I'm lucky enough in my full-time gig to have exposure to and to get to know some pretty cool people. One of those people is Herb Perez who won the gold medal in Taekwondo in the '92 Olympic games in Barcelona. That in and of itself would make him pretty cool, but Herb is also a lawyer, mayor of the town in which he lives, and a darn fine guitar player as well. A bit of an underachiever you might say...
Herb happened to hear about my guitar building exploits through another of the folks I work with, and I happened to have a guitar in my office one day when he stopped by HQ for a visit. He picked it up, played, and ordered one on the spot. That was a little over a year ago.
As his build spot got closer, we emailed back and forth to get all the details nailed down and ended up with an offset made from pine from the International Harvester building that was built in downtown OKC in the 1920s. It was an impressive piece of lumber that was perfectly suited to the shou sugi ban finish technique we were going to do.
With him being an Olympic gold medalist, I wanted to include a couple of special touches: gold knobs and a special Olympic ring inlay on the back of the headstock.
Here are the specs:
- Maple neck
- Rosewood fretboard
- 100 year old pine body
- Hand-wound PAF neck pickup
- Hand-wound noiseless Tele bridge pickup
- CTS pots
- Switchcraft switch
- Gotoh modern mini tuners
