Alejandro Escovedo's Les Paul

Alejandro asked me to build him a guitar like a Les Paul Custom only lighter and better to play on stage. This guitar would be traveling a lot and needed to be rugged. I built him a guitar basically off my jigs for making a late 50's Les Paul Standard. It is slightly thinner and the Maple top is only 1/2" thick over the mahogany back. The neck is stiffened with carbon fiber to give it added stability and a more articulate tone.  He played it a lot and decided the humbuckers didn't really work with his rig. He brought me some records with the tone he was after on them. We listened and eventually we found some Dearmond Pickups from the 60's that have all the aggressive tone we were looking for. I fabricated some plates to mount them in the humbucker rings and wired them up. It looks like this:

The headstock inlay art is a representation of Al's tattoo, he uses this art a lot as his mark.



More Photos of Joe Walsh's Esquire

 The Callaham bridge chosen has 3 brass saddles, machined for proper intonation.

 The height of the Dearmond suits the string height of the standard Fender geometry, It mounts flat against the body. I used low profile metal knobs.

 I like using large dots. Dim lights and aging eyes make it a necessity.

 I had some new decals made, Lincoln Durham did the art. The tuners are Schaller locking as per Joe's request.

A simple, no-nonsense guitar. Simplicity has its place in design and functionality. This guitar used only a few parts which makes it look rudimentary. Closer inspection shows that each one was chosen carefully and the end product is suitably refined.

Joe Walsh's Esquire

I met Joe Walsh working as guitar tech for him. He flew in to do Ray Wylie Hubbard's Grit and Groove fest and I helped get the guitar related gear in order. At the end of that week Joe Asked me to buid him an Esquire with a P-90 instead of the standard Fender style pickup. We talked and ended up using a vintage Dearmond pickup instead. He liked it enough to use it for photos promoting his current tour. Here are some photos of the results

This is the Callaham bridge I hacked to make room for the Dearmond Pickup. It was designed to be a soundhole acoustic guitar pickup. It is very shallow and requires no routing of the body.

I chose a highly flamed piece of maple for the neck. It is reinforced with carbon fiber truss rods.

It ended up looking like this. I front mounted the controls and made a thin pickguard from phenolic resin, it looks like bakelite.

The back has a control cover, recessed string ferrules and a thick stainless steel neck-plate.