Nerd alert! Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly interested in microtonal music. I’ve done tons of research, lots of listening, and have modified several guitars and basses of my own to play non-standard scales. This one is my favorite:
This guitar started out as a Playboy special edition guitar, made for Steve Clayton Industries. I had been looking for one of these for forever, and finally picked one up off Ebay for only $300. It was just so perversely PINK that I just knew I had to do something bizarre with it. Recently I had become intrigued with the idea of a guitar with equidistant frets, and had also recently seen the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and inspiration struck. Thus, the Angry Inch guitar was born.
I pulled all the frets out, drilled out the fretboard dots, and filled all the fret slots and dots with ebony. I made sure to line up the wood grain when I filled the old dots, so they are almost imperceptible. Then I leveled the board and trued the radius, and stained the board black. If you look really closely, you can see where the old fret slots and dots used to be, but you have to look REALLY close. I then refretted it with my favorite fretwire (stainless steel jumbo frets from Jescar), made a new bone nut, gave it a full setup, installed a Seymour Duncan JB/Jazz pickup set, rewired the controls (just a volume knob and a switch), tuned it in straight 4ths (DGCFBbEb) and then played the hell out of it. You can already see where I’m wearing through the finish in some spots, which is just the way I like it.
Yes, this is undoubtedly an unusual guitar, but it’s really easy to play. It is, of course, much more difficult to write music with, but somehow I managed to write an entire album using this guitar as the main instrument. If you’d like to hear what this instrument sounds like, you can hear it all over my most recent album, Songs In The Key Of X.
