Lloyd Baggs has reemerged from the shadows of guitar design, for the first time since the late ’80s, with his innovative AEG-1 instrument.
“I had intended at some point to retire and head off into the sunset as a photographer,” Baggs tells me over a Zoom call, concluding that he’s become content with the other paths down which life has taken him. “Being out doing landscape photography helps me think and organize my thoughts for the business, and I get lots of inspiration while I’m out letting my imagination soar, thinking about anything but guitars. If you cut me, I’ll probably be bleeding ‘photographer’ before anything else.”
That approach has yielded not only a successful business, but one of the best in its league. And, on November 1, L.R. Baggs debuted the AEG-1—the acoustic pickup manufacturer’s first ever guitar—a high-quality acoustic-electric whose body is made of plywood. Ask anyone you know in the industry, and they’ll tell you it sounds amazing—and not just for a guitar that’s made of plywood.
Not only is its sound impressive, but, appearing alone on the roster in the year of its company’s 50th anniversary, it seems to have come out of nowhere. We know L.R. Baggs’ status within the acoustic pickup industry, yet suddenly, they’re spelling out a new name for themselves for acoustic-electric guitars. Why now?
Baggs in the workshop, sanding the side of one of his AEG-1 models.
Baggs admits that he’s not a very good guitar player. He tried learning in college before he got into building, but what really started his career in music was cello, which he began playing in fourth grade. “I wouldn’t consider myself a prodigy, but I was close to one. By the time I was in high school, I was fourth chair in the UCLA Symphony,” he says. “My teacher was Joseph DiTullio, who was then the chief cellist with 20th Century Fox, but was the concert master of the L.A. [Philharmonic] before that. He said he was going to start subbing me on dates that he couldn’t take with 20th Century.”
Outside of his early accomplishments as a cellist, Baggs was a distracted student, more interested in surfing and working on cars than school. Despite his average grades, he ended up being accepted into Occidental College in Los Angeles on the invitation to join their budding cello department. Unfortunately, that plan had an untimely expiration date.
“Within about three months of being in college, I got in a fist fight with the halfback on the football team,” says Baggs, “and I broke my left hand very badly—to the point where I couldn’t even make a fist for almost a year.”
He shifted his studies to fine art and photography, and, after graduating in 1970, began working as a fine-art printmaker in the area. “I worked in a place that did Warhol, Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Sam Francis, [Frank] Stella, [Ellsworth]Kelly—all the big New York artists. At the time, one print would sell for $1,000.”
Baggs crafted this custom–built guitar in 1977, for the great Ry Cooder. When Baggs showed Cooder his first polished instrument, the roots-music master said, “I think it’s fantastic. Will you build me one?”
A couple years later, he accepted a master printer position at Editions Press in San Francisco, and would commute there from his place in Berkeley. It was in 1974 that he started building guitars as a hobby, beginning, rather unconventionally, with a copy of a ’30s Washburn archtop with an oval soundhole, thanks to his love for cello and jazz. Around that time—through his connections in the art world—he befriended Ry Cooder.
“Being out doing landscape photography helps me think and organize my thoughts for the business … letting my imagination soar, thinking about anything but guitars.”
“I brought [my first guitar] down to Ry,” Baggs shares, “and just said, ‘Hey, what do you think, man?’ ’Cause he was playing carved-tops and all kinds of crazy stuff. And Ry said, ‘I think it’s fantastic. Will you build me one?’ That launched my career.”
Not long after, Baggs was offered another, more-attractive printmaking job with a prestigious shop in L.A., and moved back, while also building a loft workshop in an old fire station downtown to continue developing his guitar business. After making about seven or eight models, he transitioned to flattops, and his clientele expanded to include Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Janis Ian, and “a bunch of the jazz-heads and flamenco players around L.A. I was getting $3,000 dollars for my guitar, just unadorned, and I had a waiting list of a year or two,” he says.
Meanwhile, Baggs and Cooder had been collaborating on finding the best way to amplify the acoustic Baggs had built for the guitarist. “We’d put all kinds of crazy stuff in there—we mostly landed on a magnetic pickup and a microphone. And hehad this refrigerator-rack-sized gear that he used to swear at and try to make it all work together. I mean, it was brutal! Then, in 1978, he calls me and says, ‘Hey Lloyd, I’m working on an album down at Warner Brothers; you want to come down? There’s something I want you to hear.’”
