When I walked in the door of his shop he was in the middle of repairing some pickguards for a long-time customer of his.  He told me that he actually stopped doing repairs some years ago, but that here he continued to do anything that this one guy asked him to do.

I do repairs.  Lord knows I could use the money!  Yet somehow, the vast majority of my work has been my custom guitars.  I do repairs, it’s just that no one ever asks me to do them.  But I have a guy that is to me as this other guy is to Saul Koll.  I’ll probably be doing any random guitar repair/modification/custom build for this guy until one of us dies.

This one is for him.  It started life as at least three other guitars that he picked parts from.  The neck is from a Japanese Squier Jagmaster, the body is from a Japanese Fender Jaguar, and the pickups are from an old Teisco.  Some of the plates are custom ones that I’ve fabricated.  The most notable feature is that I’m adding four tuners on to the headstock to convert it into a ten-string guitar (thus the Roman numeral “X” designation).

I’d already started making short-scale six-string basses when I heard about somebody who was looking for a custom builder to make a high-quality lookalike of the Teisco TB-64.  The TB-64 was Teisco’s version of the Fender Bass VI.  You may have seen one in the hands of Blonde Redhead and Jet Harris.

I raised my hand pretty early on as being interested in doing the build.  I started out drawing it full-scale and posted the screenshots for the client to see.  He liked what I had done, so he sent some funds over for me to get started.

It’s been about a year in the making on this one, but given the level of “custom” that went in to it, I think that’s ok.

*I’ve been recently informed that the brand name Teisco is currently owned by Westheimer Corp.

Bass VI® is a trademark of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.