And now for something completely different (Dr. Teeth Bass)

We all have our guilty pleasures. Mine is Top 40 Radio and pointy guitars.

I had bought a surf green Stratocaster a couple years ago, mainly because I loved the way it looked. I don't really play much guitar but I hoped that this guitars allure would be the incentive I needed to move up to 6 strings instead of 4. Something about the sickly, sunbaked green and the tortoise shell pickguard was such an amazing color combination in my mind that I started thinking about all the short comings of the instrument itself and what I expected it to be just from its appearance. Something about the sarcastic weirdness of that color scheme got me thinking about how to make it even more weird and fun.

I love BC Rich shapes, some of them at least. Neal Moser designed a lot of their 80's pointy metal shapes and continues to maintain his own Custom Shop making high end, souped up versions of his original BC Rich designs.

 Bernie Rico aka BC Rich>>>

His designs are so over the top and intense that BC Rich has basically turned itself from the company Bernie Rico started into a niche market for the metal community. Unfortunately, these shapes are so stylized and dramatic that they never really made it past being a stage prop which is unfortunate.

As a two dimensional design, a lot of Moser's designs were very beautiful and elegant (in their own evil way). There are so many guitars in the world that glaze over the defining lines of the the shape of the body, which makes sense because in the case of these pointy metal guitars, they don't make a comfortable and erogonomic translation to a three dimensional object. Regardless BC Rich designs continue to hold a special place in my heart. I own a Beast bass that I added extra strings to to make it an 8 string. But something about that green Strat was still calling my name.

A personal dilemma I find myself faced with as a luthier and as a guy who loves to buy guitars is "Should I buy this or should I make this?" With cheap-o weirdness that appears in flea markets and Ebay listings, the unique appeal of certain instruments can't be passed up; a patch of crazing here, a big patch of paint missing there.. a ridiculous sticker or phrase scrawled on the back.. There's a reason many companies have jumped on the road worn craze - an instrument that has been loved and lived in invites you to play it and to use it. I've bought my fair share of guitars that fall into this category, almost all based on looks.

In this process of collecting weird crap, my brain collects a layers of residual feelings towards all these strange specimens that I hope to imbue into my own instruments. At a certain point it will inspire a new shape or an idea for a hardware modification but this time my brain said, "You need to make the ugliest, coolest thing" So I started with a list of adjectives that would define some parameters for how this thing would look. I came up with this :

All good ingredients for any guitar, right?

So here we have it. My Green Hilarious Pointy Muppet guitar. I wanted all my favorite things on it, Here are some specs.

Quartersawn Maple Neck, Ebony Fretboard with Mutant Inlay, Handpainted Dr. Teeth Headstock, Hipshot Ultralite Bass Tuners, Grover Rotomatic guitar tuners, Tusq Nut, Medium/Medium Fretwire, Mahogany Body, Tortoise B/W/B Binding, Mystery brand 8 String Bridge, Cruiser P-Bass Pickups, Ibanez Iceman Minihumbucker, Seymour Duncan SMB4d, 6 Way rotary switch and a 3 way coil selector for the Seymour Duncan Musicman Pickup. 34" Scale