2025 - Hardly any hope!

73 – Damn!

Damn, I'll be turning 73 in June this year. I'm already the oldest person at many tables. It's a rather uneasy feeling, you're in a constant state of anxiety that something might happen to your health. Well, of course, at 20, you could just as easily be walking out of the house and a roof tile could fall on your head.

Les Paul & Tele - Bender

See you soon in Los Angeles at NAMM!

Trans Tremola

Les Trem on Dean Zelinsky!

göldo SL-Tuner

It's about time! Design, refinements, technology: here they are, our brand new, half-open, very own SL tuners. We hope they cause a stir at NAMM in Los Angeles in January!

A nice new arrival!

Marco Ballestri describes in his book about Wandré that Mr. Pioli was inspired to create this body shape when he observed his urine (very medically expressed!) for a while while peeing, as it passed the toilet seat and dripped into the toilet bowl.

Memphis-Design

Oh, how beautiful! Three designs by my friend Roland Hauke, Vienna – Memphis style. This has always been one of my favorite furniture designs. Take a look here: https://www.hauke-instruments.com/

And another new arrival:

Built 38 years ago and now bought back - a Duesenberg Starplayer from 1987, multi-color “dreadlook” sanded paint job. A real eye-catcher next to my Lady and the Di Donato-Custom!

Even more crazy - the Bond Electraglide - 1985

Instead of frets, these ascending “stairs”, all made of carbon fiber and active with power supply and stereo cable. An innovation that was ahead of its time, but not absolutely necessary. I have it now. Who knows if that was the right decision? Definitely better: the Duesenberg James Bond Paloma!

My old dream is coming true after all!

As an old Les Paul Junior and P-90 fan, I've always wanted to reproduce this sound as perfectly as possible. There are replicas of these guitars, but unfortunately they are all too heavy. Here we have finally managed to bring this legendary sound back to life, with its incredible response and light weight. Our new Duesenberg (still a secret!) sounds even better to me, more open than the original. And according to various voices, this 57 here is one of the very best ever built!

Sitarizing

The time has come again, sitar sound on the Tele! Three tiltable, scale-compensated brackets made of ultra-hard, glass fiber-reinforced plastic. I'm certainly by no means the Indian master when it comes to producing this effect. But it rumbles and buzzes very typically, doesn't it?

Interestingly, the sitar sound can also be deactivated for each pair of strings by unscrewing the front grub screw and then tilting the trestle downwards. On the right are the two outer bumps without sitar function. And all three bumps down = Tele “normal” without sitar sound! And this super hard plastic provides excellent vibration transmission, see “graphtech”.

Marco Nobach

Oh Marco, what would I do without you!

Marco works as a mechanic/precision engineer in a factory that manufactures connecting elements, mostly from stainless steel or titanium. Marco is also an old-school guitarist and, many years ago, not only had the idea of a trans tremolo based on the “Bigsby,” but actually made it a reality.

Last year, I returned to one of my ideas from 2017, a tremolo with a thick axis that has a notch for each string to modify its deflection depending on the string gauge (see here in chapter 2017). But even after several prototypes, the transification was still not as precise as I had hoped. So how could I determine the exact insertion depths for the E, A, D, G, and B strings, and ensure that it would still sound harmonious in a two-tone range, at least for strings 010 to 050 and 010 to 046, when the lever was pushed up or down?

This is where Marco came into play, whom I still remembered from back then and spontaneously called after a forensic search for his phone number. Of course, he still had the “project” on his guitar, basically the same technology as mine, but that was it, no further commercialization on his part. I described my specifications to him, such as axle diameter, string gauges, etc., and this ingenious precision engineering freak explained to me that he had calculated the insertion depths pretty accurately back then. Well, in a job like that, math is essential, but it's rather foreign to me.

So this genius Marco not only set about calculating all the values according to Duesenberg's specifications using his system, but also manufactured this shaft on the high-tech CNC company lathe (private botch job = outside working hours). We gave him a white Duesenberg TV-Phonic to work on, and the result was amazing. Wonderful tremolo harmony within more than 4 semitones, all built into our traditional tremolo housing.

And now we have a new project in the works, the first true wrap-around torsion tremolo. With Marco's help and ideas, it's going to be a really awesome tremolo!


Thanks to Trump, the Americans are losing money on the dollar, but they can continue to export their guitars etc. to Europe with zero customs duties, while our guitars are subject to 15% duty there. Thank you and congratulations, Ursula von der Leyen!