Chad Henrichsen (in photo) and Gonzalo Madrigal are the two master builders in charge at the Gretsch Custom Shop in Corona, California. Henrichsen arrived at the shop in 2008.
Chad Henrichsen’s inspired builds for the Gretsch Custom Shop are exemplary. Online, you can see his matching Bastogne walnut Duo Jet and Penguin models, as resplendent as Louis XIV furniture, but with a whole lotta music inside. A little searching also reveals a Baritone Jet in an explosive nitro silver sparkle metal flake finish, showing how high a low-tuned instrument can fly. There’s a ’59 Penguin Relic in sonic blue that boasts a vintage voice to match, via TV Jones TV Classic pickups, and a paisley-and-goldburst ’55 Relic Duo Jet with a hiply retro cat’s-eye f-hole, Seymour Duncan DynaSonic pickups, and a Bigsby B3C tailpiece. The guitar looks as if plucked from George Harrison’s dreams.
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That’s just a handful of the multitude of guitars Henrichsen’s made with equal measures of precision, inspiration, and love since 2008, when he joined the Corona, California-based Custom Shop, where he and Gonzalo Madrigal are the master builders. “My mind is constantly running at about a million miles an hour,” he says. “I am always thinking of a different way to do things, like how can I change the internal body chambering structure to maybe make a guitar sound a little bit different? Sometimes those thoughts are fleeting, but when I get one that really sticks I might write out a spec sheet just to have it saved, and go back to it later and build off of that original idea and play with it.”
Those ideas sometimes become the spark for the instruments that Henrichsen makes for the Custom Shop’s annual online dealer events, which he describes as “sort of a mini NAMM show for us. We come up with our own builds and really play around with our ideas.” Some of the results get ordered for top dollar; others are not so lucky. But either way, Henrichsen feels he walks away a winner. “What sticks and what doesn’t gives me a chance to see if I’m in line with the customer base. Some get great reviews; some kind of fall flat, and so you go, ‘well, let me focus on something else.’”
“There were so many little things I had to take in bite-sized chunks as I went along. When I was faced with something I hadn’t seen before, I had to figure it out.”
Henrichsen describes his ascent to master builder as “kind of a weird journey. I actually went to school to be an audio engineer. I wanted to work in a studio and play with faders and all that stuff, but the timing was less than desirable, meaning I got into it at the time DAWs started coming out, and recording technology became widely available to home consumers. That shift happened as I got out of school, so I took a detour. My bandmate at the time got a job here at Fender [which owns Gretsch] and helped me get hired as a setup tech, and then I quickly progressed into doing repairs.”
He’d already been rehearsing for that gig. “I was really interested in guitars and I’d been tinkering around with them,” he says, “swapping pickups—real simple things—and then started working here and really dove headfirst into it. I talked to a lot of the builders that had been here a long time. I got a lot of good pointers, and luckily I had a little place at home where I could go and make some sawdust. I was no stranger to saws. Maybe not so much routers, but I knew how to handle them, and I looked at it from a thousand-foot view and realized, ‘this is just geometry.’ You can make things very complicated if you like, and especially in the Gretsch world, where our designs often dabble in the complicated side of things. But if you want to build a Strat or a Tele, it’s not that much work. So, I started building my own guitars at night and on weekends, and it just snowballed from there. I kept upping my game and kept trying different things, like ‘Now I want to do a carve top,’ and ’Now I want to do a set neck’—and just kept developing my skills.”
Although Henrichsen can build any Gretsch guitar from scratch, his specialty is necks—the most important aspect of an instrument’s playability. “As far as making necks and bodies, we keep it very old school,“ he says.
Henrichsen’s first home-builds were “really models that I wanted for myself and just didn’t have the money to buy. My very first was like a SoCal-style Strat, with a humbucker. The second was basically a copy of a ’54 Les Paul with P-90s and a wraparound tailpiece. That’s where I dove into carve tops. I made a carve-top Telecaster with some Filter’Trons in it. In building my own instruments, I could make them to an exact thickness, make the neck shape exactly how I wanted it. It’s fun to watch it take shape throughout the process, and it gives you a sense of accomplishment after a few months of toiling at home after work when you see it come together and finally get to plug it in and make some noise. It’s the greatest feeling ever, really.”
