Reader: Adam Hauk
Hometown: Belfast, Maine
Adam Hauk’s partscaster is built around a Telecaster body he found gathering dust among his parts collection. In between playing, modding, and building gear he found time to take up swirl painting and dipping, which jump-started this project.
I’ve been a gigging guitarist since I was 14 years old, and actually dropped out of high school and got my GED so my parents would let me go on tour. I moved from the sticks in Maine to Boston to try out Berklee, but ended up going to Musicians Institute after falling in love with the Southern California weather and the access I had to players like Scott Henderson, Carl Verheyen, Paul Gilbert, and more. I spent about a decade in Hollywood playing studio sessions and doing some touring. When I moved back to Maine, I realized I could afford the gear I lusted after if I taught myself to build it. That was the first step down an endless rabbit hole of building amps, pedals, cabinets, and guitars.
This guitar is the partscaster that I never knew that I needed. I had this old Telecaster body floating around my collection of gear and parts, and for years it just sat there. At some point I started getting very interested in swirl painting and dipping. Something about the natural chaos of the process, and never really knowing how it's going to come out, spoke to me. If you set things up just right the results can really surprise you—and sometimes those results can be amazing. After dipping this guitar body and seeing how cool it looked, I decided to keep going and turn the body into a complete guitar.
Adam Hauk’s swirl-painted partscaster is a small part of a very sizable gear collection, including many pieces he’s built or modified himself.
I got a roasted maple neck from Warmoth and a gold Telecaster hardware kit from Fender. I ordered a custom laser-engraved pickguard from a guy in England that I found on eBay, cannibalized the pickups from a friend’s Telecaster, and hooked up some paper-in-oil tone caps. I love this guitar so much, and couldn’t be more pleased with the final result.
I don't usually gravitate toward Telecasters—I’m more of a Les Paul guy who has the occasional Stratocaster day—but something about the brashness and immediacy of this guitar really inspires me. If you showed it to me and told me it was my old worn Telecaster body, I’d barely believe it. So if you’ve got an old body lying around collecting dust, it might be worth giving it a whole new life.
