Meet Siccardi Number 28: a 5-ply, double-cut solidbody tribute to Paul Bigsby’s “Hezzy Hall” guitar.
Reader: Mark Huss
Hometown: Coatesville, PA
Guitar: Siccardi Number 28
I have too many guitars (like at least some of you I’m sure), but my current No. 1 is a custom guitar made for me by my friend Ed Siccardi. Ed is an interesting and talented fellow, a retired mechanical engineer who has amazing wood and metal shops in his basement. He also has an impressive collection of tonewoods, including rarities like African mahogany and some beautiful book-matched sets. He likes to build acoustic guitars (and has built 26 of them so far), but decided he wanted to make me an electric. The fruit of this collaboration was his Number 27, a Paul Bigsby tribute with a single-cut body—looking very much like what Bigsby made for Merle Travis. Note that Bigsby created this single-cut body and “Fender-style” headstock way before Gibson or Fender had adopted these shapes. This was a really nice guitar, but had some minor playing issues, so he made me another: Number 28.
Number 28 is another Paul Bigsby tribute, but is a double cutaway a la the Bigsby “Hezzy Hall” guitar. This guitar has a 5-ply solid body made of two layers of figured maple, cherry, swamp ash, and another layer of cherry. The wood is too pretty to cover up with a pickguard. The tailpiece is African ebony with abalone inlays and the rock-maple neck has a 2-way truss rod and extends into the body up to the bridge. It has a 14" radius and a zero fret. Therefore, there is no nut per se, just a brass string spacer. I really like zero frets since they seem to help with the lower-position intonation on the 3rd string. The fretboard is African ebony with abalone inlays and StewMac #148 frets. The peghead is overlaid front and back with African ebony and has Graph Tech RATIO tuners. The guitar has a 25" scale length and 1.47" nut spacing. There are two genuine ivory detail inlays: One each on the back of the peghead and at the base of the neck. The ivory was reclaimed from old piano keys.
This is Number 27, 28’s older sibling and a single-cut Bigsby homage. It’s playing issues led to the creation of its predecessor.
I installed the electronics using my old favorite Seymour Duncan pairing of a JB and Jazz humbuckers. The pickup selector is a standard 3-way, and all three 500k rotary controls have push-pull switches. There are two volume controls, and their switches select series or parallel wiring for their respective pickup coils. The switch on the shared tone control connects the bridge pickup directly to the output jack with no controls attached. This configuration allows for a surprisingly wide variety of sounds. As an experiment, I originally put the bridge volume control nearest the bridge for “pinky” adjustment, but in practice I don’t use it much, so I may just switch it back to a more traditional arrangement to match my other guitars.
You might not know Greg Koch, but we’ll bet your favorite guitarist does. In 2012, Fender called the Wisconsin blues-guitar phenom one of the top 10 best unsung guitarists, and in 2020, Guitar World listed Koch among the 15 best guitar teachers. He’s been inducted into the Wisconsin Area Music Industry Hall of Fame. Koch is a bonafide midwest guitar god.
He joins Cory Wong on this round of Wong Notes for this meeting of the Middle-America minds, where the duo open with analysis of music culture in Wisconsin and Minnesota—Koch taught at Saint Paul’s now-shuttered McNally Smith College of Music, which Wong attended. Koch and Wong zero in on the blues roots of most modern music and talk through soloing theories: It can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be, but Koch shares that he likes to “paint himself into a corner,” then get out of it.
Koch and Wong swap notes on the pressures of studio performance versus the live realm, and how to move on from mistakes made onstage in front of audiences. Plus, Koch has created scores of guitar education materials, including for Hal Leonard. Tune in to find out what makes a good guitar course, how to write a guitar book, Koch’s audio tips for crystalline live-stream sessions, and why he still prefers tube amps: “I like to crank that sh*t up!”
