When do your modding adventures turn into your first self-build guitar? Dave Burrluck goes back to the 70s to revisit his early guitar-making past. Flares are a necessity…
As we’ve documented before in The Mod Squad, building a guitar today is pretty simple. Buy a kit from StewMac and, with afew basic tools and some of that modding knowledge you’ve accrued, you can build your own T, Sor J-style on your living-room table. Ha!
But turn the clock back five decades and things were rather different. Aside from the obvious ‘what did we do before the internet?’ issue, guitar kits didn’t exist and getting any information on guitar making, especially of the electric variety, wasn’t easy. Why bother? Well, my adventures started after I’d asked my dad if he’d loan me the money to buy an electric guitar from the Bell Musical Instrument catalogue. He replied, ‘No, but why don’t we make one?’ He even found some plans in a woodworking magazine and, although far from refined, said guitar (which weighed a ton) sort of worked.
Iwas lucky. My dad had a small workshop filled with his (and his father’s) hand tools. From a pretty young age I’d shape scrap wood into all sorts of things. As I got older I learned how to use saws and planes, and how to accurately mark and join wood. By the time I’d started to learn the guitar in my mid-teens I realised that the solidbody electric guitar, for the most part, was a pretty easy bit of wood craft. However, getting access to the non-wood parts – such as fretwire, machineheads, bridges, pickups and potentiometers –was more of a stumbling block.
First Steps
But it wasn’t just guitar making I was attracted to, it was original design. I have no idea where that came from, but I can remember drawing up some pretty exotic ‘designs’ on the dinner table. This was helped by the fact that my dad, a civil engineer, had a large board, T-square and all sorts of drawing accessories, such as a set of French curves, protracting pencils and – importantly – rubbers.
The first new guitar design that I still vividly recall being on my radar was Dan Armstrong’s see-through Plexiglas guitar. I can’t remember where Isaw it first, but there was Keith Richards on Top Of The Pops in 1971 banging out Brown Sugar on a ‘Plexi’. Later that year, there was Ronnie Wood with the Faces, playing Stay With Me with its gloriously catchy and scratchy slide solos. What was this otherworldly creation?
Meanwhile, me and my bass-playing mate would skive off school and spend days listening to The Stones’ Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out. I didn’t know then that Iwas listening to Keith whacking his ‘Plexi’. This was a rock ’n’ roll tool, no question: a modernist creation. Was Dan Armstrong an alien?
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