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My name is Jake from the band JEFF The Brotherhood. This is my weirdo guitar. It was built- let's
start from there- it was built by Dave Johnson who has a little guitar shop in his attic,
called Scale Model Guitars. Its the 43rd guitar he's made. There's the serial number there.
And I guess we've got to go back to the beginning. When I first started playing guitar in this
band I didn't really know how to play 6 strings, I didn't take lessons or anything like that.
Me and my brother just wanted to play simple punk songs so I had this really cool Dean
Hollywood Z guitar, my first guitar, that my Dad bought me at a guitar show for like
90 bucks I think. And I somehow broke the nut and I could only put the 2 strings on
there. So I had an acoustic string and an electric string, both in tuned to the same
note and I guess my idea was I don't have to tune anything and all I had to do was do
that... you can play chords on it. And it was much easier to learn the guitar that way. And eventually
I added the third string to make more complicated chords to do, you know, stuff like that. And
once we realised, once we started touring as a two piece band, like touring the United
States and stuff, I had this sxxxxx Ibanez, like $200 guitar centre guitar with
3 strings on it... We tried to get like... Its really hard if its just 2 people, you
get a low end beefy sound. I've seen a lot of 2 piece bands with just guitar and drums
and you just can't hear the guitar, all you can hear is drums. I think there's two main things.
If you eliminate all the high strings you're not mucking up the sound, you just get powerful
chords. That's all you really need. If you want to do some lead stuff you can get up
pretty high still. Another thing is you've got to keep that hi-hat tight. You can't keep
an open hi-hat because its just too loud. I learned that from the Velvet Underground.
For a long time they didn't even play with cymbals because they just muck up... you know.
Don't give enough room for the guitar to be loud. We're all about loud guitars.
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I toured with that Ibanez 3 string for about 5 and a half years or so, until it got stolen
out of the band with a bunch of other sxxx. Which is kind of sad because... I took the
tuning picks out of those, I don't think you could sell it or anything. It was a piece
of sxxx. It was just a wreck, you know? So I had to get a... I had just started talking
to Dave about getting this, and he had luckily already copied the neck style. This was like...
He had emailed me on Myspace a long time ago when Myspace was still... He emailed the band
or messaged the band on Myspace and said he was moving to town and wanted to build a guitar
for me. But at the time I was broke of course, so when I got some money we kinda of revisited
the idea and started designing this guy. The neck is basically exactly the same neck as
the Ibanez gutiar because I got so used to playing it. Just with different types of wood
and stuff. I don't know too much about wood so I can't really... I think that's like a
cherry wood right? I don't know... Its black, its all dark, its got some nice... I don't
know what you call that colour. Anyways, I always wanted an SG because I think SGs are
the most baddass looking shape of guitar, so I told him I wanted an SG body. We looked
at, we just kind of took a stencil of the SG body and put the neck on it, then looked
at a bunch of different head styles and I thought this one looked the coolest. And it
worked really good for having this configuration of machine heads. This design here is taken
from the Firebird also. And that's taken from a classic SG pick guard. This was my idea,
just to have a chrome plate with just the input and the volume and that's it. The pickup
was wound by a guy named Lynn is Nashville who is like a master pickup builder, to have
half a pickup, which is one of my favourite parts of it because its custom. We wanted
to get this stuff filled in and recrowned, but maybe someday when I'm rich I can do that.
Dave is also a master inlayer so he did mother of pearl JEFF The Brotherhood. Another one
of my favourite features. My favourite, favourite, favourite thing about this guitar though is
the tuning... The tuning thingies here. I like to get kind of rowdy, our crowds get
real rowdy, we jump in the crowd and stuff and people jump on stage. When you're playing
just guitar and drums, and if one tune peg gets bumped and one string goes out of tune
- especially on a 3 string guitar - you can't, you know, you've got to stop the song and
retune or its going to sound horrible. So we got these tuning pegs that tune from the
back. And they're real tight, so you can run around and bump into everything with them.
And you can change the strings really fast on them too. The just unscrew and you stick
the string in, tighten it down and clip it off. They're awesome. I don't even know what
they are but I told him that was an issue and he was like, "Oh well what about these?".
And they work perfectly. Its really cool if you look at it like this. You can see all
the guts. You can look at it from the back. I was going to play a show naked in this because
you can see my penis through the guitar, which would be funny. This strap is actually handmade
too by a company in Chicago called Soldier. They're a cool company. Its made out of a
seatbelt. This is actually a scrap of xxxx from the xxxx in Chicago. Dave's from Chicago,
he used to have a shop in Chicago. That's pretty much it. That's the guitar. I just
had them build two six string versions of it for the expanded second half of our set,
where it's two guitars and a keyboard player. I tune it to drop D, and then the six string
ones are drop C sharp. Grunge tuning.
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