The guitar's entire top is mother-of-pearl pieces, in a circular mosaic pattern, similar to some old Zemaitis guitars from the 1960s. I wasn't sure what to make of it. It just seemed bizarre, more than anything else. But every time I looked at it (every day or so), it intrigued me more. The seller wanted $325 in a fixed-price auction. The seller had great feedback, and it seemed like a reasonable price, but for whatever reason I was not able to pull the trigger.
Will Ray's Bottom Feeder: King Mother-of-Pearl (January 2019)
I kept an eye on it, though, and it went through several no-bid cycles. Then, the seller added "or best offer" to the fixed-price auction. I got to thinking about it and figured to offer $50 less. So I sent an offer of $275. To my surprise, he immediately accepted my offer and I PayPal'd him.
Sometimes selling an included hardshell case that you don't need can lower your price on an instrument enough to make a good deal into a great deal.
Bottom Feeder Tip #207:
If a seller's item hasn't sold after awhile on eBay, he or she may entertain best offers. That's opportunity knocking for you as a buyer. You have nothing to lose if you send your best offer. It can be accepted, rejected, or met with a counteroffer. But keep in mind that once your offer is accepted, you just bought it and must pay for it. It's legally binding, as they say.
The mother-of-pearl pattern on this instrument is ornate and thoroughly plotted—even on its headstock, to the extent that the company's name appears on the back rather than interrupt the visual vibe.
I received the guitar a week later. It's stunning up close. The mother-of-pearl really pops. It came shipped in a brand-new hardshell case. I'm not into hard cases, so I promptly sold the case for $50, which brought my actual price down to $225—where I'm more comfortable as a bottom feeder.
Bottom Feeder Tip #688:
Sometimes selling an included hardshell case that you don't need can lower your price on an instrument enough to make a good deal into a great deal.
Normally a P-90 fanatic, Will Ray nonetheless found this axe's humbuckers very articulate and mud-free—making his final $225 cost a Bottom Feeder bargain.
How do I like the guitar? Well, it's an interesting piece—that's for sure. The intonation is good, the neck is straight, the action is easy to play, and the humbucker pickups are very articulate without being muddy. I have other guitars that can do the same thing, but they don't look like this one! I still get a kick out of eyeballing it.
So, is it a keeper? Yeah. I'll probably keep it around for a while. It's always fun to show people, and it never disappoints at a jam.
[Updated 8/19/21]
With a P-90 in the neck position, this guitar built from a modified Squier Affinity body speaks a language blending Gibson and Fender.
No question about it—this guy was a true guitar nut, like me. He called it a Custom Shack P-90 Tele. The builder is known for taking parts from various guitars and making very affordable Frankenstein masterpieces. Anyway, the auction was coming to an end with the price around $120 when I put in a snipe bid of $225. I really didn't think there would be much interest, but 27 different bids came in and I won it for $199.99 plus $25 shipping. I was happy because I really wanted it bad, and I still saved a few bucks from where my maximum bid was.
The 3-way switch puts both pickups in hum-cancelling mode in the middle position, so the previous owner obviously
knew his stuff.
When it arrived, it played perfectly for me right out of the box. It was also very light: 6.3 pounds, which was a real plus. The intonation was spot-on and everything was well adjusted—both pickup heights, action, and neck relief. The two pickups were both well balanced in terms of tone and output. Bottom Feeder tip #287: Sometimes you find a guitar that has been modified in such a way that keeps you from having to go through the trouble yourself. It saves you time, energy, and probably money, too. When that happens, just buy it. Don't go through life with any regrets.
A Fender Telecaster decal was applied to the headstock, with plenty of layers of clear-coat finish to make it look convincing.
Funny, but this Telecaster kind of reminds me of a guitar that my friend Tim Page from Buffalo Brothers Guitars designed years ago for G&L called the Bluesboy. It sported a Telecaster style body, bridge, and pickup, but with a more Gibson-ish humbucker in the neck position for more warmth. Tim understood that some players like the melding of Gibson and Fender aspects into a single guitar. I call this one my little Fender Bluesbird because it, too, is a monster that eats the blues for breakfast. So is it a keeper? Yep. For now. She's a sweet little guitar.
The potential sources of noise are both maddening and many—lying in wait along every step of the signal chain, and beyond.
For a designer and builder, noise is a curious thing. I can breadboard things to the ends of the Earth and it will be quiet. We can test it with every guitar we can acquire through every amp we can find. We get prototypes completed, tweak some values because of the differences in shielding and parts placement on a PCB, and then we get a final version.
We run it into every amp we have, give it the go-ahead, and begin spending money we hope to recoup. Then we release it, somebody calls and tells me it's kind of hissy through their specific amp, and lo and behold, it is—even with everything else accounted for. I then find another amp just like what the user has, try our pedal there—and it is noisy. Hmmm. Then I find another like that, and it's quiet.
It's enough to make designers want to pull their hair out and/or light themselves on fire. Like most men of my age, I just grit my teeth, bury my emotions, and probably eat or drink more than I should and give myself an ulcer. Anyone else?
We follow the RFI/EMI noise reduction practices I have in my notes and textbooks. Sometimes certain discrete components or integrated circuit designs are kinda noisy. So are my record player and my '70s hi-fi. But I think they all can sound terrific. At some point, some things are beyond my control. The amps people play, the wiring in their homes, their proximity to a weird dimmer or gospel radio station, their ability to assemble a DIY patch cable, the authentic single-coils in their guitars, the vintage blackface Fender amp or Vox top-boost with a two-prong power cable ... there's only so much you can work around. We make something we think sounds really beautiful and fun and imperfect, and hopefully inspiring and great. We hustle to make it a good pedalboard citizen, and then, we kind of have to live with it. We do a lot more to fight noise than most pedals I've opened up and studied, and I've seen a lot. I'm always game to do more, but if endlessly chasing that dragon means we never get around to releasing something that we're excited about, that's just no fun for anyone.
I also wonder whenever there is a stacked single-coil pickup or a noise gate that really “just" eliminates noise—could it really be doing nothing but that? Something else had to be changed in that design or signal path for it to work. Is that change positive? Does that single-coil hum that comes from my Strat when I'm running into a drive somehow make me feel like everything is a bit more ... alive? Am I the only one who feels that? I also once had a very expensive tube amp steadily increase hum to where it just broadcast a loud ground hum that eventually overpowered whatever I was playing into it. As it happened, I wanted to fill it with dog poop and light it on fire and leave it on the manufacturer's doorstep. So does this make me a hypocrite, a flip-flopper, or just a guy like most of us who have drawn a line in the sand that works for them?
Someone once told me: “Nobody ever returned an album or demanded a refund because of single-coil hum." While that sounds dismissive of what can be a genuine concern, I hope you consider that idea as a player or user. Most pedals are audio amplifiers to some degree, and whatever you feed them—good, noisy, or bad—will be altered by some order of magnitude. Find your acceptable threshold and learn to work around it. Some venues or studios will simply remove guitars, pedals, or amps you've been dead set on using. In the end, what matters is the performance.