My Kinda Business

Have you seen, the most beautiful guitar in the world...? OK, it's a bass, but...

As I mentioned the other day, I've been thinking deep and long about building a Jooky guitar body from scratch, and so - more than any other time - I've been looking really carefully at a lot of guitars. Don't get me wrong, I know how they work and understand all that radius bobbins and intonation things and stuff, but I mean more from an aesthetic point of view. I'm thinking about form, baby, and trying to get my head around why it is that I like some guitars but not others.

And saying that - why I like - is probably a good starting point. If I'm going to come-up with my own design, I guess the easiest and most sensible way to do it is either to take an existing 'shape' - a Les Paul, Strat or Tele - and change a few of the curves. This will no doubt make the guitar more saleable too, and lets face it the majority of electric guitar players probably play a guitar that is more or less one of those shapes, even if that majority are playing a guitar that is influenced rather than influential.

I don't want to do that though - lovely though the Holy Trinity are, I can't really see the point.

So I want to do something a bit different.

At the other end of the spectrum then, we have the I'm-not-like-everybody-else approach, where odd and weird shapes are created not out of any desire for playability, but rather to scream LOOK AT ME. By that I mean the BC Rich kind of stuff, and the weird and wonderful things luthiers put together to get a few column inches in the press and on-line which will hopefully gain them a few more punters through the door. Though we know most of them will be asking for a Strat or Tele with added extras, when they do arrive.

But I don't want to do that either. I've done the Spring collection shock jock thing before, and fun though it is, I can't say I want to make things I really don't want to play myself. I may only ever make one guitar anyway, so it would be a shame to have some monster in the corner that I can only play on stilts with a false arm to hit the glockenspiel.

So where does that leave me? Well, I'm kinda ruling myself out of the heavy metal arena as it isn't my cuppa and I've never fell in love with the pointy things they play.
I'm also unlikely to go for the Holy three, much as I love playing those sort of guitars you have to ask - what would be the point of yet another copy of such things?

But what does that leave? I mean, the guitars I love are things like Jazzmasters, Jaguars - the whole offset thing - so they would naturally come into my thinking. I've said before that I love the look of a lot of the old Voxes, the Teardrop especially, but even the Phantom is interesting in a lot of ways, and I like the idea of stretching what a guitar can do without getting into Midi and track pads and the like. I also love the look of Rickenbackers, surely the most underrated guitar of all time. Ok the 330 and 360s get all the attention alongside that funny bass thing whose name escapes me, but their solid bodies look amazing. I just love the curves on a Rickie, less interested in the chrome addiction, but there we go. Some of the old Epiphones were excellent too - again the shapes are interesting and a lot of the time deceptively simple and you have to love that classic feel to their necks when you find a good oldie. Dan Electros are a similar case - the double-horned one especially, one of the most beautiful guitars I've ever seen.

So in terms of a body shape, I guess what I'm saying is that I want something that is going to look like a lost, small builder classic that stopped getting made in the Seventies because they never sold enough to stay in business, not a tweaked version of a guitar that everybody wants to play.

There, that sounds like my kind of business plan.