Guitar Maker

THE VELVET JOURNEY

Chapter 10: A New Guitar is Born

Well here we are, we’ve just tightened the last screw in order to mount the pickguard. This the magical moment, the new Velvet is born!

First point of interest for us is the weight, 8.79 (close to 4 kgs) which is the upper limit of what we wanted to reach but our goal was to keep it under 9 lbs. Second most important point is to know the balance and how it feels when strapped around your body, result is all perfect as the neck keeps always up no matter how you move.

Time to try it and play the first notes through an amp, always a special moment! Tight midrange and quite fat, less boomy and a bit hollower than what a LP would be. A tad closer to he SG tone, certainly due to the slightly thinner body but plenty of sustain. When played clean, the guitar keeps a snappy attack and some kinda vintage “twang” if I may use this word for a guitar like this. The Lollar Imperials do a perfect job, beautyfully balanced with nice overtones. Well these are at least our first impressions, of course this is “New-Tone Land” and it all needs to be processed, beta tested, compared and reviewed many times.

We are honestly satisfied with the first results as they are very close to what we expected which is not always the case. On instruments with new shapes, you often need to tweak and adjust but here we have the usual potential problems out of the way.

As with every new guitar we do, this has been a very very exciting experience and by doing this we learned a lot. Yes, as with life, making guitars is a never ending learning curve.

I would like to thank all the people who helped and worked on this new Velvet guitar: friends for their input during design, the boys at the workshop for bringing in their ideas, expertise and craftmanship. A special mention to Sho Hara for keeping his camera ready in the workshop as we moved forward, Masuda Minoru for keeping track of every detail and my friend Kei for friendship & support for what we often called the “Crazy Guitars”!

Time for you to test one of these if you can, and let us know what you think, any input is always welcome! They should be available as of February 2012.

Thank you all for following the Velvet Journey, I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as we did! Please come back to the blog as I will always keep it up to date with our current thoughts and consideratons!

Chris