Here’s a close-up of the simple but highly effective control set on the Baggs AEG-1.
When Baggs made it to the studio, Cooder, who was recording his 1979 album, Bop Till You Drop, surprised Baggs with an acoustic-electric guitar equipped with the best-sounding pickup either of them had heard at the time. The only issue was, the instrument was a Takamine that the Japanese company had designed to mimic Baggs’ exact model, from headstock to strap button.
“I thanked him for showing it to me, left, and I sat out in my car on the street for about a half an hour alternately fuming and excited,” Baggs says, “and that was the moment at which I said to myself, ‘This is where I need to be. This is the future of acoustic guitars.’”
“I still shudder to think about this: I’m driving down the freeway from Santa Monica, in this beat-to-crap old ’59 Chevy pickup truck that I had, with Ry—a national treasure!—sittin’ in the passenger seat; no seatbelts,” Baggs reflects. The two were on the way to NAMM to meet with Mass Hirade, Takamine’s president at the time, to discuss the copy of Baggs’ model.
“I broke my left hand very badly—to the point where I couldn’t even make a fist for almost a year.”
“I complimented him on the guitar,” Baggs says, describing the meeting, “and said, ‘You know, you’ve done a really nice job. But I’m kinda hurt that you didn’t involve me in this in some way, and it does feel like you’ve taken something from me. Don’t you feel like you owe me something?’ And he lowers his head and says, ‘Yeah, we do. What do you want?’
“I said, ‘Well, I build 10 guitars a year. I need to amplify my guitars; will you sell me 10 systems a year? And he said, ‘“Sell” you? Ten systems a year—that’s all you want?’ I said, ‘Yep, that’s what I want. I know you don’t sell that system to anybody, but I’d like to be the guy.’”
A photo of the guitar’s inside reveals its key structural component: a piece of poplar plywood made up of a circular frame of the soundhole, suspended slightly under it by one top section that attaches to the neck joint and two diagonal sidebars that extend to the sides at the guitar’s waist.
Hirade accepted the agreement and, shortly after, sent Baggs two of the Takamine pickup systems to start. With earnest curiosity, Baggs immediately set about reverse-engineering it, approaching the task with his knowledge of car mechanics but with no background in electronics. What he found inspired him to develop something a bit savvier, and soon the LB6 unitary saddle pickup was born.
Baggs’ pickup, which, rather than an undersaddle design, also functions as the saddle, caught on quickly. Several country artists, along with Leo Kottke, were early adopters; Baggs jokes that they could tell where Kottke was on tour by which stores they would hear from when he was visiting. Then, one day, Baggs received a call from guitar manufacturer Robert Godin, who asked if he could use the LB6 in his models. Baggs had to develop a preamp first—at the time, he didn’t know what that was—and his next step was to design a new guitar.
Baggs elaborates, “I was trying to figure out how to sell more pickups, and I thought, ‘I’ll just make an acoustic-electric guitar and put a pickup in it.’ So I bought a Telecaster body from a kit, hollowed the body out on my barbecue with a router, and put an acoustic top on it.”
He also installed some kalimba-like metal rods inside, which, tuned to the main resonating frequencies of a Martin dreadnought, worked with the LB6 to simulate a heightened acoustic quality. The build—Baggs’ second ever acoustic-electric—became Godin’s Acousticaster.
L.R. Baggs AEG-1 Demo
Zach Wish demos the LR Baggs AEG-1. He explores its sonic options and talks about his experience with the guitar on the road with Seal.
But, back to the topic of the AEG-1, and the question posed at the beginning of this article: Why now?
“The word ‘should’ is a very interesting word,” says Baggs, threatening to wax philosophical. “On one hand, ‘should’ should be a four-letter word. Because, it sort of denies reality, and people say, ‘Oh, you should be this,’ or ‘You should be that.’ That’s bullshit. But on the other hand, ‘should’ has this beautiful potential.
“Over the years since the Acousticaster, I’ve kept building,” he continues. “Not building guitars for commercial absorption, but about every couple of years, I would build another acoustic-electric, trying to figure out how to make it sound like a nice guitar.”
