The first in the Zodiak series commissioned by collector John Teti. Carved and painted maple body with an ash top and a maple and mahogany neck with inlaid ebony on the headstock. Inlaid mother of pearl stars on the body mark the constellation and mother of pearl Aries glyphs mark the neck positions. Grover Imperial tuners, combination bridge/tailpiece, and a single Carvin pickup round out the hardware.
Back before the dot com bubble popped, the guy that had previously bought Mona from me asked me to build one guitar for each sign of the Zodiac. It was a great chance for me and I learned a lot. With this project I committed to building necks with headstock designs specifically integrating into the full picture and to trying to totally maximize the visual snap of the instrument. Not that I mastered those things. A couple months after I got going, the bubble popped and The Man decided to sink his money into something else. I’m still grateful for the little luxury this gave me to stretch my skills, upgrade my shop, and try to work with someone else’s demons instead of just mine.
His intention wasn’t even to play these, but I set them up to be playable anyway. I kept the layout minimal—a single pickup painted into the design, and a single control pot and a bridge/tailpiece with the smallest profile. The neck inlays were a small step, but would have been graded “could use improvement”. The large wood inlays on the headstocks are good though.
Aries went through several stages in look with the buyer wanting red red firey red, which it took a while to sink in. (I’d borrowed a book on zodiac symbols from the library, but they were interpreting Southeast Asian symbols instead of the more Western described signs. This caused a bit of confusion.) The pictures of the final state aren’t that great, but the look is indeed more powerful.