AntiFragile. Improvement through adversity. There aren’t many things in life with antifragile properties. Denim. Leather. Ramones t-shirts. Andraste, Icenic war goddess was antifragile. Guitars, in theory at least, are antifragile.
Too often, though, the practice is different. I used to own a Tom Anderson Telecaster. Beautiful it was. So beautiful I never dare pick the thing up for fear of dinking it. The inevitable day when the first dink happened I shed tears.
Guitars don’t get to be antifragile until at least the dozenth dink. This is something that US guitar maker Bill Nash realized back in 2001: accelerate the aging process and lots of professional musicians will become your best friend. No need to take the precius ’62 Strat out on tour any more, take a new guitar that looked right, sounded right and played right. An industry was formed. To the point that even the Fender Custom Shop felt they had to chip in.
But therein comes a problem. When it becomes an industry it’s really difficult to preserve any kind of Mojo. Production-line relic’ing becomes a contradiction in terms. Such that I can now say, having owned close to a dozen Nash relics, there are great ones, and there are very very average ones.
Which is why, I suspect, a small army of individual relic’ers decided to get in on the act. Which in turn created a new problem. How do you know the relic you’re about to spend your hard-earned cash on is any good? Type the word ‘relic’ into eBay and on a typical day you’ll find literally hundreds of guitars to choose from. A Fender Custom Shop relic could easily set you back a couple of grand. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve bought relics for less than a hundred.
To some extent, you get what you pay for of course. But having said that, one of the most depressing guitars I ever saw was a Fender Custom Shop Rory Gallagher tribute Strat. Just after that, I came across a John Grierson version of the same guitar. It cost me less than 10% of what the Custom Shop tragedy would have cost me, but it was about twenty times better quality. I felt guilty. Guilty enough to say to John, we need to do something to fix this problem.
Let’s try and get back to where Bill Nash started from: small numbers of individually created, high quality relics, that sound great, play great and look great. Simple as that.
Oh, except, rather than signing the guitars with a permanent marker pen, we thought why not create a proper badge of quality. No permanent marker, no easily-forge-able decal, something that was impossible to copy. A unique mark for every guitar that got produced that offered clear re-assurance to a buyer that they are getting exactly what they think they’re getting: a hand-crafted, beautifully set-up, unique piece of guitar Mojo from some of the best luthiers in the country. All the time making use of the best quality guitars and guitar parts. Making better guitars better.
And so here we are, two years-worth of splinters and callouses down the line of testing and trialing literally hundreds of guitars, with four types of relic:
Standard – our everyday ‘better than Nash’ guitars, created from the same quality woods and hardware that he uses, wood-appropriate pickups (meaning that, while we love Lollars and Fralins, sometimes EMG or Fender N3 or a hand-wound boutique pickup make for better choices), individually set up to aerospace levels of precision, uniquely relic’ed and, finally, fitted with a uniquely numbered ceramic plaque.
Premier Cru – when it came to making relics of Gibsons and Rickenbackers, we quickly realized the only way to do it right is to start with an actual Gibson or Rickenbacker. The start point for our Premier Cru guitars, then, is either an American guitar in need of some TLC, or one that never had the care and attention it should have had before it left the factory. A bit like French wine, some years and some vineyards are better than others. Pick up a 2002 Les Paul and chances are it will immediately feel right. Pick up a ’74 or anything that left the factory after 2009, and you’re pretty much playing set-up roulette. Back to the production-line-Mojo problem again. Our job is to get that aerospace precision quality set-up done, couple it with world-class, eye-wateringly beautiful relic’ing, and finish the whole thing off with one of our uniquely numbered A-series ceramic plaques.
Artist – I know, I know, relic’d guitars polarize people. The effect gets far stronger when it comes to painted guitars. Think George Harrison’s Rocky Strat, Clapton’s Fool SG or Hendrix’s psychedelic Flying-V. We happen to like them. Or at least those that have been done well. And then, if they have, the new problem becomes, if it’s that beautiful I daredn’t play it. Answer: paint it beautifully and then relic it so that the beauty still shines through, but you’re not afraid to pick the thing up and play it. Our Artist series guitars use the same high quality woods and hardware as our Standard guitars, and come with the same precision set-up and individually numbered ceramic plaque, but the quantities are strictly limited to a maximum of ten guitars of each artwork design.
Custom – like any good custom boutique, we’re happy to take on select commissions, but what our rare-as-hen’s-teeth range of Custom guitars is mainly about is one-off re-creations of famous guitars. With a pernickety emphasis on attention to detail. Example: I’m a massive fan of Lowell George so having a replica of his famous Strat was high on our list of Custom priorities. Pretty soon after you declare an intention to re-create such a guitar you realise that Lowell had an Alembic ‘Stratoblaster’ jack-socket fitted to his guitar. Try and get your hands on one of them and you quickly realise ‘hens teeth’ is nowhere even close to their rarity value. Given this inconvenience, it would have been tempting to say, why don’t we just copy the circuitry and make a facsimile cover plate to look like the original. But somehow, we could never bring ourselves to do it. Better to not do our Lowell Strat until we could find an actual Stratoblaster, than to knock out something that looked about right, but that we knew in our heart of hearts wasn’t right. That’s the ethos we bring to any of our Custom guitars: respect the history – do it right, or don’t do it.