Meet Blondie. This guitar features a nicely figured curly maple top over an alder body. The neck is figured maple. The scale length is 25.5” with a hard tail bridge. It has a decorative cocobolo stripe inlaid into the top to carry the line of the cocobolo fingerboard. I kept the neck a bit fatter than usual on this one. It has a beefy, Gibson style, baseball bat feel to it.  

The electronics feature two hand wound JeSTone P90 pickups. Controls are pretty simple: a three way toggle, volume and tone. I wound the pickups with fewer turns than standard P90s. While I love the P90 growl, they tend to be very noisey and a bit out of control The standard wind is 10,000 turns; I used 8000 and 9000 turns on the neck and bridge pickups, respectively. This gives a nice balance between two pickups. To me the reason to use single coil pickups is to produce a sound with clarity and articulation. Cuting back on the turns does this.

I also used a grounded copper shield around the pickups for noise rejection - you can't completely eliminate single coil hum, but this cuts back on some of it. I am very pleased with the final product. In my opinion, the pickups sound great. They have a nice clean sound with just a bit of edge that can drive an amp at higher gain. The P90s will work great for blues and old-timey rock and roll.

This is finished with what has become my favorite finish, hand rubbed polymerized tung oil. This finish produces a very thin (if you are worried about the impact of finish on acoustic properties, this is minimum) satin finish. This is a very eco-friendly finish. It is applied by hand, not sprayed. There is minimal waste.

This guitar is all about elegant simplicity. I like it!