Joe Knaggs set out to make a better S-style guitar. The result is the new Severn Trem SSS.
BY ART THOMPSON
NEW & COOL
JOE KNAGGS AND his team have been building exquisitely crafted solid and semi-hollow custom and signature guitars for more than 20 years, so it’s always a treat when one shows up here for a test drive, as this Severn Trem SSS did. Named for a river in Maryland, the Severn harks back to Knaggs’ days working at PRS before he launched his own guitar company.
“The inspiration behind the Severn was to create a guitar that I wanted to play,” he explains. “I had a ’61 Stratocaster at the time and wanted a Strat-style guitar with a fretboard radius of eight and a half inches, so it wouldn’t be as curved as the Fender and fret out when I’d bend strings. There’s a lot of other factors that led to where the Severn ended up, but the big one was when I made a hardtail bridge for another guitar called the Choptank — I wanted all my guitars to be named for tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay — so I looked at a Tele, and the front of the bridge plate was lifting up because it wasn’t screwed down. That didn’t seem right to me, so I made a bridge plate that would screw down in front. And when I put it on the guitar and strung it up and played it, that thing rang better than I’d heard any other electric guitar. That hardtail bridge was really what inspired me to start a guitar company.”
The Severn’s alder body has an S-style shape, with contours on the front and back and a beveled heel at the 15th position that makes it easy to slide your hand around and reach the high frets. What really makes this guitar pop visually is the Seafoam/TV Yellow finish with three-ply purfling inlaid between the colors. It creates the illusion that the yellow is the pickguard; in reality there’s a black pickguard sitting atop that carries the pickups, knobs and five-way switch.
But apart from the finish, the standout item on this build is the proprietary Chesapeake trem bridge, a unique two-piece affair with a plate surrounding the rear pickup, in Tele fashion, that’s attached to a hinged bridge. As Knaggs explains, “That steel plate creates a magnetic field around the pickup, so you get the Telecaster thing going on. But the biggest reason our bridge is different is because I took that Choptank b
