood with no adjusting screws or springs.  This gives the pickups considerably more resonance as they now can pick up vibrations directly from the wood.  I used a Pigtail aluminum bridge and Gotoh 510 series tuners (these are great!).   This guitar has tons of low end and a sparkle to the top end helped greatly by the aluminum bridge.  A very lively guitar!

Click on Thumbnails! 

Giffin Standard, Maple burl top   
   
   I found this piece of burl underneath a pile of other wood in my workshop.  As you can see, that was not the best place for it!  It looks really nice with a Honey burst, and the tortoise-shell and white binding really sets it off. I've used a pair of Lindy Fralin P92 pickups as a change from regular humbuckers, and they sound great.

The fingerboard and head veneer are Macassar Ebony and so is the inlayed heel cap.  The body and neck are Honduras Mahogany which always produces a great sound.  It has Grover tuners and a TonePros bridge, all in Nickel.             

                  


  Click on Thumbnails !

(Dec 2007)

 Double-neck, 6&12, Left-handed, 
   This guitar took a little while to figure out, especially as I'm right handed,  but the end result was well worth the effort.   It was built to my customer's  fairly exact requirements, and the tricky part was to make it all work. 
The body is Mahogany with a Lacewood top which covers a large number of wiring channels which run all around the front.  The ultra-skinny necks are Maple with Rosewood laminates, Rosewood fingerboards and Rosewood head veneers.  The inlays on the F-boards are 'moon phases' with MOP 69s inlayed on the heads.
The pickups on  the 12-string are Gretsch Filtertrons, and the bridge is an ABM 12-way tun-o-matic.  On the 6-string, the neck pickup is a high output Filtertron, and the bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan  Custom humbucker.  The  2-point tremolo bridge is by Gotoh.    The wiring consists of volume and tone for each neck, neck selector switch, and individual pickup selectors for both necks. 
The 12-string is strung 'Rickenbacker style' with the low string first (Pyramid flat-wound strings). 
For a such a large instrument it ended up remarkably compact.  This was a lot of fun to build!

        Click on Thumbnails! 

Giffin Baritone Standard, Black        

    I don't do too many baritones, but they are fun instruments and sound amazing.  On this baritone, I made the body a little thicker than my regular Standards to bring out the low-end frequencies more, and to this end I used a pair of DiMarzio Deactivators which work extremely well with low-tuned instruments.   These pickups look great with their Nickel-topped coils.  The F-board is Indian Rosewood (the camera blanched it out for some reason), and the scale length that I used is 27 1/2 inches.  It rings like a bell!   I used a TonePros bridge and Grover tuners.  The black gloss finish seems very appropriate for this guitar.

                                            Click on Thumbnails!                                    

 
(Dec 2007)

Cust. comment

   

(Nov 2007)
 

 Model T Custom, Walnut burl top 

   Here is a new instrument with an unusual piece of wood on  the front.  It's Walnut Cluster Burl  which is rather different from a normal Walnut Burl.  I used the same material on the front of the headstock.  I've nicknamed this guitar the "Mad Dog" because if you look closely on the headstock, the book-matched Walnut looks like it has a crazy dog's face on it....
   The guitar is fully bound in cream, with gold fittings.  I used  Kent Armstrong Custom Humbuckers, a  TonePros bridge, and Gotoh tuners.  The finish on the front of the guitar is natural, and the back is stained a golden brown.  Very classy looking!

            Click on Thumbnails!