I love old guitars: They sound better, look cooler, and have character and vibe that a shiny, glossy, new guitar does not have. With a new guitar, I always worried about scratching, denting, and banging it up on the road. Problem is, old, vintage guitars are expensive, to say the least. And you don't necessarily want to customize a vintage guitar or even take it out on the road for risk of being stolen or destroyed (the road, the stage, and airlines are rough on guitars and other instruments). THE SOLUTION: have a custom- built guitar that looks vintage, sounds vintage, yet has modern gear for better tone and intonation, and is replaceable in the case of the common road casualties, without the expense of a vintage instrument.

I always loved the old telecaster butterscotch blackguards, you know, Haggard played one; so did Springsteen and Keith Richards. So I went to see Mario Martin at Guitar Mill in Murfreesboro, TN. After sitting down and telling him about my dream guitar, he went to work building it.

The tele body has a semi-transparent butterscotch finish using nitrocellulose lacquer (this is the stuff they used back in the old days... the resonance is better and the lacquer ages like the vintage instruments as well, darkening and yellowing with time and developing small harmless cracks and checks in the lacquer that is common with vintage guitars. Mario has a special process to speed up the aging of lacquer. He ages the hardware as well. The front pickup has a mini- humbucker and the bridge pickup is a standard tele pickup. The bridge has piezo pickups in the saddle so that the guitar sounds just like an acoustic when they are activated! This is a high-tech, new, "old" guitar. The custom neck is a v- neck like the old martin acoustic guitars. It is road friendly- and looks great! I have been taking it out on the road and I love it!