It would take a very thorough, deep dive down the rabbit hole to explain everything behind Baggs’ approach to building guitars, but, in short, he’s a devoted fanatic of acoustic physics. “When I built my first guitar, there was one book on building guitars, and the chapter on tone was three paragraphs long,” he prefaces, laughing. In time, he took inspiration from his life as a cellist to pursue what has become a lifelong source of intrigue: studying violin Chladni patterns. His goal has been to harness the information from the symmetrical patterns, which show how a rigid surface vibrates, fluidly, when it's resonating, to improve acoustic guitar resonance. “I would say it’s a fair statement that I was the first builder to start looking into Chladni patterns on a steel-string acoustic guitar,” says Baggs. Now, builders like Andy Powers, Bryan Galloup, Giuliano Nicoletti, and others from around the world attend conferences on the subject, and acoustic physics in general.
The three variations on the AEG-1 in Baggs’ catalog.
Since, Baggs says, “I’ve continued to investigate guitar physics, I’ve continued to investigate Chladni patterns. I’ve gotten more scientific equipment on this thing now [holds up iPhone] than I had when I started looking at building.So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make an acoustic-electric guitar that sounds really nice acoustically to begin with [before adding a pickup].”
When Covid hit, Baggs found himself with ample free time, and was encouraged by his staff to try building another guitar—for the first time since the late ’80s. His first attempt was to make somewhat of a redo of the Acousticaster, but the results were subpar—at least by his own standards. Thinking the problem might be the air volume inside the shallower body, he took an old acoustic-electric, cut a big hole in the back of the body, and epoxied a “big ol’ kitchen pot” to add air volume. “Didn’t change the sound at all,” he says.
To figure out where to go from there, Baggs drew inspiration from his earlier years as a builder. “I had this conversation with José Ramírez III in Germany in around 1990,” he explains. “He told me that on his top models, he made his sides a quarter-inch thick, like the rim of a drum. He said the more rigid your sides are, the better the guitar’s gonna sound.” Baggs states that’s because of one key fact: An acoustic guitar’s back is an anchor for the neck, holding it straight in place. When the sides are more rigid, the back is freer to resonate.
He decided to experiment with that idea on “a little old China-made 000 guitar,” reducing its depth by cutting it in half, adding wood around the inside of the rim “to make the edges totally rigid,” and gluing it back together. “And son of a gun, if it didn’t sound really good! That’s what led to this guitar.”
A rear view of this natural finish AEG-1 reveals its bolt-on neck base and access panel.
On the AEG-1 product page on the L.R. Baggs website, a photo of the guitar’s inside reveals its key structural component: a piece of poplar plywood made up of a circular frame of the soundhole, suspended slightly under it by one top section that attaches to the neck joint and two diagonal sidebars that extend to the sides at the guitar’s waist. “It’s all cut on a CNC machine; it’s machined out like a bicycle part,” Baggs explains. “So, the neck is actually anchored to the sides of the guitar.” (If you were wondering, that’s why it doesn’t matter that it’s made of plywood. Poplar plywood for the structural component was also chosen for sustainability reasons.)
“You know the second skin on the kick drum, the one that has the hole?” Baggs continues. “It’s very important how you tune that. And we discovered that most people like to tune the kick slightly below that of the main head, so it enhances the low frequencies.
“Then, ‘aha!’ Because the back wasn’t holding the neck anymore, we could do whatever we wanted with it. It was no longer a structural part of the guitar. It was the second skin on a kick drum. So, we just went nuts. That was it.”
I tell Baggs, towards the end of our conversation, that his career trajectory reminds me a lot of the concept of divergent thinking: essentially, about drawing connections between ideas that seem disparate to other people. He says he relates to that idea.
“And that was the moment at which I said to myself, ‘This is where I need to be. This is the future of acoustic guitars.’”
“If it hasn’t been by inspiration, we just simply won’t do it,” he says, “because it has no power; it has no meaning; it has no heart. If it’s just something to fill out a line item in the business … it does not have any authenticity because it doesn’t have any need. And I think that one of the reasons our company’s done so well is that we’ve surrounded ourselves with really talented people. Honestly, I feel a lot like the village idiot most of the time,” he says, laughing.
