New Orleans, LA
I am a bassist, guitar tech, and founder of Strange Guitarworks. When not working on guitars, I create experimental music under the moniker of UFO Death Cult, utilizing microtonal instruments of my own design. "Intonation is a social construct."
Jun 15 2025
I am a hobgoblin of consistency. I’ve been using the same bass amp since 1998 (a prototype Mesa/Boogie Bass Triaxis and Strategy 500 power amp), and haven’t even changed my core settings in decades. I’ve played fretless bass almost exclusively for about 25 years. I usually only own one or two basses at a time, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/plugging-a-hole-in-benjamins-bass/
Mar 25 2025
Benjamin was invited to sit down with Chris Vincent on his podcast, “Number One Guitar”, to discuss music, fretless bass guitars, and life as a guitar tech. Check it out!
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/podcast-with-benjamin-strange/
Aug 06 2024
We believe that your guitar’s nut is the most important lynch pin of a good setup. If it’s not cut properly, there’s no other adjustment you can make that will improve the feel of your instrument. The nut is also the most crucial aspect of keeping your guitar in tune. We’ve seen so many people …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/making-a-bone-nut-from-scratch/
Jan 16 2024
Today, I’m going after one of my least favorite features on the world’s most popular guitar: I’m making a case against Fender’s Micro-Tilt. Fender introduced the Micro-Tilt in the early 70’s, and this has been causing problems with their necks for over 50 years. This was designed to angle a bolt-on neck back in the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/the-case-against-fenders-micro-tilt/
Nov 13 2023
I’m a fretless guy. My first foray into fretless bass was back in 2001, when I yanked the frets out of the carbon-fiber neck on my Peavey B-Quad4. Over the years I’ve rarely owned a fretted bass, and have gone deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of fretless playing – so much now that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/fretting-a-fretless-bass/
Sep 18 2023
If you had asked us a year ago if a multiscale guitar could be PLEKed, we would have said “Not yet!” The PLEK machine was designed for parallel frets, and for many years doing a PLEK job on a multiscale (or fanned fret) instrument simply wasn’t possible. But the good people at PLEK are always …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/pleking-a-multiscale-guitar/
Jul 24 2023
“Intonation is a social construct”. I’m not sure if I coined this phrase or inadvertently appropriated it, but I do say it often. All music is out of tune – it’s a mathematical impossibility for any three notes to be perfectly in tune with each other at the same time. That’s just science. We all …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/gibson-frets-in-the-wrong-place-fixed/
Jan 13 2023
Ten years ago I was fired for the first time in my life. I was blindsided, in complete and utter shock, and I suddenly found myself unemployed and quickly going broke in San Francisco. I had been becoming increasingly disillusioned with San Francisco, and had been yearning to move back to the city that most …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/ten-years/
Jan 28 2022
When I was 17 years old, I had already become bored of the same-old, same-old approach to guitar design. My jaded teenage eyes were already sick of seeing Strats and Teles over and over and over again. I thought these were grandpa guitars, and I yearned for something new. Then I discovered the Parker Fly, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/replacing-the-output-jack-on-a-parker-fly/
Oct 27 2021
Left handed people have never had it easy. Lefties have been burned at the stake, bump elbows with righties at the dinner table, and struggled with scissors in elementary school art class. Left handed people also have limited options finding a guitar that suits them. Left handed people comprise of 10% of the population, yet …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/converting-an-acoustic-guitar-to-left-handed/
