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"
Thank you for your interest in my guitars and your kind words. I know that if I were serious about making real money with Girlbrand Guitars I would focus on one or two models and start churning them out in quantity. I hope to settle down and do that someday, but for now, I just can't help making each one different from the one before. Which isn't to say that they don't fall into a few large catagories.
The necks are a traditional combination of hard Maple with Ebony or Cocabolo fingerboards. I like the Cocabolo because the reds and oranges are so much more attractive and the figure more interesting than the brownish\purplish Indian Rosewood so often used for fingerboards nowdays. Bodies are anodized aluminum, sometimes colored in the anodizing process and sometimes left just aluminum though the anodizing gives the metal a more Nickle look. There is a core of Cedar or Redwood or Bass. The backs are usually Phenolic or Formica over Birch plywood. And the tops are whatever pops into my head. Early models used Formica/Nevamar stuff (The Greg Morton, the Yellow Top), with linen and canvas phenolics later (the model Meredith Brooks is holding on her CD cover) which had a wonderful tendancy to age rapidly to dark pumpkin orange shades. Then came the Metal Tops using rusted steel, galvanized, copper corroded with uncorroded design areas, and your favorite, galvanzed steel with the Zinc selectively eaten away and left to rust under compost. I have even, when bored, made some with fancy wood tops, Birdseye and Burl, but that's the very sort of thing I wanted to get away from. I do however , like the wood top on the Speedboat model, in that it was inspired by those ChrisCraft speedboats of the 30's, a sort of Dunhill, Abercrombie and Fitch look I would like to do more with. I've managed to find some of the original wavy plastic drum material that Rickenbacher used on their Lighshow models way back when and I intend to do a couple of lightshow Girls (Hippie Girl?) when I have time for the rather complicated color organ electronics.
Pickups, which I build from scratch, are designed by Dave Schecter, somewhat of a legend (underground and aboveground) in guitar electronics design, who, though his mind is occupied by more profound matters nowdays, still sends me some of the ideas that fly from his brain as the sparks fly upwards. The current system uses a pair of hand built transformers which (when engaged) add midrange and low end beef to the traditionally bright edgy single coil tone. The idea is to give you Fender and Gibson tone and combinations. The 3-way pickup selector switch (lead- rythym\lead-rythym) plus the three tone taps for each pickup add up to fifteen pre-set tones before you ever touch the tone pot. I keep intending to put in a in-phase/out-phase switch which would add I think another nine tones, but it seems just one switch too many.
Hard to say why exactly I chose Girl for a guitar name. I usually say that it's because guitars, like boats are always female (ref.- Lucille), and one can take that pretty far, but really I think that "girl" is just such a terrificly "loaded" word. A word that's so general and yet so powerfully specific. All models to this date have carried the "Homegirl" decal, as I have been too lazy to get others printed up. But I am looking forward to "Badgirl", "Cowgirl", "Societygirl", "Sailorgirl" and , of course, "Geishagirl". I am happy for any suggestions. Chris Larsen"
Some info on Girlbrand.
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