“We take a problem and we find a solution with what we have to work with: chisels, drill presses, handheld routers.”
After about 18 months at Fender’s Corona factory, Henrichsen transferred to the distribution center. “I worked in the inspection and repair department that deals with all the import models that come in,” he recounts. “We do checks on all that stuff, and if things need to be fixed, we do that. I ended up supervising that line for a couple years, and I applied for the Gretsch position a year before I got it.”
Asked if he hit any serious roadblocks while developing his building technique, Henrichsen replies, “There were so many little things I had to take in bite-sized chunks as I went along. When I was faced with something I hadn't seen before, I had to figure it out—whether sketching it out on paper or making real rudimentary drawings in CAD, like ‘Okay, here’s my bridge height, here’s the thickness of my body, the rise of the top.’ A lot of people do this very differently. Some do actual full-size, one-to-one-scale sketches. It was a lot of little things and I slowly chipped away at them.
This gorgeous walnut G6134 Penguin is one of Henrichsen’s recent creations. It has a natural stain finish, tortoiseshell/cream binding, chrome hardware, a mahogany neck, an ebony fretboard, and a mother of pearl inlay at the 12th fret. The TV Jones TV Classic pickups enjoy a treble-bleed circuit and a no-load tone control.
“In the Gretsch shop, we hardly use any CNC. We do use CNC for the logos and the inlays, just for speed and consistency, but as far as making necks and bodies, we keep it very old school. We actually have an old copy carver, a purely analog machine, and if we want to do a solid top, we actually use that old copy carver. We actually take a lot of pride in not having fancy new machinery. We don’t have engineers that need to program things to make something happen. With Gonzalo and myself, we take a problem and we find a solution with what we have to work with: chisels, drill presses, handheld routers. We obviously have a pin router for things, but other than that, it’s a lot of hands-on work, and I love that.”
So do customers who order a guitar from the Gretsch Custom Shop, which has eight staffers in total. “We have a very small shop and it’s just filled with woodworking tools: joiners, planers, pin routers, edge sanders. It is not fancy by any means,” Henrichsen says. “It’s like a very small cabinet shop. Gonzalo and I have help with finishing and binding, but we basically oversee the whole process. Gonzalo focuses mainly on bodies. I focus mainly on necks, but if either of us has a build that we want to do…. I’ll dive in and make bodies and he’ll make the necks, so our jobs are very intertwined. But just for the sake of efficiency, we tend to stick to those two areas so we can move as fast as we can yet still retain that handmade vibe the Gretsch Custom Shop is known for.”
“Gretsch is kind of known for gadgetry throughout the years, and so to have all those switches.… To me, it’s kind of like piloting the space shuttle, but we’ll happily build whatever they want. I like the surprise orders. And tone is very subjective.”
Exactly how long it takes to deliver a guitar once an order comes from a dealer or player depends on the complexity of the build, as well as how many orders are in line before it. “Something like a standard ’57, ’59 Duo Jet—we can get those out pretty quickly. But a custom Falcon with three pickups and custom inlays and things like that—that all adds to the time,” the luthier says.
One of Henrichsen’s favorite instruments to build is the Tom Petersson Signature 12-String Falcon Bass, which is tagged at $12,999. “It is such a monster, and the reason I like it is because I have to do things very differently from all of our standard necks. For a Jet or a Penguin or Falcon, I have jigs that I use on a shaper table, a pin router.... That speeds things up a little bit for me. But that 12-string bass neck? I literally have to do most of that on a standard router table by hand. That makes you think a little bit differently, keeps you on your toes, and there’s really no room for error. It’s a measure twice, cut once sort of situation.”
Here’s a close-up of the Tom Petersson Signature 12-String Falcon bass, focused on its pair of Custom Seymour Duncan Super’Tron pickups. But for Henrichson, the 3-way switch electronics are a snap. His favorite challenge is hand-shaping, without templates, the 12"-radius neck, which has a 30.5" scale length.
