The “Crazy Joe” Guitar

I’ve championed various instruments over the years such as the Ovation Breadwinner, G&L ASAT, and the low-impedance Gibson Les Paul Recording; but my main guitar since 2005 has been my Simmons Trifonic, built by Casey Simmons right here in Dayton, Ohio, and it's now the only electric guitar I own.*
                                                                                                  *True at time of writing; but now I also own the Simmons MK. II.

What’s so special about this guitar? Well, its most important feature by far is that it says “CRAZY JOE!” on the neck in mother-of-pearl! All kidding aside, Casey makes the best guitars I know of and he and I rigorously engineered every detail of this guitar’s design and construction, which started in late 2004. I told Casey I wanted a big, heavy, fancy, Cadillac of a guitar with my name on the fretboard and a body shape I sketched out during a particularly boring Ph.D. seminar class; Casey had his own ideas about what types of construction would be the sturdiest and have the best tone. The end result is a guitar that is truly unique and is the best I've found in terms of tone, playability, and ergonomics.

At 3rd Annual Rockin' 50's Fest, Green Bay, Wisconsin, May 2007
Image ©2007 John Hall
 

In the initial planning stages, Casey and I put a lot of thought into construction styles and how they affect the guitar's tonal response. Eventually we settled on what we call an “infinite tenon,” where the neck of the guitar extends all the way to the end of the guitar body and is glued at the bottom and sides. The main difference between this method and traditional “neck-through-the-body” construction is that the latter usually has two body “wings” glued to the sides of the full-depth neck. The Simmons method is a compromise between that and regular set-neck construction. Of note is that the strength of the joint, and theoretically the mode of vibration transfer, is derived primarily at the bottom of the neck channel. [Incidentally, Casey’s current guitars use a much deeper neck in a routed body channel, so they’re getting closer to neck-through construction; but the body is still a continuous piece underneath, which is the main difference.]

In the living room of my old apartment, Yellow Springs, Ohio, January 2006.
The Rig of Death can be seen in the background.
Image ©2006 Christopher Bell
 

We chose African black limba for the neck and white limba for the body, the latter of which Gibson used in the 1950’s for its Flying V and Explorer guitars with the trade name “Korina”. These woods are not particularly dense, but when used in a solidbody guitar 1-3/4” deep (like a Gibson Les Paul Junior) and 16” wide (the same as a Gibson ES-335!), the result is not exactly a lightweight; the guitar weighs close to 13 pounds. In contrast to the majority of folks who swear by light, resonant guitars, I actually prefer the clean, sustaining, even tone that you can only get with high mass. The neck is extremely large and has a very pronounced “V” shape. The 12"-radius fingerboard and headstock overlay are both unstained Madagascar ebony.
 

The electronics are truly my specialty and represent lots of experimental tweaking. I chose three G&L ASAT "MFD" pickups for their very clean, wide-bandwidth "hi-fi" sound; and because I used them for many years. The MFD design uses a ferrite bar magnet underneath the coil and large threaded steel polepiece inserts that, according to Lindy Fralin of Fralin Pickups fame, results in an efficient magnetic field geometry somewhere between traditional alnico slugs and steel polepiece screws. The neck pickup is stock, the reverse-angled middle pickup is a stock ASAT bridge pickup, and the bridge pickup is an ASAT neck pickup modified by Lindy for a louder, more robust sound. Rather than simply re-wind the pickup with thinner wire, Lindy actually lengthened the bobbin, changing the coil geometry and allowing more turns without excessively increasing inductance. The result is a punchy, clear-sounding bridge pickup with the solidarity of a steel guitar, exactly what I was looking for. The wiring circuitry is top-secret, but I will reveal the use of Clarostat conductive-plastic sealed pots, a gold-flashed silver-contact ceramic wafer switch, and Teflon-insulated, silver-plated hookup wire.

I insisted on the Bigsby vibrato. The guitar’s bridge was originally a “badass”-style wraparound tailpiece anchored to the body with locking studs, but I replaced it in June 2008 with a roller bridge I designed and had machined by Larry Whalen at YSI in Yellow Springs, Ohio (courtesy of Vince Hayes). Roller bridges are often criticized, but the German-made ABM saddles used in mine have particularly good bearings and that seems to make all the difference. The bridge is screwed directly into the body of the guitar using shims to set the action. Tuners are Sperzel TrimLoks, proudly made in Cleveland.

At my kitchen table in Enon, Ohio, January 2008.
The Merle Travis Bigsby assembly didn't last long - I hated that thing.
Image ©2008 Joe Tritschler
 

The guitar has all kinds of cosmetic goodies, like a German carve to the front and back of the body, real nitrocellulose finish and tortoise-grained cellulose nitrate bindings and, best of all…nut and “horn-protectors” made of fossilized wooly mammoth bones! The pickguard and armrest were originally polished aluminum, but these were replaced with .125” solid cellulose nitrate tortoise in 2006. The medium-sized frets were dressed extra low at my request by Casey.

My good ol' buddy Ryan Bussey.  Most of my old G&L's
passed through his hands... sometimes more than once!
I believe he helped shovel my driveway that day in March 2008.
Image ©2008 Joe Tritschler
 

The guitar once held perfect tuning for three weeks straight on tour with Deke Dickerson and has been remarkably reliable except for one major incident in early 2007. Coming back from Deke’s Guitar Geek Festival in Anaheim, California in January, United Airlines managed to drop the guitar so violently that it severely cracked the peghead and the neck-to-body joint under the neck pickup. Repaired by Mark Kaiser at Fret Repair in Franklin, Ohio, the guitar is as good as new and there was no significant change in tone. (Guess it travels in its road case from now on…take a bow, United.)
 

So how did I meet Casey Simmons? In the summer of 1999, when I was still an electrical engineering undergraduate student at Wright State University, I had put a Hammond M-3 organ up for sale in the local Tradin’ Post (remember the days before eBay and craigslist?). He and a friend came and bought it, we exchanged numbers and jammed a few times together. He was only one year out of high school at the time. We basically lost contact until 2004, when he called me up asking for help wiring a guitar he’d built; I said sure, come on over. What he brought over was stunning. I kept asking him again and again, “you built this?” The binding, fretboard and headstock inlays, finish work, fret detailing…all were just amazing, and the guitar played like butter and sounded fantastic. [I later bought this guitar...click here.] I asked him if he’d consider building me a guitar and he said this one was only his second, but he’d certainly try. We started hashing out the Trifonic immediately thereafter. Casey is now in Restoration at the National Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, doing upholstery, machining and finish work on B-29’s and the like. He plans to start building guitars again in early 2010.