“I had one of the guys from my L.A. posse visit me yesterday,” he shares. “We were talking about creativity, and I remember saying to him that just about anything that anybody does that’s great doesn’t make any sense. It’s not contrived for a purpose like making money. It’s just something you have to do … like absorbing oxygen in your body. People that paint, people who do music—we’re kind of freaks! People say, ‘Oh, you’re so courageous to have started the business.’ Nah-ah,” he says, emphatically. “I was not cut out for anything else! I would suffocate in a suit!”The Barstow Bat is designed to offer a versatile 3-band EQ section to create colors and tones beyond that of its influence, with a surprisingly quiet and calculated circuit under the hood. For even more sonic versatility, the TURBO button swaps between classic silicon RAT distortion and a more open and aggressive TURBO RAT LED clipping mode.
Features
The Barstow Bat highlights include:
- Classic RAT Distortion with a super-quiet noise floor
- Eye-catching graphics based on the work of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman’s iconic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Massive output volume
- Active isolated 3-band EQ for a wide range of tones
- Selectable clipping modes (Standard or TURBO)
- True Bypass on/off switch
- 9-volt DC power from external supply, no battery compartment.
- Hand assembled in Peterborough, Canada
- LIMITED EDITION BLACK version available until 2025
Megan and Rebecca Lovell don’t use many effects pedals. They didn’t even use amps until they were 16.
“We don’t necessarily need to sell out Madison Square Garden to be like, ‘Oh, we’ve made it, we’re a success, mom,’” Rebecca chuckles. “We’re a lot more comfortable at this point in our lives and our career with truly defining what success means to us. Being able to have houses, roofs over our heads. We’ve got the cash that, if on tour we want to stop and pay for the Whole Foods hot bar, we can do that. That’s luxury enough for me, at a certain point.”
“I was sort of playing catch-up for many, many years. I still feel like I’m playing catch-up.”—Rebecca Lovell
That sense of modesty and self-awareness is admirable, though when it comes to making new music, Larkin Poe continue to swing for the fences. Their latest album, Bloom, which the sisters co-produced with Rebecca’s spouse, guitar slinger and vocalist Tyler Bryant, represents both a continuation and striking progress. Throughout these 11 tracks, Larkin Poe deliver the driving, stomping grooves and post-Allmans interplay that have made them buzzworthy torchbearers for electric blues and blues-rock. With Megan on electric lap steel and Rebecca on a Strat, their guitar-frontline dynamic has become as intuitive and instinctive as their harmony singing. “We’re constantly ‘foiling’ for one another [on guitar] … acting as a foil,” says Rebecca. “So if I’m going low then she’s going to automatically go high, and vice versa.” Rebecca, who also handles lead vocals, describes her sister’s keen ear with awe. “I can sing something at Megan onstage and she can immediately play it back to me,” she says. “She’s so comfortable with her instrument.”
On Bloom, sisters Megan and Rebecca Lovell continue their mastery of southern music, from bluegrass to Allmans-style boogie to blues rock.
“I was sort of playing catch-up for many, many years,” Rebecca adds. “I still feel like I’m playing catch-up.”
Where Bloom really ups the ante is in its songcraft, in terms of both the depth of expression and sheer number of earworm hooks. In “Mockingbird,” “Little Bit,” “If God Is a Woman” and other standouts, bits inspired by ’70s singer-songwriters and rootsy Music Row pop elevate the sisters’ rock ’n’ soul. To say it another way, with these songs Larkin Poe could open a tour leg for Taylor Swift and absolutely kill, preaching their gospel of blues-soaked guitar heroism all the while. Many, many online orders for entry-level lap steels would ensue.
On Bloom, Rebecca explains, “I do think the songwriting was the center of the creative process, which it always is. But I think that we were especially meticulous in writing for this record.” The songs were built from the ground up, in a spirit of absolute collaboration shared among the Lovells and Bryant. What’s more, the sisters, both now in their 30s, became comfortable enough to dig deep and reflect on their lives with candor. “Somebody will come up with an idea,” Megan says, “and it’s really neat this time around being able to set aside some of the … I don’t know what was stopping us before—sibling rivalry? Who knows what it is?Rebecca Lovell's Gear
Guitars
- ’60s-style Fender HSS Custom Shop Stratocaster
- 1963 Gibson SG
Amps
- Fender Princeton
- Fender Champ
- Square Amps Radio Amp
Effects
- Vintage Roland Space Echo
- MXR Phase 90
Strings & Picks
- Dunlop .60 mm pick
- Ernie Ball Coated .011s
“I think you have to be especially vulnerable when opening yourself up to write a song with people, and Rebecca and I have always struggled with that a bit over the years. But it was like some sort of a veil fell away and we were able to come together in a way we hadn’t really before.”