Electronics are another matter. “I love playing with different types of pickups,” he says. “If somebody wants that classic Gretsch twang, then I would go with a TV Classic or maybe a Ray Butts Ful-Fidelity, or if somebody wants a little bit more output, then maybe a Power’Tron. We do a lot of 3-pickup guitars, where you might have a Super’Tron in the bridge, and maybe a DynaSonic or a TV Jones T90 in the middle position. I love mixing pickups because it expands your tonal palette. We could get into the arguments about tone pots or tone switches. I’m not a big fan of the tone switch, but there is a place for them, and some people love ’em, and it doesn’t matter to me when a customer order comes down. You get what you want. But most of the guitars that I come up with are going to have a tone pot. I do enjoy the no-load tone pots, so most of the time that tone’s running wide open. I’m a big believer in trying to keep that signal path as short and as clean as possible. I had a Falcon order a few months ago where the customer wanted a blower switch for the bridge pickup. He also wanted a phase switch for the pickups, and coil taps for each pickup. It took me a couple days to map that out, but it was great fun! And Gretsch is kind of known for gadgetry throughout the years, and so to have all those switches.… To me, it’s kind of like piloting the space shuttle, but we’ll happily build whatever they want. I like the surprise orders. And tone is very subjective.”
“You don’t want to think about your instrument at all. You just want to be that instrument.”
Given that, what does Henrichsen do when a buyer asks for a “crunchy” sound, or something bright and biting? “I reach out to the customer and have a conversation, to say, ‘Okay, what is your idea of brightness or grittiness,’ or whatever adjective they’re using, and try to narrow down as much as I can, so then I can offer suggestions about pickups. But that’s a tough one, so I try to talk it out and offer different options. We explain that, in our experience, if you use this pickup with this body style, this is the kind of sound that you’re going to get. Obviously if you want a really tight focused sound, a full-size hollowbody may not be your thing. All those little things factor in.
Henrichsen sands a neck in the Custom Shop, which he says looks very much like a small woodshop from decades past.
“If I want that really open, big-sky sound, I’m going to go with a Falcon. But if I want something a little tighter, I’m probably going to go with a Jet and maybe even a center-block jet, to tighten it up even more. I’ve done some builds in the past where our Jets and Penguins, even though we call them solidbodies, have not been very solid. They’re highly chambered inside, and I’ve played with the floor of that chamber—lessening the depth—to see how that changes the sound. That’s part of the fun I have as a builder—playing with those dimensions and seeing the results.”
The endgame of all this, of course, is to create a great-playing and -sounding guitar. The key, says Henrichsen, is “attention to detail. That is one of the things I’m most proud of about the shop. All of us really are paying attention 100 percent of the time. Of course, we make mistakes; we’re human. When you are doing some of the run-of-the-mill operations, it’s easy to let your mind wander and you think about, ‘Oh, I’ve got to feed the dogs when I get home,’ or whatever. But we really try to be cognizant of that and get that tunnel vision, in a good way. With woodworking, if you’re not paying attention for half a second, things can go sideways, or you may miss a little hairline crack in that wood and it may rear its ugly head later on when you’re trying to put a finish on it. If every little piece that makes a final product is the best it can be, then that final product is going to be even greater.
“The player can immediately recognize when the proper attention has been paid to details,” he continues. “We do a lot of binding over frets, for example, and when you have those fret ends nice and smooth, it feels comfortable. Things are balanced. The last thing you want as a player is distractions. You don’t want to think about your instrument at all. You just want to be that instrument. It needs to be a part of you, not something that you’re fighting. When the customer picks it up, and it just works and it feels great, and they have no complaints whatsoever…. That’s our end goal every time.”
Joe Silvius, an exotic tonewood specialist at Martin, has been with the company for 27 years.
Here at Premier Guitar, we’ve done profiles on master guitar builders in the past. But unlike many guitar factories around the country, Martin doesn’t have master builders, exactly. They rely on a crew of highly skilled specialists, rather than individuals who oversee a guitar’s production from start to finish. Silvius, whose title is exotic tonewood specialist, is one of the former.
