Hi Everybody,

Chuck and I just got back from our amazing weekend at at the Montreal Guitar Show. While we were gone, Lance Keltner of Destroy All Guitars posted videos of our Professional and Legend guitars. Lance is awesome, and we’re more than thrilled.

I’ve put the Professional video up on our video page. It’s the third video down from the top.

I’ll put the Legend video up as soon as we debut the model, which we want to do simultaneously with Destroy All Guitars. Of course, you can get a sneak peak on Lance Keltner’s Youtube Channel (grin).

More to come! Stay tuned …

Rich

Hi Everybody!

I’ve posted the videos of Denny Breau playing our new Professional Acoustic II and our Professional that we shot a couple of weeks ago.

They’re right on top of our Video page.

Denny is wonderful and I think the guitars have never sounded better.

I’m holding back a couple of videos of the Legend model, like I am the photographs, so that we can make an introduction of the guitar simultaneously with Cliff of Destroy All Guitars, so please be patient with me for just a little longer.

Rich

A few years ago, a guitar player friend of mine brought this beautiful acoustic guitar by a well known maker by for a set up.

After the setup I played the guitar and was extremely impressed with the sound of this instrument, and when my friend came back to pick it up he invited me to come hear it live.

When I heard this beautiful sounding guitar on stage through a PA system with drums, electric guitar, bass, keyboards and vocals, it just didn’t sound that great any more.

Two things had happened.  One, it was trying to feed back, so the frequencies that were trying to feed were pulled back in the board which wasn’t good for the guitar’s tone. Two, every time he strummed, his strumming hand was contacting the top or the bridge causing a thumping sound through the low end of the system.

Then, one day my friend Denny Breau and I were talking about an acoustic gig he had coming up and he made a comment that an electric guitar equipped with piezo pickups is great for the electric player who needs an acoustic sound.  But, he said, you can’t play it like an acoustic because it has electric guitar strings and you can’t dig into them like you can acoustic guitar strings.

The Professional Acoustic II was designed for the acoustic guitarist who has to play live.

It has a master grade spruce top with mahogany back sides and neck, and I redesigned the interior carving of the top to allow it to vibrate more freely, producing a wonderful acoustic tone.

It is set up like an acoustic with acoustic guitar strings.

It has an LR Baggs pickup system and preamp.

It plays like an acoustic guitar.

When plugged in, it sounds like an acoustic guitar.

But it dosn’t feed back like an acoustic guitar.

And it dosn’t have that low end thump through the PA system like an acoustic guitar.

We recently shot a video of Denny playing this guitar, and the tone blew us away.  I can’t wait to show you this video, which Rich will post just as soon as we get the audio files from the studio.

In the mean time, photos of the Professional Acoustic II #228 are in our Latest Batch page.

I hope you will be as excited about the guitar as I am to offer it!

Chuck

Gene Ess is a fantastic Jazz guitar player in New York City who just happens to endorse our guitars.

He recently received a SESAC award for one of the Top 10 Jazz albums of 2009 for his album “Modes of Limited Transcendence” featuring our Elite guitar.

Here’s the link to the announcement:

http://sesac.com/News/News_Details.aspx?id=1107

I had the pleasure of listening to Gene as he tested out one of our guitars (not the one he ended up purchasing) and was stunned by not only his skill but also with his tone.

Congratulations Gene!  We are privileged to have you playing one of our guitars.

Rich

Hi Everybody!

I’ve posted the latest batch of guitars … sort of.

I’ve held back the images of our latest model so that we can arrange for some new marketing.

I’ll have them up soon, so please stay tuned!

Rich

Due to customer requests, we’re now offering a 12″ fretboard radius option on our Archtop guitars and 10″ or 12″ options on our Fusion and Classic guitars!!

Chuck

Hi everyone,

Years ago a guitar tech showed me how to wire a two Vol. two Tone guitar to have independent Volumes. In theory this sounds great, because you can turn one Vol. down without turning off the whole guitar. Up ‘till now, we’ve wired all our guitars this way.

I’ve been studying wiring and have come to the conclusion that independent Volumes change the taper of the pots in an undesirable way. So we are now wiring the guitars to have non-independent Volumes.

We are also in the middle of putting together a electronics bread board with somewhere around $300 worth of capacitors and resistors so that we can plug in each model of guitar that I build and custom wire each model for the absolute best tone for those woods and components.

I have already found what I think is the ultimate tone for the Blues Queens. I now wire the Blues Queens the same way the 59 Les Paul was wired except I also put a Vol. kit, which consists of a resistor and a capacitor, on each Vol. control. The resistor makes the Volume pot have a really smooth taper and the capacitor retains high end so that, as you turn the Vol. down, it doesn’t get muddy.

I rewired a client’s Blues Queen like the 59 Les Paul and used Bumblebee caps wired like Gibson did it from 52 to 60. Holy $#!& does it sound good. Creamy, Fat, Punchy. Turn down the Vol. and Tone and it cleans up beautifully for Jazz.

If you would like to have this wiring in your Blues Queen, contact me. For a nominal fee, Richard and I can make a harness for you to drop into your guitar – you just have to solder the pickups to it.

I just want to build the finest playing, sounding and looking guitars that I can possibly build.

Chuck

Up until now, we have wired all our archtop guitars with independent volume controls.  However, a number of our customers have told us that the volume controls work better for them when they are wired in the traditional Gibson manner.

Since we haven’t had raves about our independent tone controls, and because the change is easy to make or to reverse, we’ve begun wiring our archtop guitars in the traditional way.  I know that we are giving up some flexibility, but I believe that the playability of our guitars is now even better.

Independent volume controls will remain available on request at no charge.

Chuck

We have shipped the latest batch of Archtops, and both Chuck and I think they’re absolutely fantastic.

We’ve been experimenting with different, subtle, variations of “binding” color and we think the guitars look incredible.

There are two guitars (possibly only one – it’s in discussion) for sale from this batch, so you can wait until photos are up (most likely Monday or Tuesday) or call Chuck for details.

This batch, we built our first 3 pickup Blues Queen.  We weren’t sure it was going to be pretty, but it sure is!

We also have our first factory Bigsby trem, and our first gold leaf binding!!!

Rich

We’ve posted some sound samples!

There’s a long story behind these clips. We hired a videographer/audio engineer, gathered one of each model (which took quite a bit of doing), grabbed our Carr Slant 6V amp and a borrowed vintage Fender, kidnapped Denny Breau, and headed for South Portland to shoot some video.

Denny improvised in just about every possible style, one after another, for 6 hours. It was an incredible display of virtuosity and stamina. In the studio, the guitars sounded great.

Well … we got the raw files, and both the camera and the board had malfunctioned. The video was unusable, but some of the audio files were salvageable – maybe.

We gave them to Bruce Goulette of StudioG, and he worked his magic. He had to put in a fair amount of compression, and play with the levels to resurrect the almost non-existent voice track, but a few of the tracks were usable.

We’re deeply grateful to Denny and Bruce, and we’re going to try again – just as soon as we can get the stars aligned again. In the meantime, we “sort of proudly” present our first sound clips.