Name: Dana Welts
Hometown: The Berkshires, Massachusetts
Guitar: Custom Teardrop
Since I was an 11-year-old in 1963, I’ve been drawn to the teardrop-shaped guitar I saw Brian Jones playing in pictures of the Rolling Stones. It had such an artistic and classical shape compared to the Strats, Jaguars, and traditional ES guitars that were so popular among my preteen friends. I never lost the attraction to the Vox Mark VI guitars.
In December 2021, I was talking to my good friend Jeff, a builder and guitar tech extraordinaire, and mentioned that I always liked the teardrop. On a whim, I asked him if he’d consider building one for me. I seriously doubted he would have the time, and if he did, I would be waiting a long time. “Well,” he said, “I really would need a plan….” I thought, Hm, he’s a little interested.
I searched the internet and found a great drawing from the TDPRI forum and brought it to him. Jeff said he had a piece of mahogany that might fit, and that he’d also been looking at vintage Vox necks on eBay. He showed me the listing for a neck from a 1964 Vox Spitfire or Hurricane (the seller wasn’t sure which). We sealed the deal when he pointed out that the headstock didn’t have the same paddle design as the classic teardrop, and I told him that that was my least favorite part of the teardrop design. I preferred the headstock on the Spitfire/Hurricane.
The project went quickly from there. The plan was not to replicate an exact 1963 Mark VI, but to create a modern, roadworthy guitar with all the visual appeal of the Mark VI. Jeff went to work and four weeks later, I demoed the guitar before finishing. It felt and sounded incredible.
The pickups are a pair of Seymour Duncan P-100s wired through a 4-way modded (series/parallel) switch. The bridge and tuners are from a hardtail Fender Strat that Jeff happened to have hanging around. The maple headstock complements the warm white lacquer finish perfectly, and the guitar is appointed nicely with the obligatory Vox-style chicken-head knobs.
When I took delivery of the guitar, it looked absolutely beautiful, and I was onstage with it that weekend. I had a feeling that it would raise a lot of interest at shows and sure enough, on most nights, a guitar player in the audience finds their way to me and wants to talk about the guitar that they too remember from the ’60s. Every time I put the teardrop on and plug it in, I feel like I’ve come full circle with that kid from 1963 who dreamed about playing electric guitar in a rock ’n’ roll band. It’s pretty cool when dreams come true.
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Kent Meloy
Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio
Guitar: Live-edge Cherry Swamp Monster, nicknamed “Keith Richards”
For the past five or six years, I’ve been slowly building my guitar-building chops starting with a couple kits and then moving into my own scratch-built designs under the name Tunguska Guitars. Lately I’ve been intrigued by some of the builds I’ve seen featured on The Great Guitar Build Off run by Britain’s Crimson Guitars, and I’ve tried to start thinking outside of the norm.
My brother-in-law has a bunch of 2" slabs of cherry wood that have been drying in a shed behind his house for a couple years. When we were down for a visit, he took me up to collect a few. This particular live-edge piece wormed its way into my heart, and I grabbed it, knowing it was probably useless for a guitar.
But once I got home, I kept thinking about how to solve the problems. The entire bridge/tailpiece area was completely unsuitable, and one thing I knew I did not want to do is fill it with resin. This thing needed to stay as raw, beat-up, and un-shiny as possible. There was barely enough wood to get a body and neck out of it, but I managed to get both.
I decided the only way to solve the bridge issue was to fabricate something myself (if you can call it that), so I picked up a 3/8" steel rod and used a blowtorch to heat it up and make the necessary bends in the bridge, far enough apart that it literally “bridged” the canyon of disintegrating wood. I put threads on the mounting ends so I could install nuts on the top and bottom as a basic height adjustment. The 2-piece tailpiece was less drastic, but also did the trick by boring deep into the good wood for support.
I decided the pickup mount would emulate an acoustic, boring all the way through the body and countersinking a steel ring for decoration with pickup mounting holes on the backside instead of the top, and I wanted a single volume control to hover in the upper horn’s decorative hole. This took a while and involved a short, threaded rod, three nuts, and a little bit of J-B Weld to get one of the nuts on the mini-pot.
Once I got far enough into the process, I was calling it “The Nameless One,” but my friends started calling it “Keith Richards”–a grizzled, beat-up, true rock ’n’ roll survivor. I came to be completely okay with that assessment: It just feels perfect!
The pickup is a hand-distressed StewMac Golden Age Parsons Street humbucker. The fretboard is ziricote and the relic’d tuning machines and control knob came from GFS.
The thing sounds amazing—it’s very open and organic. Cranking up the distortion just a bit gives it a lovely swamp-’70s vibe. It completely surpassed my expectations, and I’m sure it’s Keith’s fault.
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Frank and Eli Doris
Frank and Eli Doris with the Yellowcaster. A Crate neck and various electronics completed their 3D-printed axe.
Hometown: East Northport, New York
Guitar: Yellowcaster
The father-son team of Frank and Eli Doris decided to create a guitar after Eli got a 3D printer and wanted to use it to create a guitar body. In the time-honored tradition, Frank sketched a design on a napkin, then Eli used a CAD program to design the body and knobs. The 3D printer produced the body, which had to be done in sections, since the printer was limited in the size of the sections it could manufacture. The body sections are held together with super glue. The body is made from Eryone PLA 3D-printable filament, and Frank and Eli decided on the silk gold color, since it was something different from the usual Fender and other guitar colors.
Being a longtime guitar player and tinkerer, Frank had all the parts and electronics on hand, except for the Crate neck, which he bought on Reverb for about $50 (with tuners already installed). The neck and middle pickups are Fender MIM Strat pickups, and the bridge pickup was taken from a 1970s Univox Les Paul Custom copy (the original gold-plated pickup cover had to be removed to allow the pickup to fit in the pickguard). The bridge is a stock Fender with import (MIM, Squier, etc.) string spacing.
The knobs spell out “BÖC,” the abbreviation for Blue Öyster Cult, Frank’s favorite band (Eli likes them, too), and, of course, the “Ö” has the umlaut!
When Eli was assembling the guitar, father and son were thinking, “With luck, this thing won’t just explode as we’re putting it together!” They had no idea if this would actually work. In fact, during the first try, the body cracked and had to be reinforced, and a wood block was inserted to block the tremolo. When stringing the instrument, the guys tried .010-gauge strings at first, but settled on .009s as these put less tension on the guitar.
Frank notes, “When we plugged it in, we were expecting it to sound like a banjo, but the guitar actually sounds great, with a lot of sustain. It also plays like a dream! We took a chance on the neck, but it’s great. The guitar is also surprisingly ergonomic and falls right into place when sitting down.” The Yellowcaster isn’t heavy, either, weighing in at just 6 pounds, 13 ounces.
“The only things we forgot were to add holes for strap buttons, and to think about whether it would fit into a case,” says Frank. As a result, the Yellowcaster doesn’t fit into a standard hardshell case or gig bag, but does fit into a bass gig bag. “We can’t wait to take this guitar out and see people’s reactions!”
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