“I think you have to be especially vulnerable when opening yourself up to write a song with people, and Rebecca and I have always struggled with that a bit over the years.”—Megan Lovell
If you’ve followed the rise of Larkin Poe, it might be hard to believe that Rebecca and Megan could get any closer. Born in Tennessee and raised in Georgia, they entered music through classical training but made their names as two of the three Lovell Sisters, an acoustic unit grounded in bluegrass. As Megan explains, “Bluegrass is the foundation of the way we put riffs together and the way we approach our musicality.” To this day, she calls square-neck resonator hero Jerry Douglas her foremost inspiration as a player, and she believes bluegrass set a standard of musical excellence that the sisters have retained in Larkin Poe. “My expectation of what I should be able to do is quite high,” she says.
Growing up, the sisters absorbed a broad range of music at home: During our chat, the name-checks include Ozzy Osbourne, Alison Krauss, Béla Fleck, and the Allman Brothers, whose albums Rebecca pretty much used as a guitar method. Her more recent 6-string influences include her husband and other Strat masters like Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan. “I can hear how much of a Bryant flavor I do have,” she says with a laugh. “Which is kind of cute, maybe kind of sad. I don’t know. The internet will decide.”
Megan Lovell's Gear
For Larkin Poe, success sometimes looks like the hot food bar at Whole Foods while on tour.
Photo by Zach Whitford
Guitars and Basses
- Beard Electro-Liege
- Amps
- Tyler Amp Works Dumble clone
Effects
- Electro-Harmonix POG
- Universal Audio Starlight Echo Station
Strings & Picks
- Dunlop Zookies thumbpick
- ProPik fingerpicks
- Scheerhorn stainless steel tonebar
- D’Addario .013–.014s
Almost 15 years ago, Rebecca and Megan came together officially as Larkin Poe, refocusing on Southern blues-rock and, over the years, fostering their love of profound country-blues like Skip James and Son House. “We didn’t stand in front of amplifiers until we were 16, 17 years old,” Rebecca says. “For many years, it was so startling to stand in front of any amount of wattage. That was something that has definitely taken some time to really get used to.”
“We’ve had just enough taste of what the top feels like to know that happiness lies wherever it is that you put it.”—Rebecca Lovell
Perhaps because of their background reveling in acoustic tones, the Lovells’ amplified sound is bliss for anyone who adores the undiluted sonics of excellent guitars plugged into well-crafted, overdriven tube amps. In our age of mile-long pedalboards and amp modelers, the Lovells remain closer to the ideal that Leo Fender and Jim Marshall had perfected by the mid-’60s. “Megan and I are pretty militant about never doubling or stacking guitars,” Rebecca says, “and we are trying to create big, fat sounds between just the two of us.”
Bloom was captured at Tyler and Rebecca’s no-frills Nashville studio, the Lily Pad, with a small but mighty arsenal of no-nonsense axes and amps. The goal, as ever, was to bottle the energy and ambiance of the live show. Rebecca tracked using low-wattage tube combos and her trusty HSS Fender Custom Shop Strat. Megan, who plays primarily in open G (G–B–D–G–B–D), relied on the Electro-Liege she developed with Beard Guitars and a Dumble clone by Tyler Amp Works. “It was the best tone on the record,” Megan says, “and I could never get away from it.” The holy grail sound for her, she explains, is David Lindley’s “Running on Empty” solo. “Having come from the acoustic background,” Rebecca adds, “we’ve always been very sparse in terms of effects pedals.”
It’s a humble, self-aware approach to gear that savors the fundamentals. What else would you expect? More than anything, the Lovells’ greatest gift might be their ability to understand what’s actually important. “We’ve been doing this now since we were young teenagers,” Rebecca says, “and we’re on a slow-burn path, buddy. We have played shows to just the bar staff. And we’ve had just enough taste of what the top feels like to know that happiness lies wherever it is that you put it.”