After the loss of his baseball career prospects, Silvius left college to work at the factory, where he started out in the string division. He then moved on to fretting, and then pre-finish (which involves body sanding before finish is applied), where he stayed for two years, eventually running the department. About 23 years ago, he switched over to the sawmill and acclimating areas, and for the past six or seven years, he’s been working in the custom shop as well. There, he’s responsible for guiding dealers in selecting the perfect wood for their custom builds.
“Obviously there’s thoughts—I’m sure everybody has them—of something else, maybe better, but I can’t see anything better than this.”
But before that can happen, incoming wood—that ends up on the shelves for dealer selection—must be inspected and acclimated, or dried. Now, when it comes to guitar building, wood drying may not sound like the most thrilling aspect. But after forests and lumber yards, it’s where guitars begin, and if that core material isn’t handled with care, intuition, and technical expertise, there would be no guitars from Nazareth (or anywhere else, for that matter).
Part of Silvius’ expertise is knowing how to treat a wide variety of tonewoods to reduce their moisture content—the woods Martin accepts can come in at up to about 40 percent—to the desired range of six to eight percent. The process involves “sticking,” where cut pieces of lumber are literally placed on horizontal support “sticks” of wood to enable air to flow through them. Then, the wood is placed in a kiln set to temperatures specific to the species being dried (as high as around 160°F), until the ideal moisture content is reached.
Silvius explains that customers have been increasingly interested in seeing unusual grain patterns on their guitars, such as that shown by this cocobolo back.
Courtesy of Martin Guitar
Sometimes, wood is brought below that desired range and then reacclimated, which helps to “stabilize the wood for less issues in the future,” explains Silvius. But every species dries differently, and has to be handled carefully to ensure that it survives the process: If it’s dried too much, the cells in the wood will die, making it brittle, which also prevents reacclimating. If it’s dried either too quickly or too slowly, it can lead to different types of damage that make the wood unusable.
Ebony, for example, takes six months to dry—if it’s done any faster, it will crack. “I would say ebony is probably the most complicated,” Silvius explains. “We’ve gotten really good at controlling it. Everybody wants ebony for their fretboard and bridge, so we gotta make sure we keep that in as good of shape as possible.” Then there are other woods like gonçalo alves, “which is a rare wood—it’s hard to work with. It doesn’t like to stay flat. We put plastic bands around it to help keep pressure on it to try to keep it as flat as possible.” Other tonewoods, like rosewood and sapele, are more forgiving, and take just two weeks to dry before they’re put in the kiln.
If you’re wondering about torrefaction (the process of drying wood at an extreme temperature to capture the sound quality of vintage guitars), that’s done by a vendor offsite. Silvius explains that it requires a specialized kiln with a controlled low-oxygen atmosphere, and a proprietary “recipe.”
Having worked in the acclimating area for more than two decades, Silvius is knowledgeable on how to put a wide variety of tonewoods through the drying process.
Once the incoming wood has gone through the acclimating process, it’s then ready for the production line, and the custom shop. For the uninitiated, the custom shop offers a unique experience for dealers from around the world to come in and design their own guitars to be sold at their locations, down to choosing the type and sets of wood to be used. The designs themselves may not be “exclusive,” per se—as dealers’ requested builds might be similar to those chosen by peers—but are often created with their specific customer base in mind. (The custom shop also has guitars pre-built for dealer selection, if they might be interested in buying a finished model as opposed to designing it themselves.) Some recent visits have been from Haggerty’s Music from South Dakota, Reno’s Music from Indiana, Empire Music from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Andertons Music Co. from the U.K.
“The piece of wood that they select has to speak to them. It’s all a perception. Everybody loves things differently.”
“Every dealer is different,” Silvius comments. “Some come in with an actual plan. They know what guitars they want; they know what species they want. They get a list, come in, do their thing, and leave. For others, it’s like a supermarket. They look at the shelf and say, ‘Let’s take a look at some of this.’” A lot of Martin’s exotic woods are kept in locked cages that only a handful of employees have access to, Silvius being one of them.
