Johnson

My  Number 1 – A Frankenstein and proud!

Johnson was born in late 2019 and is the byproduct of a Fender Sixty-Six guitar model.

I have always wanted to build my own guitar. One that eliminates a bunch of the issues I have with pretty much all guitars. I even went as far as to draw up a body style. The one I created was really just a scaled down Fender Jazz bass. I love the Strat design, but I wanted to italicize the body; giving it a slant that would allow the horn to get just a little more out of my way. Drawing done, I hung it up and it remained a ‘someday’ plan. Then one day, I come across an ad for Fender’s new model – and THERE IT IS! The Sixty-Six was part of Fender’s Alternate Reality Series. They essentially did exactly what I was planning to do. So I ran out and bought one.

First up was a new neck. I’m a big guy and I have big hands. I have always liked the big baseball bat style necks of the old teles. So I hit up Warmoth online and configured a neck to suit my needs. Honkin’ large C profile, Rosewood fretboard, jumbo stainless frets, special nut for working with trems. Then I added some amazing Ratio tuning machines. These things are awesome. They eliminate the oddities of tuning across the various strings.

Then I swapped out the 2 humbuckers. My guitar tech is the amazing John “Skully” Macintosh (Geddy Lee, Jeff Beck). He had some custom-wound, open sounding, low output pickups which was exactly what I was looking for.

I curved the whammy bar to help get it into my palm better. I tend to use the bar a fair bit and the angle has always bugged me. So the curve relieved some of that and gave it a bit of a futuristic look.

Last up, it needed some bling. So I hired the amazing Turkish artist Alper Eskimez, of Alperious Custom Pickguard to use my logo and create a thing of beauty. He did not disappoint.

A couple of strap locks and she’s good to go. It’s an amazing axe.

In 2022, I met Guitar tech Steve Baric and we underwent a refinishing project on Johnson. He used a blow torch to burn the edges and bring out the grain.

We also added the amazing Vega Trem, added a kill switch, some coil splitters and adjusted other Electronics.