Number 1

Sometime around 1991 I thought I’d build my own guitar.  Brian May did. I mean, how hard could it be?

I found out.

While studying art at the Alberta College of Art, which had a dream woodshop with every power and hand tool you could imagine, I bought a chunk of mahogany, a slab of maple and started carving it into My guitar.  I didn’t want to copy anything else, I wanted it to be mine.

Two years later, I had this.  Or something resembling it.

• Solid mahogany body
• maple neck
• 24 3/4” scale
• Graphtech saddles
• Gotoh bridge and machine heads.
• volume, tone switch and coil cut for bridge pickup
• Seymour Duncan Custom 5 in the bridge position
• My own P90 in the neck (I originally had a Seymour Duncan Jazz – as seen in some of these pictures – but used it mainly with the coils split, so I made myself a P90 years later).

Number 1 was my main guitar for years, until I got the bug again and started building more.

UPDATE I’ve since replaced the bridge pickup with an Axesrus Hot Iron. 14k of guts. Maybe I’ll take some pictures. Anyway, if I do a video with Number 1 and it has a zebra pickup, that’s what it is.