Taha

Taha – another example for a real custom instrument.

The customer wanted a guitar with a wide string spacing on the nut. For his Epiphone Casino, we made a new nut with the first and last fret close to the edges, which he liked but he needed more. Plus, he likes the string spacing on the bridge of his acoustic guitar for picking. And he also had some ideas how the guitar should lay on his leg while he was sitting – ideas for a custom guitar grew.

So, some of the parameters were set: neck width; his leg should be closer to the bridge pickup like on a Jazzmaster and we would need special made pickups by Harry Häussel due to the string spacing. For the shape he wanted me to blend between our model Susi and a Jazzmaster, which I then designed on an 1:1 drawing on paper. He made a different sketch on his iPad and sent it to me, so it went several times and the shape got closer to a Telecaster or a Les Paul. Finally, he brought a small beamer and we projected his final sketch on my paper and we drew it together.

For the body we took meranti and a 3mm padouk top that we glued on the arched top with vacuum. The neck is made of 3 pieces of padouk and 2 pieces of maple, the fretboard is ebony. The pickups are a Classic B and a P90 with special spacing and ebony enclosures. At the beginning, we had a 3-way-toggle for the switching between the pickups and seperate volume knobs. After a while he changed it to switching only the modes of the humbucker via the toggle (serial/split/parallel) and one volume knob became a blend pot.

It came out a beautiful, easily playable, uncompromising guitar.