Gender Bender Custom Jazzmaster Collaboration

This has been a passion project for a good few months now and I’m delighted that it has finally seen the light of day.

I met Murray when he attended the Cole Coatings Workshop Introduction to Paint course a couple of years ago. He’s a serial hobbyist and a tool nut with an experimental bent and an eye for detail, so we obviously get on well!

Knowing what my skillset is, Murray asked me to refinish a guitar body for a personal project he was undertaking. I obliged and in the spirit of skill sharing, agreed to do it in exchange for a guitar body of my own. Murray took it upon himself not only to make me a body but also to hand-carve and fret the neck, and the results just blew my mind.

Given that I was planning on painting over it, we invested little in speciality wood for the body and simply plumped for poplar based mostly on its comparatively low cost; important in an experiment. I did a couple of tests with staining the white flesh of the body to see how the grain would absorb pigment and loved the way it looked so much, I ended up staining the whole thing; body, neck, headstock, and swerved paint entirely.

The neck is maple with a lush quilted fretboard, a luxury version of the style I’ve been accustomed to on telecasters throughout my playing career. The fretboard has been left unfinished and only given an oil treatment. This will require upkeep to maintain the condition of the wood but that’s a trade-off for the natural feel of the wood when compared to contemporary high gloss fretboards on off-the-peg instruments.

There’s little by way of flourish in the finish overall but there are a couple of subtleties… I used a fineline edging tape to give the appearance of binding on the neck; the chrome neck plate has been media-blasted and emblazoned with a graphic from a beloved and timeless guitar album (cool points if you know it), and the headstock has a four-colour Fender-style spoof graphic I designed and dusted on with an airbrush. The whole thing has been buried in clearcoat before polishing - the only way I really know how! The overall look of silver coloured hardware against purple tinged grain is complimented by the organic one-of-a-kind custom ‘Pink Fantasia’ scratchplate, cut by Murray to Fender dimensions.

Following a dry-fit assembly, the guitar went to Providence in Peckham for a proper setup, new nut, Gabriel Tenorio strings and honestly, it feels and plays great. The pickups sound massive through an AC30; I’ll get sound samples together soon enough.

Historically, I’ve only ever played telecasters. I’ve dabbled with other things but teles always stuck because I liked the sound, the looks and the simplicity. Having said that, many of my guitar heroes are offset players and this has made me covet them for a long time… Robert Smith, Tom Verlaine, Kurt Cobain, all of Sonic Youth, Jessica Dobson, Troy Van Leeuwen, Kevin Shields, Thom Yorke, Johnny Marr, Elvis Costello etc. I chose a Jazz over a Jag because of the scale length and in terms of the build, I used the best I could afford on the hardware with some consideration for aesthetics. If I’m being totally honest, it’s too good a guitar for me; I’ve got a £400 Squier level of ability and this is an instrument with far more maturity, style and detail than I can demonstrate in my playing. That said, it was a concept piece themed around the expression of my thoughts and feelings and importantly, my gender identity through playing music; one of the few times I can feel truly free and as myself and take pleasure from that, so the making of it was just as important as the playing of it is now that it’s been realised. I got stuck in so I could see what I could create with an unfamiliar substrate, and it has given a huge boost in confidence, so much so that there’ll be more custom guitars appearing here imminently and I’m taking requests for custom finishes now. Murray would love to build more custom guitars, and body blanks are cheap if you want to go that route. Get in my DMs.

Ian x