Body & Neck: Mahogany (Toona Sinensis)
Fretboard: Rosewood

Controls: Volume & Tone

Tuners: Locking

Bridge: Tune-O-Matic or Bigsby Style

Pickups: Bridge Humbucker with a DC Resistance of 11.8K.

Scale Length: 24.75"

Fretboard Radius: 14"

Neck Width at Nut: 1 5/8"

Neck Width at 12th Fret: 2"

Neck Profile: C-Shaped

Neck Thickness at 1st Fret: 7/8"

Neck Thickness at 12th Fret: 1"

Fret Wire: Nickel/Silver 6150 “Jumbo”

Finish: Satin Poly

Weight: Approximately 6 pounds

Lemme tell you why this guitar exists. I wanted to figure out a way to build a guitar I always wanted to own, but nobody ever seemed interested in building and I wanted to be able to sell it at a decent price. It's the greatest rock guitar of all time, but one nobody seems willing to build the way I always felt it should be done. If you've got an interest in my long-winded explanation I'll be happy to share it with you.

Affordable Enough to Enjoy Owning

First off, there's the cost thing. During the decades since I was a teenager roaming the streets of Hollywood and rocking out with single-minded abandon, the marketing vultures of the industry have apparently noticed that us aging rockers make up a big chunk of the people who buy guitars. Presumably as we've aged we've accumulated too much disposable income.

A lot of the industry is centered around providing exact copies of the guitar made famous in 1950-whatever and it has to be exactly like that 60-year-old guitar because there was some kind of special sauce in those that modern technology is unable to replicate. To replicate that mojo requires the use of special secrets that force them to charge you $3000 or $5000 or $9000 and then you're going to need to make sure nobody ever touches that instrument once you get it home or it will lose its resale value.

I have acquaintances who own a room full of guitars that have barely ever been touched. That takes all the fun out of plugging in and playing an instrument. To me this stuff is supposed to be inexpensive enough so you can try out new things. You shouldn't be scared to take your new guitar out and play it. When you play your instrument you should be able to beat on it like it owes you money without worrying about the fiduciary consequences of nicking it up a little.

The other thing that's become more and more prevalent is a desire for highly-figured woods, which almost never contribute to the sound of an instrument in a positive way, but they drive the cost up considerably. You won't find any of that here. I found an inexpensive foreign source for really lightweight mahogany bodies and necks.

Something I Always Wanted

So here's my take on a classic that's normally sold these days as a replica of its late-50's form. When the line originally debuted in the mid-50's it was intended to be a student guitar and its retail price was $49.50. It also had a P-90 pickup, which blues players came to love because their single-coil sound was a little bit thicker than the guitars coming out of Fullerton, but still thin and biting enough that every single nuance of your playing technique was audible. Unfortunately for rockers, every single nuance of your playing technique was audible. Along with a lot of 60-cycle hum.

When the P.A.F. came along in 1957 it hit the expensive models first, but eventually became the most popular pickup the company made. The P.A.F. became so popular that the P-90 was almost out of production by the early 60's. Rockers love P.A.F. pickups because they have a fatness that distorts in ways single coil pickups don't and they have enough output to drive the front end of an amp nice and hard. I have a benchmark for rock guitars; they have to be capable of what I call a "Basic AC/DC" sound when you plug 'em into a decent amp. If I can't get that "chak" that thumps me in the chest a little I'm not sure what I should do.

Apply some Zeus-Juice to this and your smile will light up the room. These pickups are a ceramic humbucker with a DC resistance of around 8.6k. Of course since the price of the instrument is so reasonable upgrading the pickup won't break the bank if you decide to go that way.

Mahogany Guitars Rule

Speaking of cost, this guitar has a very nice neck and body. That's primarily what you're buying. This is excellent mahogany (Toona Sinensis or "Tuna Sinsemilla" in my own shop slang) with a maple neck and fretboard. Normally the guitars exported from this region seem to come painted in overly-bright Hello Kitty colors, but I don't care for paint on guitars. You may have noticed the Tung Oil finish on this guitar. That brings us to another part of the puzzle.

One of my first instruments was an Aria made by Matsumoku. It had a satin finish and no matter how much I played it there were never any visible fingerprints on it. I've known guys who seemed to spend as much time polishing their instruments as playing them. Satin finishes rule. They never look dirty.

I also kind of think shiny guitars look silly, so there's that. There's something kind of Louis XIV-ish about shiny, ponce-y guitar. I see someone open up a case with a quilted AAAA top staring out at me and I can't help thinking they should be wearing a powdered wig, pointy shoes and a lace cravat.

Here's a big thing, though…those 20-coat lacquer paint jobs are thick and that thick paint dampens the resonance of the instrument. It's a big part of why cork-sniffers love the early nitrocellulose paint. It wasn't so much like wrapping your instrument in neoprene. And that's a valid way to go, but not the one I've chosen because I really liked the way satin finishes look and feel.

Oh yeah, the feel-y thing. Shiny guitars grab your skin. Those gloss finishes have a friction coefficient like glass. You're chucka-chucka-ing away and your shiny guitar suddenly friction-rapes your forearm. Now you just fell out of time with the rest of the band and looked silly in the process. If only you had a guitar with about a quarter as much friction trying to grab you. You know, like this one.

Tuna-Matic

One thing you always see on guitars using this style of body is a wraparound bridge. Now, I don’t necessarily have anything against those, but I prefer a Tune-O-Matic. You can always get the intonation just exactly right and that let’s me sleep easier at night. The earliest versions of this guitar didn’t even have saddles. They essentially just had the tailpiece from a Tune-O-Matic and you wrapped the strings around that and called it a day. OK for a student guitar, but not what I had in mind. I feel like a separate bridge and tailpiece really makes this a serious guitar. If you’ve got a thing for Bigsby-style trems, I’ve also got a few of those available at a slightly higher price.