Late last year, Larkin Poe cut a live performance for the German television show Rockpalast. Enjoy the full, blistering 80-minute set.
The finish on this 2019 PRS Custom 24-08 is called “Angry Larry,” but stare long enough and you’ll realize it’s not so angry, and has much more of a deep, mesmerizing kind of vibe. (And Larry? He’s not so angry either.)
I am one hundred years old, so I remember when PRS guitars began creeping into the pages of my guitar magazines in the mid ’90s. While legends like Al Di Meola had long been on board with PRS, he played jazz. As an aspiring shred-hero-demon-master, I had little patience for jazz. It was seeing Dave Navarro and Mark Tremonti with PRS guitars in the pages of guitar magazines that made me sit up and take notice. Those guys were on VH1, and I planned to be cool like them.
Somewhere along the line, PRS began to become associated with a very different type of guitar player. They became “dentist guitars,” as coined by the denizens of Reddit: expensive yet mainstream instruments with a flashy look, a status symbol of the elite and untalented. Certainly not a tool for a real musician.
Why do certain guitars get these scarlet letters? And why are we so quick to buy into the notion of, “Oh, that guitar’s not for me,” because of a vibe we got from Instagram?
That tiny 10 tells us that this guitar features a 10-top, a designation reserved for the company’s finest figured-maple models.
It’s not easy to divorce ourselves from the reality curated by internet influencers. But at Fanny’s House of Music, we occasionally find the strength to peek behind the digital curtain. We are delighted to report there are some great guitars back here! Take, for instance, this 2019 PRS Custom 24-08. It has a special-ordered “10-top,” a designation reserved for only the finest figured maple tops PRS produces. The desirable and collectible nature of PRS 10-tops has very little to do with how playable the guitar is. Their rarity drives up their price, fueling the anti-dentist hordes on the internet.
“It’s not a red guitar that screams, ‘I’M A RED GUITAR’—it’s more subtle and refined.”
If you take the horde wisdom as gospel, what you may not discover beneath the almost three-dimensional flame is an instrument with soul. There’s something special about this guitar. It’s hardly been played, but it’s begging to be. The edges of the fretboard are perfectly rolled and the pattern-thin neck shape—which feels, to this author, like a slightly thinner ’60s Gibson slim-taper neck shape, although your mileage may vary—is invitingly shaped like the palm of your hand. The PRS 85/15 pickups pack plenty of oomph, but not so much oomph that even the clean channel on your amp sounds distorted. There’s warmth to them, but also clarity. It’s a musical sound that kept me contentedly noodling in the electric guitar room at Fanny’s for an almost uncomfortable amount of time. (Thanks, as always, to the nonjudgemental and endlessly patient employees of Fanny’s.)
This instrument features PRS’s pattern-thin neck shape, which measures 1 11/16" at the nut.
Perhaps there’s a lesson in anti-anti-snobbishness to be learned from the handsome deep-red finish of this guitar, curiously called “Angry Larry.” It’s a dark red, with an almost purple hue in some light. It’s not a red guitar that screams, “I’M A RED GUITAR”—it’s more subtle and refined. According to PRS forum lore, while trying out new finishes, PRS Sales and Marketing Manager Larry Urie took a shine to the dark red. Coincidentally, his white skin would occasionally, under certain circumstances, acquire a strikingly similar color. The folks at PRS decided to name it “Angry Larry” in his honor, although it has been occasionally reported that he’s not an especially angry guy. Someone trying to perfectly orchestrate their internet persona might take umbrage to the association, but not Urie. He has taken it in stride and can be seen posing with the guitar on the social media of Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center, making a humorously scrunched-up angry face.
Maybe fancy flame tops aren’t your thing. That’s fine! But if you don’t have a strong opinion on fancy flame tops, this PRS Custom 24-08 kindly requests that you avoid allowing a pitchfork-wielding crowd to shape it. Whatever your “thing” is, you can discover it by getting a lot of guitars in your hands. Do you like the way it sounds, plays, and looks? Then it’s a great guitar for you. The next time you visit Fanny’s or any great guitar store, pack an open mind. You may find you have more in common with dentists than you thought.
Sources: prsguitars.com web site and forums
