-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.19 N.6 April 2018 7

“Nacho Baños of Valencia, Spain, noted specialist in all-things-Fender from the inception through the first five years and beyond, has created a fine line of custom built Spanish electric guitars that are nearly beyond description. Nacho’s attention to detail captures exactly the essence of what Leo Fender started over 70 years ago. The sound and style of a Nacho guitar is sheer genius.”—Billy F. Gibbons

Nacho Baños builds his own unique collec-tion of vintage Telecaster reproductions, and every guitar he builds is unique in terms of the remark-ably realistic aging he cre-

ates. To see a Nacho Telecaster is to behold the most artfully inspired vintage reproduction ever created. There is simply none finer in existence, and we doubt there will ever be. So enjoy the following interview with Nacho as he describes his aged Telecaster reproductions.

TQR: When did you first become interested in the guitar?

I have always been a musical person. My grandpa was a violin teacher and my grand uncle was a famous composer in the 1930-40s in Spain. I must’ve had something in my genes. Ever since I can remember I was the happy sing-along kid to the music I heard on the radio. During the late 1960-70s we used to take never ending trips with the whole family in the car and my dad always had music playing. In the mid ‘70s I remember one of my brother’s school friends had an electric guitar and I looked at him with reverence. I finally started playing guitar in 1981 when I was 15 years old, mainly strum-ming chords to accompany myself while singing. I loved Elvis and 1950s rock and roll.

TQR: Did you play in bands, and what kinds of music appealed to you most?

Right out of high school in 1984 I got together with a couple friends and we started playing. My main guitar was a D28 style Yamaha and I had bought a very cheap Les Paul copy, which I couldn’t even keep in tune and a transistor amp. I fig-ure both the amp and the guitar cost me about $200 USD. The

drummer’s family had a garage at their summer house which was not far from the city. No one in the band could drive (driving age here is 18) so we took the train to get there. We would skip class during week days and lock ourselves in for hours playing blues and classic rock and roll covers. We were sloppy and lousy. We had an old amp head and two cabinets. The voice, guitars and bass all went through that same amp. The house was close to a small village. We were so loud people from the village would show up to find out what the noise was all about.

But we kept practicing and eventually became audible. I started writing my own songs and in 1987 we recorded four originals in the studio. It was kind of mid ‘60s rhythm and blues vibe. By then we were all going to public university in Valencia. I was studying economics and music seemed more like a passion than a real way to make a living. The local mu-sic scene was really happening here with the pop/new wave in the mid ‘80s but nobody I knew was making a real living with bands. We were just trying to have fun, dress funky and pretend to be cool.

TQR: When did you become infatuated with the Telecaster and what was the first Tele that you owned?

Once I wore out all the 1950s rock and rollers I started digging back into blues and country acts. I still had my useless Les Paul copy but I saw pictures of Telecasters in pretty much all of my favorite vinyl record covers. I was never really

drawn to Springsteen’s music but the image of his old modi-fied Esquire in Born to Run stuck in the back of my mind. Then of course there was Albert Collins, James Burton, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Mike Bloomfield which I discov-ered years later… It seems everything I loved was played on a Tele. John Mellencamp and John Hiatt sounded Telecaster. The whole Rockabilly Revival scene (Robert Gordon, Matchbox, Crazy Cavan) sounded twangy Telecaster. Shakin’ Stevens was big in Europe in the early '80s. I really dug the guitar sounds of his records. In the studio he used Albert Lee and the legendary Mickey Gee, one of the most amazing Tele players ever (Tom Jones, Joe Cocker, Dave Edmunds). Dr. Feelgood was also one of my favorite bands ever and Wilko

builder

Nacho GuitarsNacho GuitarsCREATING VINTAGE HEIRLOOMS

-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.19 N.6 April 20188

Johnson was the archetype of the guitar hero, of course armed with a Telecaster. In 1985 I was nine-teen and came to the United States for the first time. I went to a farm close to Idaho for a summer exchange student program. I loved the country and wanted to become

a cowboy. For a whole summer I lived on this farm, went horseback riding, learned to milk cows, chop chicken heads and catch rattle snakes. The family had a guy my age and we got along. We went cruisin’ in his mom’s pickup truck and he always had Hank Williams Jr. playing on the stereo. Some-times we went to rodeos during weekends.

