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- Each year, the master builder
has to create a true one off.
Sometimes, it falls into place like "The Trees".
I had the wood.
I found out about the offset.
Acoustasonic.
It was perfect.
The Celine one.
The Stratocaster one.
I was sitting in a bar
and I met the guy next to me,
that fell into place.
This just kinda came naturally.
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I always wanted to build a resonator,
especially at Fender,
and it just seemed like it was the time.
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Aloha! I'm Ron Thorn.
Master Builder at the Fender custom shop,
here to show off my Hawaiian Dream resonator telecaster.
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Why Hawaii?
I love Hawaii.
My favorite place on Earth.
I'm pretty sure I'm gonna end up there
at some point in time in my life.
I love it.
Love the culture.
Love the beauty.
The musical heritage.
That's right there.
And slide steel guitars is a big part of it.
Plus koa, one of my favorite tone woods comes from Hawaii.
In fact, it's the only place it grows on Earth,
is in Hawaii.
So, combining all those passions and love
into one instrument,
which is gonna be challenging
and also allows me to utilize what skills I have.
Inlay.
Building.
Engraving.
Seem like a good canvas to do what I can do.
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Typically, resonators are a steel body.
A completely steel body.
Be it brass or nickel silver.
That's the most common
although there's lots of wood bodied ones, too.
But traditionally,
a resonator or a tricone is a steel bodied instrument.
Before the electric guitar came to be,
a guitarist in bands were competing with louder instruments.
Be it horns,
piano,
you name it.
Everything was louder than the acoustic guitar
at that point in time.
So, there was a few attempts made to make a guitar louder
and one of them was essentially creating a speaker
inside the body of the guitar
and the cone being driven by the strings
acting as the speaker cone
projecting the sound out of it.
It worked for a few years
before electric guitar came to be.
But of course, the resonator is still living strong.
Even today.
A hundred years later.
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All right, the Hawaiian Dream.
Starting with the neck,
it's quarter sawn koa.
Even the skunk stripe is koa.
Has an inlay within an inlay on the headstock.
I first inlaid African Blackwood,
the Fender logo slightly oversized,
and then repocketed it
for the gold mother-of-pearl Fender logo.
So, it looks like a traditional Fender decal
that has a black outline,
but instead it's gold mother-of-pearl
with a very thin African Blackwood outline.
And then a set neck,
not too often found on Fenders
but I love doing it.
And I figured it would just be a little odd
having these long, long neck bolt holding it together
so why not pick some koa that matches
and blend the heel in.
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To match with the fretboard,
I went with traditional tuners in black.
Move into the body,
solid koa,
one inch thicker than a traditional telecaster,
with a nice book-matched, curly koa back,
with the bird-of-paradise sound holes.
It's completely chambered out,
minus a cone ring to where it
the cone is suspended on.
It comes in off the side and it is supported
but this is all hollow underneath here.
Little bit of wood here to support the pickup.
The top is 50,000 thick brass,
which is hand engraved and then bronze plated.
Traditionally, this would be chrome or nickel.
I wanted to do bronze
just to match the the goldeness,
the warm neutral colors of the rest of the woods.
So finding bronze plater was a challenge.
It took two different plating companies
before I found one that was willing to work with me
on getting just the color just right.
And it's starting to patina a little bit still
so I can't wait to see this in 20 years.
It's probably gonna look gorgeously aged.
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The neck pickup is our own magical gold foil pickup.
I removed the cover and had it plated bronze also.
The cone is a hand spun, national biscuit style cone
with a maple biscuit
with the piezo element underneath.
This is a Highlander preamp system.
It's an active preamp
so there's a couple batteries in there.
It allows it to blend both pickups.
You can either have just the piezo,
just the neck,
or a combination of both,
in which case then you can blend the two individually,
and then there's a master volume controlling both of them.
The inlays are all Hawaiian flowers.
Each position marker is a different Hawaiian flower
so I had to do some research on that.
Figure out what are some of the popular ones
and get the materials right.
There's quite a variety of mother-of-pearl,
black mother-of-pearl,
gold mother-of-pearl,
abalone,
and even some reconstituted stone.
Some orange spiny.
Some Jade.
And a few of them I even add
a little bit of micro engraving on there
to give it some depth
and some shadow
and some detail to the flowers.
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This is a palm rest
that prevents your hand from laying on the strings
which then essentially mutes the cone from moving
'cause it moving like a speaker.
So, it's a palm rest
so that you're not dampening the strings
or the cone essentially.
It's made out of stabilized koa,
which is you take the wood
and you impregnated it with acrylic in a vacuum chamber
so all the pores and all the cells
get filled with plastic
and it becomes a plasticized wood.
So it's very durable.
Can be machine thin
and not risk being crack or fall apart.
I've inlaid this brass ribbon on there
and I've engraved it with "Lono Haili Moe",
which is essentially the King's dream
or the King's fantasy,
so it seemed appropriate to name this the "Hawaiian Dream".
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I would love to see this end up in Hawaii, of course.
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Only one place on earth where this tree grows.
That's amazing.
And it's such a beautiful, beautiful species.
Even when there's no figure,
it's just it has this inner glow,
chatoyancy going on.
And then when you get it figured,
it's absolutely beautiful.
There's no wood that looks like that.
It's so gorgeous.
And only one place.
It's amazing.
Yeah, I would love to see this end up back there.
Back in the islands.
Yeah, send it home.
Send it home!
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