Your Guitars: Andy's "Les Pew"

Regular readers will realise by now that I get a lot of mileage out of EBay finds on this here blog. Another good place to find unusual and individual guitars, of course, is Myspace. Today I'm featuring a guitar built by one of my MySpace friends, Andy. I'll let him tell you all about it:

When my local church decided to remove the Victorian pews from their building I bought one for my kitchen but they only came in seven foot lengths, so I decided to shorten it to fit into my cottage but what would I do with the remaining wood? Being an amateur guitar maker after making a 12 string semi at a adult education course I had toyed with idea of building the body of a guitar from one but didn't think that pine was a suitable tone wood, but with reassurance from a luthier on the internet I went ahead.

I was keen to leave the original finish on the back and front, the top is the back rest of the pew and the back the seat.

I'm not exactly a conventional player as I love electrics but play with my fingers (no, I'm not Jeff Beck) it's just that I don't get on with electro-acoustics and prefer the longer sustain you get from an electric guitar. So I decided to build a semi but a 14th fret neck-body join to aid tone/stability. The headstock is a visual clue to it's more traditional past existence.

The tone is incredible! I guess somewhere between an acoustic and a telecaster, very full and warm yet defined and crisp. Pine is a wonderful tone wood, I can see this being my main guitar.

I'm looking forward to playing it in the building that it's already spent 150 years in!

Apparently Andy had some pine left over from the church pew he bought, and he'd now building himself a Rocket-shaped headless bass guitar of his own design. I'm going to keep watching to see how that one turns out.

Andy's Guitars MySpace Page