“I’m not much of a salesman,” he adds. “When they come in, I shoot ’em straight. I’m not going to tell you something just because I want you to buy this guitar. That’s not what I’m about. The piece of wood that they select has to speak to them. It’s all a perception. Everybody loves things differently.”
In the past, Martin would have rejected wild-grain East Indian rosewood for its nontraditional patterns, seen here.
Courtesy of Martin Guitar
Sometimes, the selection process can lead to some humorous, unconventional scenarios. One year, a group of dealers came in from Japan, who were all interested in the same pre-built model. “The custom shop director brought in a putting mat, and they actually putted,” Silvius says, laughing. “Whoever made the putt got the opportunity to buy the guitar. It’s just fun.”
Silvius says that the cultural trend in the guitar world over the past several years has been all about aesthetics: wild-grain East Indian rosewood, striped Gabon ebony, flame and quilted maple. Customers today are looking for something more distinctive in a guitar’s appearance—and that trend has steered Martin in a wildly different direction from where they’d been for decades. “It was about tradition, so everything had to be perfectly quartersawn [cut to yield straight-grain pieces]. If it wasn’t, we would reject it. But now, people love the look of the [different grain patterns]. Doesn’t necessarily affect the guitar—the sound or anything. It just gives you that ‘wow.’”
“We took a trip to New York recently,” Silvius shares. “I was at Rudy’s [Music], who’s going to be here next week to select wood, and the gentleman who works there was telling me what he wants. He likes more traditional, straight grain. But he needs something that his customers are going to turn around and go, ‘Wow, the back just looks incredible.’ These dealers know their customer base. They have regular customers that come in, and they know what they want.”
In Martin’s custom shop, Silvius guides dealers in selecting the right woods for their custom guitar designs.
As Silvius alluded, quartersawn wood has straight grain, and has long been highly sought-after. But it’s becoming scarcer, partially because in order to get it, harvested trees have to be at least 24″ in diameter. A less expensive alternative, flatsawn—one of the kinds Martin used to reject—produces wood with “cathedral,” or spire-shaped, grain patterns. And especially given the shift in popular preference, Martin has been bringing more flatsawn wood into their production line. However, Silvius comments that flatsawn is harder to work with, as the pieces can be fickle: “It twists. [Some pieces often] turn into almost like a potato chip and we can’t use it. But other pieces stay flat.”
Aside from handling unruly wood, Silvius’ biggest challenge in his work overall, he says, is “probably our own internal specs. We are so critical of the material itself. Our standards are set so high that sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Because we want everything to be perfect, and it just can’t be. It’s wood. Even when I match sets—we like everything to have perfectly matching grain or perfectly matching color, or both, and sometimes you just can’t. We beat ourselves up over it.”
“People love the look of the [different grain patterns]. Doesn’t necessarily affect the guitar—the sound or anything. It just gives you that ‘wow.’”
When Silvius plays more of a role in selecting the wood for a dealer, which can be another option in the custom shop experience, it becomes a bit more personal for him. “I try not to take much home with me, but I do,” he laughs. “Say they want a high-end D-45, and I gotta select either the Brazilian rosewood, or maybe the cocobolo. Did I make the right choice? Are they really going to be happy with that guitar when they get it? But I’ve also had dealers come in that, when I would meet them for the first time, say, ‘So you’ve been picking out my wood! Thank you,’ and just give me a handshake. It feels great when that happens.”
Ultimately, Silvius says it’s those relationships that make up the best part of his job. It doesn’t hurt that, because Martin employs so many Nazareth locals, he also works alongside many people whose family members he grew up with. “It is a really close-knit community. Even the VP [Deb Karlowitch], she retired a couple years ago, but I graduated with her son. Her husband, when we walked home from school, would pick us up sometimes on the way.”
As Silvius emphasizes the passion that Martin’s roughly 500 employees have for their work, which he says speaks to their consistently high-quality products, it might surprise you that he doesn’t play guitar. “It’s funny, because I’m not a guitar guy. I’ll be honest with you,” he admits. “I always blame it on having short, chubby fingers.