Hardware You Can Trust

The hardware is fine, but it's not nearly as nice as the neck and body. Although it does offer locking tuners. The idea is to offer a solid deal on a guitar that sounds and plays really great right out of the box without the need to go broke in the process. That should be perfect for someone who's all about, "Hey, I wonder if a Junior might be the right way to go for me?" If you already know this is your thing then maybe you want to trick it out with some upgrades…or not.

These are just fine as they are, but the bridge and tailpiece are castings. The nut is plastic. Other than that, it's got the kind of hardware most import guitars have. Playable, but not fancy. I just want to make that clear so you aren't expecting Schallers or something. In this price range you're getting generic import hardware. It works fine. It's not like back in the 70's when you'd try to tune your Japanese wonder-axe and the tuning machine would bend if you turned it too fast. Just a big FYI for the concerned consumer. I'm doing what I can to make a good, inexpensive product, but I can't perform miracles. This guitar does have locking tuners, though. I love how fast that makes string changes.

Not Your Grandfather's Junior

By the way, as soon as I put the first one of these up for auction someone asked me if I could build one with a P-90. The kings of making these with a P-90 are still in business and still cranking out excellent guitars. They charge a lot more for them, but they make an excellent product. I'm building these because I've always felt like the Junior would be an unstoppable force of nature with a humbucker and making that happen is my raison d'être. I may eventually make one with a mini-humbucker because that's been driving my curiosity, too, but the P-90 Junior of your dreams is made in Tennessee, not Florida by way of Asia.

Oh, and for the love of all that's holy, please don't ask me if I'll make a seven or eight-string version of this for you. Or inlay a dragon fighting a gryphon on the fretboard. I see stuff like that and I want to pull out a can of Ronson lighter fluid and go all Hendrix. Not to give you my old-man advice, but it's cooler if you make sounds that leave more of an impression than the guitar you were holding. "Oh yeah, I seem to remember he was playing a Junior." Nothing up your sleeves and you still pull that rabbit out of your hat. More impressive than walking up with a $20,000 custom 8-string guitar with a AAAAA top of endangered wood that's hand-carved out of a tree that used to be growing on the lawn of Aldous Huxley. You be the center of attention. Let the guitar just be a tool you brought along. Or at least that's my philosophical intent behind building 'em.

Hard-Mounted Pickup

Anyway, back to pickups. Humbuckers were never really associated with this model, but they pair up with it extremely well. These guitars are light-bodied and made of warm-sounding mahogany without the overly-bright (and heavy) maple tops of the more expensive models. When an amp distorts the harmonics light up. The treble can really get out of control if a guitar is too bright. A nice warm tone distorts into something you can really sink your teeth into. In the late 70's Saint Edward of Nijmegen screwed a P.A.F. into an alder Strat body. In his early instrument he had a vintage trem, but in '79 when he started using locking trems he thought the alder body was too bright and came up with a black and yellow beast made of mahogany to combat the dreaded toppiness. Later he'd go to basswood (also a very warm wood sonically), but I digress.

Mahogany sounds awesome; that's the takeaway. The market has moved in odd directions in the last couple of decades. A lot of people want highly-figured wood encased in a thick finish. Those instruments may serve to somehow fill a need in a player's ego, but it's seldom if ever the path to a better-sounding guitar. Some of the best-sounding guitars are plain-Jane basswood, but in many cases tone isn't the driving force behind the instruments you see hanging up in the store. Getting back to Saint Edward, there's something else he discovered that moved mankind forward. If you screw your pickups right into the wood instead of mounting them in some kind of rings-with-springs contraption it sounds better and makes it easier to control feedback when you play in front of a loud amp. You can see that at work right here.

There are manufacturers who'll tell you that hard-mounting a pickup is a novelty that doesn't yield any audible results, but when you dangle a pickup by springs and stand in front of a really loud amplifier the pickup will begin to vibrate in ways that don't sound very appealing. Some touring musicians wedge foam in around the sides of the pickup to fight it, but why should you have to? Ever kicked an old Fender amp with a spring reverb? Hard mounting combats that tendency for the springs to do things that nobody wants to hear. If you never play louder than bedroom volumes you'll never know the difference, but for those of you who live for feedback it will completely change the character of the feedback you get.

The Bottom Line

This is the ultimate 24 3/4"-scale set-neck, solid-body, rock-and-roll machine. In my opinion, of course. It's light, comfortable, warm, loud, has a very full tone and doesn't have two pickups magnetically pulling at your strings or a body full of spaghetti from all manner of wiring sucking your tone. I honestly don't know why this instrument in the configuration I build isn't issued to every kid with disciplinary problems who's interested in rock guitar. It's designed from the ground up to rock. Besides all that, it looks absolutely awesome (in my opinion…again, your mileage may vary). I honestly don't see how you can go wrong. Of course, I like earning a living, so you probably shouldn't blindly trust me, but I'm shootin' you straight. As soon as I assembled the first one I knew. Plug it in and you'll know, too.

What's in a Name?

By the way, the name is kind of an inside joke. When I was about 11 I walked by a pawn shop and saw a no-name Made-in-Japan sunburst electric guitar in the window. They wanted $79 for it. My dad had given me a .22 rifle with a scope a few years earlier and I took it back to see if they'd trade. They swapped me the guitar for the rifle and I joked that I went from being a Gun-Man to being a Guitar-Man, but I was still a G-Man at the end of the day. So when I decided to build a Junior I couldn't help calling it a, 'Junior G-Man.'