Don's first prototype
Reader: Don Baker
Hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma
Guitars: First, Second, and Third Prototypes
This reader has two patents for his innovative pickup circuitry designs, which he’s implemented in two out of three of the prototypes he shares in this story.
I’m much less a guitarist or luthier than an engineer and inventor. I came up with a neat way to wire matched single-coil pickups into humbucking circuits (U.S. Patents 10,380,986 and 10,810,987). For two, three, four, and five pickups, you get one, six, 25, and 90 distinct humbucking circuits. For three pickups, you can get six more distinct circuits with hum. For humbucking (HB mode) you just add the outer line pickup(s) to the inner line on the 6-way switch label. Hum mode shorts out the inner line pickup.
The guitar industry has shown no interest, so I’m taking the long route, like Mr. Wally Byam, the founder of Airstream Inc. He started off selling plans to make his travel trailers. I planned on making a lot of mistakes, and used Photoshop to design a versatile plywood guitar body using a minimal amount of wood. It has a bolt-on neck (Saga Music Golden Gate S-94, with an unmodified headstock), a central spine below the pickups, two arcing ribs to enclose the electronics cavities, and laminate front and back covers. I make my own round guitar knobs, and do it all in my apartment and balcony (routers are very dusty). Anyone with a decent woodshop can make one.
A closeup of the switch and knob configuration on Don’s first prototype.
The first prototype, a white guitar, has three P-90s with N, S, and N poles up, bridge to neck, tone pots for each pickup, a 6-way switch with a 2-way mode switch (HB and Hum), a preamp to equalize the output amplitudes with switching, a volume pot, a moveable middle pickup, and a power LED which lights with the preamp when the guitar cable is plugged in. The second prototype, a black guitar, has three Allparts Vintage Chrome humbuckers, phase reversal switches on the neck and bridge tone pots, pickups moveable to any place between the neck and bridge, and over 20 distinct circuits.
“I’m writing a highly illustrated DIY journal on how it is made, including most of my mistakes.”
As I build the third prototype with three fixed-place Jazzmaster pickups (with the middle pickup poles inverted to S up) and Spanish cedar veneer front covers, I’m writing a highly illustrated DIY journal on how it is made, and including most of my mistakes. (I’m trying a lot of new things.) I’m up to about 24 chapters and a few hundred images. This time I’m thinking I’ll use just six humbucking circuits with a preamp. In exchange for buying the book, I intend to grant the right to make two patented/patent-pending guitars with non-amplified switching, and then sell the preamp separately.
Don’s second prototype.
It’s going slow. Since a drunk driver nailed me in 1985 when I was 39, I got old and only have a few productive hours a day. But every day, I do a little bit more.
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Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