“I wish I would have tried to learn during [the pandemic]. I still want to learn to play, I just gotta get into the right mind-frame. My kids are now older, so I’m not going to sporting events and everything. It’s time I should learn.”
Bad Cat Black Cat
The new Black Cat could’ve started with an “American” channel and a “British” channel, promising “classic” tones that remind you of your childhood guitar heroes, but you’ve already heard that promise and you’ve already played that amp. The Black Cat promise is different. Sure, we’re going to share some things in common with our forebears, like an all-tube signal path, powerful transformers, familiar controls and premium Celestion speakers, but what’s under the hood is uniquely Bad Cat.
The heart and soul of the new Black Cat is the immediate feeling of connection you get with it. It’s always lively and toneful, never feeling choked or constrained. Driven by a 20W power amp featuring a cathode bias pair of EL84s, it’s remarkably loud with enough headroom to play with a live drummer yet has an effective master volume control allowing for playing at home with no loss of tone.
Specs:
- 20 Watts – 2 x EL84 Cathode-biased
- 2 Channels – Clean and Overdrive
- Channel-dedicated VOLUME and MASTER Controls
- Global TREBLE, BASS, and CUT Controls
- Bias-modulated Tremolo with INTENSITY and SPEED Controls
- Studio Quality Reverb
- Buffered Effects Loop
- 1 x 12” Celestion V30 “Bad Cat Custom” Speaker (Combo only)
- Two Button Footswitch and Slip Cover Included
Bad Cat Cub
The Cub was among the original Bad Cat designs – boutique and highly desired, it has been used on countless stages and recordings. Over the years, the Cub’s design has been steadily refined and improved. Every iteration brings something new to the table and our newest Cub is no exception. A single channel amplifier now with two gain modes, the updated original Cub circuitry is accessed in clean mode, while the overdriven mode features a newly voiced, more aggressive side to the Cub.
Specs:
- 30W – 2x EL34 in Cathode-Bias Class AB Configuration
- Single Channel
- Clean and OD Gain Modes
- Two Discrete, Switchable Master Volume Controls
- Global Input Volume, Bass, Mid, Treble, and Presence Controls
- Studio Quality Reverb
- Buffered Effects Loop
- 1 x 12” Celestion V30 “Bad Cat Custom” Speaker (Combo Only)
- 2 Button Footswitch and Slip Cover Included
Bad Cat Hot Cat
The award winning Hot Cat amp was introduced in 2005 to great accolade. As pleased as we are with the original, the time had come for a whole new Hot Cat. We took everything we have learned over the last 20 years and applied it to this limitless reimagining of the Hot Cat. A two channel amplifier now with two gain modes per channel, the Hot Cat provides virtually limitless gain combinations as well as studio quality reverb, and an all new fully buffered effects loop.
Specs:
- 45W – 2x EL34 in Fixed-Bias Class AB Configuration
- Two Channel
- Lo and Hi Gain Modes
- Two Discrete, Gain and Volume Controls per Channel
- Global Master, Bass, Mid, Treble, and Presence Controls
- Studio Quality Reverb
- Buffered Effects Loop
Bad Cat Lynx
Modern high gain players need tight low frequencies that punch and react quickly to staccato palm muting. They need high frequencies that cut without being harsh and grainy. They need effective midrange shaping with complexity and articulation. Finally, they need blistering gain with none of the noise. The new Lynx is designed to meet and exceed these demands. The Lynx has two distinct channels and a massive 7 gain stages. A new Lo/Hi switch allows exploration of gain stage topology not yet found in any other amplifier from Bad Cat.
Specs:
- Designed and Built in Southern California
- 50W – 2x EL34 in fixed bias class AB configuration
- Two Channel
- Lo and Hi Gain Modes
- Channel-dedicated GAIN and VOLUME controls
- Global Master, Bass, Mid, Treble, and Presence Controls
- Adjustable noise gate circuit – Patent Applied For
- Buffered Effects Loop
- 12” Celestion Vintage 30 (Combo only)