Reader Guitar of the Month: Yellow Submarine Strat

Name: Bruce Carrick

I’ve had this Yellow Submarine guitar idea in my head for years. Like so many out there, I feel the Beatles truly defined my life after seeing them on The Ed Sullivan Show. I never wanted to do anything except play guitar.

My idea was finally brought to life by a very talented artist by the name of Phillip Souder (you can find him on Facebook). He’s a young man with some serious talent! My guitar is 100 percent handpainted—no tracing, or anything like that—which is not an easy task to be this accurate and tasteful. He absolutely exceeded my expectations! The poster on the back is truly the icing on the cake. As you can see, Jeremy is forever alone in the sea of holes way up on the headstock. That was my only contribution to the context.

Yes, I play lefty upside down. This guitar, while being a run-of-the-mill Korean Strat, is a great player. A large part of that is the handwound pickups done for me by a killer guitar player and tech, my friend Dave Vidal, from Vancouver, Canada.

I’ve attached a pic of me with my Gibson ES-335, too, as I haven’t used the Yellow Sub guitar live yet. I always thought the Yellow Submarine characters would translate well on a guitar, and thanks to the brilliant work of the artist, the end result surpassed my vision.

Maybe the next one should be Sgt. Pepper’s on my Tele?

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