…This guitar was custom made for Graham Taylor…

I make ’em too Y’know!

Yes, we run the best guitarmaking courses on planet earth, but people often forget that I like to make them too! Graham, a veteran who has been on the course many times, heard me bemoaning this fact one day and finally decided to commission one from me – and I am very glad he did because it is a real beauty.

If you are interested you can read more about the build process here

Thru Neck Construction

This build was based on my Bailey Exotica design but with quite a few custom options.

The top is best quality 5A quilted maple finished with a custom burst colour and our fantastic gloss UV – notice that there is no fake binding on this guitar – the edges are radiused so the colour goes right up to the glue line where the cap joins the back of the body.

Drop top

The top is about 4.5mm thick which allows for a little flexability – the back of the body was shaped for the elbow carve before gluing on the cap. The cap is bent over the shaped back and clamped in place until the glue dries – this is called a ‘drop top’ style.

Wood

The wood for the body wings and neck are all extremely highly figured flamed maple – the neck being laminated for strength and stability. The fretboard is Ebony and Graham chose not to have any inlays on the front but only on the side to mark the fret positions.

MIDI

Graham decided to go for 3 single coils for this guitar and chose Bareknuckle Irish Tours which sound amazing. Six pickups, one for each string, are also built into the Hannes bridge to enable the guitar to control a MIDI device. In this case Graham has a Roland floor unit which does the trick. Graham can use this to create virtually any sound that you would normally get from a keyboard. If that isn’t enough it can also use the inbuilt piezo pickups to sound like an acoustic guitar – that should keep him busy for a while…

There are two outputs on the guitar, but everything comes out through the MIDI, so it is possible to use just one lead and still split the sound.  This means you can send the standard guitar signal to a normal guitar amp and the MIDI sounds to a different amp.

What did it sound like?

Whatever the hell you wanted it to sound like – all at the flick of a switch!

Check out more of my custom guitars or contact us with YOUR custom requirements…