Genesis Guitar: Why a Custom Creation?

To me, making music is about the purest expression of ideas and myself; extending this belief to the instruments I create worlds with seems natural. Artfully designed tools have a way of inspiring me to make better art. Frankly, if I could find an off-the-shelf or semi-custom instrument that suited the function and aesthetics I want, I would have gone with it; this relates to why I make the music I do as well. I figure if I need to have a custom-built guitar to achieve this, it would be more interesting to design as much of it as is feasible.

Extended range, multiscale, and ergonomic guitars are more available than they've ever been, though none of them are quite what I'm looking for: I want a guitar that sounds clear and plays well when tuned to Drop F1, which is typically bass guitar territory, and suits my ergonomic preferences. The Ibanez SRC6MS is the closest production line instrument I could find; it plays great in E1 Standard tuning, has okay (perhaps a bit boring) looks, sounds like a bass, and the tension is too high in Drop F1 tuning. Strandberg guitars have great ergonomics overall, but don't have as long of scale lengths as I want. I also found that most instruments don't seem to be optimized for my preferred playing position.

It took me about half a year to iterate on design goals, research, drawings, CAD modeling, and physical mockups. At times, I used literal out-of-the-box thinking to test how the concepts could work. Throughout this process, I locked down specific parts of the design when they felt right to reduce variables in the remaining work.

Fretboard configuration was the driving function of the guitar, and I discovered FretFind2D as a great tool to calculate it based on instruments I know sound good to me at Drop F1 (30" for the lowest string) and the shortest scale length relative to those that is still comfortable to play across the whole fretboard (about 2" shorter for the highest string). I printed out several combinations of scale lengths and neutral frets at 1:1 scale and attached them to a level to see how chords and notes felt all the way up and down the fretboard. The Stringjoy String Tension Calculator helped estimate a minimum of 23 pounds with the smallest available windings on the highest string, which is on the high end for my tolerable range. Based on other string combinations I've tried, dropping about 1 pound per string should have tight high and slippery low strings; this suits my style of sustained shimmering high and bending vibrato low notes.

The rest of the guitar could now be designed around the fretboard, but I wasn't sure how I wanted it to look. Most guitars marketed as ergonomic look like a variant of a Strandberg these days; I felt something more interesting could be done. I doodled angular shapes that toyed with symmetry, alluding to my playing style. These sketches informed my Onshape CAD model, taking into account things such as my resting palm and forearm position, leg interactions with the tail and bottom cutouts, and center of gravity. A 45 degree angle tilted up playing position that maintains a near identical position high on my chest while seated required keeping the center of gravity as close to the tail as possible. Hardware size estimates informed where they could fit and their cutout shapes. The model was great for figuring out details; now I needed to feel it, so I printed the design in a 1:1 scale, cut shapes out of cardboard boxes, and used toothpicks to create a sandwich emulating the thickness and contours cheaply and quickly. The mockup looked a bit hacky, was really fun to make, and made me feel my design coming to life.

Imagining fretboard inlays that flow with the body visual cues came next. My sister, Kristyn, is a tattoo artist, and she kindly accepted my request to explore concepts related to a few sketches and themes I had in mind. I imagined the body inlay design as a tree of knowledge that binds worlds together and sees all; my goal was for the neck inlays to relate to that concept, but as expressed by someone closely connected to me. I wanted the art to express itself in different ways depending on context, and thought using colors that became more vivid in UV light would be a cool transformation of the concept.

As more of the aesthetic aspects of the design stabilized, I explored how different woods and colors could look. After manually applying colors in GIMP, it became apparent that I needed a quicker system to try out a lot of combinations while the body shape stayed the same. I ended up creating a layering scheme where parts of the CAD model were masks applied to woods, colors, inlays, and burst finishes. For example, I could switch between several rectangular images of wood that show up through a window just by toggling their visibility. My color palette served as a guide to explore plain and reactive color combinations across different lighting conditions.

Finding a builder who would share my vision and deliver quality at a fair price was more challenging than I thought; even semi-custom guitars can easily be a couple thousand dollars. Many of the builders I found through luthier content and searches had interesting work, but were too busy, beyond my budget, or didn't connect with me the way I was hoping. However, I remembered seeing and hearing great things about Captain James of Dood Craft Guitars through the Baritone Obsessed Facebook group we've been a part of for years. After we discussed my concept and some fun guitar building history tangents, I knew I could trust him to be a fun collaboration partner who would manifest my design into reality.

From here, the build might take a year to complete the meticulous details of the design while James and I both have other ongoing projects; depending on the timing, maybe it will be a birthday present for myself next year. The next exciting challenge is experimenting with epoxy, powders, and dyes to figure out how close I can match my renders. I'm excited to share our progress, and the creativity it inspires, with you. What projects have you dreamed up or are already working on because you couldn't find what you're looking for? Please contact me here or on your preferred platform to connect with me about it.