Once I got back to Spain I was determined to be an all American boy. I started saving pocket money to buy a used Tele. There was a kind of weekly want ad mag where guitars posted for sale every so often. One of my friends had found a mid ‘60s chopped Tele in there for about $200. That ad paper was mostly used for dating, night club ads, escorts and the like. One day my dad saw me browsing through that paper. He gave me that look and asked, “What are you looking for?” I said I wanted to buy a used guitar and told him I had been saving pocket money for a while because I just couldn’t afford a new one. I think he was impressed. He said, “Let me talk to Mom, maybe we can add birthday and Christmas and get you a new electric guitar. But please stop looking through those papers”. So in December of 1987 I turned twenty one and we went into a local music store. They had a new 1983 blonde top loader Tele discounted for 750 euros and we bought it.

TQR Please explain how your infatuation with the Tele developed and expanded.

I used my ‘83 Tele for about five years. We gigged quite a bit and not many people were playing American music here so we gathered some local following. I started coming to the United States every summer. In 1990 I came to Boston for a whole summer and started looking for older Telecasters like the ones pictured in the record covers. I knew the ones with the black logo were cool but the thinner silver logo ones were really the thing to get. In those days there was no internet so once you got into town you browsed through the yellow pages. I asked around and someone said to go to Southworth Guitars in Bethesda. So I went to Washington DC for the weekend and

visited old Gil’s shop. He had two rooms, Fender and Gibson. In the Fender room he had about ten Teles on display. I was flipping as I had never seen so many old guitars together. I bought a worn out 1972 blonde Tele and paid him $695 cash which was two thirds of all the money I had to pay for my living expenses through the month. The guitar was really cool. I remember it came with a black case that smelled like cat pee.

During summer of 1992 I came to Boston again to do an MBA program for two years at BU. I brought my ‘72 Tele with me. I found out about VG magazine and subscribed. I had already figured out the 1950s Teles were much cooler than my ‘72, so I started looking around. There was a shop in New Hampshire called South Hiram guitars. I called them and they told me they had just sold a refin/routed 1952 Tele for $1500 USD. They confirmed they still had two vintage Esquires in stock. A great original 1960 for $2200 USD and a refin/routed 1963 for $990 USD. So I drove up there with a friend the following weekend. The 1960 was perfect but I only had one grand in my pocket so I got the modified 1963 for $950.

In the October issue of VG mag I saw Jimmy Brown from Guitar Emporium had a 1950 Broadcaster #0249 for sale at $4500. I called and asked for pictures. About a week later I got an envelope through snail mail. The guitar was so cool with a natural finish look, similar to Springsteen’s. I called right away and they told me it had been sold. But they told me there may still be a chance for me as it had been sold to G.E. Smith, who used to return merchandise. I hung those pictures on my bedroom wall and stared at them for days. That week G.E. appeared on SNL playing that guitar and I wanted to die. But I called again the following week and they confirmed the guitar came back because it was too heavy for him. I sold all my guitars and amps to buy that amazing 10 lb. Broadcaster. Jimmy was kind enough to hold it for a month or so until I was able to collect the dough. I still own it to this day.

During my second year at Boston I moved from a two bed-room apartment in Kenmore Square to a small basement on

161 Bea-con, which I rented to my friend Paul Gleason at Fairfield Realty. My parents still sent me the same money for housing ev-

builder

-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.19 N.6 April 2018 9

ery month, so I could save about $350 USD a month with the move. With that kind of money you could buy a vintage guitar every few months in 1993.

I remember going almost every week to Bay State Vintage Guitars on Huntington Avenue to hang out with Craig D. Jones. He had two lockers full of vintage guitars, Broadcast-ers, Blackguard Teles, 1950-60s Gibsons. He was kind enough to let me play those guitars although he knew I couldn’t really afford them. Craig had that typical “no BS” New England attitude but he knew everything about vintage guitars and was always nice and patient with me.

TQR: Do you have memories of a particularly magical Tele that came your way? What was special about it and did you keep it?

Right around graduation in summer 1994 I bought a 1961 slab board Telecaster which was my main gigging guitar for many years. It has a very cool see-through red finish identical to those applied at the Fender factory in the mid ‘60s for those super rare red mahogany Teles. It’s a very special guitar that I still own and play regularly.

Right after I came back to Spain, I started working and mak-ing a bit of money so I was able to buy more guitars. Craig Jones had this one particular guitar in the shop (Broadcaster #0187) which I dearly loved but he would not come down from his asking price $12.5K. I had been going to his shop almost every week for two years just to stare at that particular guitar, much like Ben does every Friday with the Excalibur Strat in the movie Wayne’s World. Finally in 1997 after many phone conversations I was able to trade a 1954 Tele and $7.5K for it. I still remember the excitement of opening the case the day I got it. It’s a very special guitar which I still own. It is made in October 1950 so it is one of those early ones with a large V neck and primitive finish.

TQR: How many Nachoguitars have you built now?

I started in 2010 and I have built about 200 guitars in eight years. On average that’s about 25 guitars every twelve months. I guess I am not the most proficient builder in the world.

TQR: Where did you learn how to accomplish the realistic

aging process you use? It is the most realistic we have ever seen.

I have been obsessed with vintage guitars in gen-eral and 1950s Telecast-ers in particu-

lar for about thirty years now. I started buying them when they were more affordable. So I have a great deal of hands on experience. I am using real vintage guitars to replicate aging patterns, marks, cracks, scratches, divits, etc. The early ‘50s butterscotch finish changes from guitar to guitar and it is very important to have the real deal in the flesh in order to repro-duce that particular color shade. If you go by pictures you see in books you may come close but no cigar. I look at each guitar as if it were a painting where all details are important and add to the whole. The fact that I do not have to comply with delivery deadlines allows me to spend a gazillion hours zooming in different areas and working my way up until I am satisfied with the end result. I guess anybody can use a screw-driver or a file to artificially age a guitar. In our shop we have about twenty different tools we use for different type of marks and wear patterns. Each guitar looks different and unique because we treat each guitar as a separate project. Our goal is to reproduce wear in such an ergonomic way you won’t be able to tell it’s artificial aging. We care about looks but most important we care about feel and sound.

TQR: You build guitars with specific variations on neck shapes, and other characteristics that make them individually unique in a very realistic way. Every one of your guitars is unlike the others in subtle ways. What inspires your vision for these guitars?

We mirror our instruments to real vintage examples, which for years we have admired and studied “inch by inch” with dedicated obsession. The amount of time we put into each instrument is key. My primary source of income is not selling guitars so I do whatever it takes to get it right. This means we can put endless hours and change things as the aging progress-es so the outcome is hardly ever the same. I always find new details to work upon and keep focusing on how to improve the parts to make a better whole. We also feel that the neck is your real cosmic connection with the instrument. We offer vari-ous back profiles and thicknesses (C, D, U and V) all within 0.80”-0.95” depth range at first fret. We are determined to get

builder

-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.19 N.6 April 201810

those round and V profiles right, especially in the shoulders area, where the grip needs to be very comfortable. We apply four different processes to the neck to make sure the feel is as smooth as an old piece of furniture that has been rubbed for seventy plus years.

TQR: Where do you source the ash and maple you use for your guitars?

We are using US ash and maple for our solid body guitars and very old Oregon pine for our hollow bodies. Interest-ingly enough, Paterna, our little village located in the suburbs of Valencia, Spain is renowned as one of the most suitable areas in Southern Europe for lumber warehousing. This

is the reason why we are surrounded by many shops special-ized in guitar wood who serve not only to the many local classical guitar manufacturers but also to many other musical instrument factories in Europe.

TQR: Do you have any specific thoughts on how the weight of a guitar influences tone and resonance? What is your opinion on torrefaction?

Yes, we are firm believers in the large neck/lightweight body combo. But weight is one of many important variables. Applying acoustic guitar principles to solidbody guitars is really the key to maximize resonance response. Of course in the solidbody world the amp and the pickups will always be the most critical parts of the equation. The crazy thing is you can be working on the wood and finish forever and once you are done with that, you will only be halfway, because without good pickups and electronics, you may still have a mediocre

sounding instru-ment. But we always test electric guitars first un-plugged

to make tone-based assessments. The type, size and direc-tion of grain are all very important when you cut and match bodies with necks. The time when the wood was originally cut and what humidity and temperature conditions were used for lumber storage is also very important. We formulate our own lacquers to achieve the same type of cracking found on a sixty plus year but we condense this process in a few months’ time. We are very careful when we apply temperature/humid-ity changes to our bodies and necks. Wood shrinks as it dries and optimum humidity levels will allow the wood to stabilize. The wood movement through the drying process is affected by the grain direction. A piece of two inch ash may take two years to dry naturally. Generally speaking pre-dried wood is delivered with less than 10% humidity level. Any guitar exposed to less than 40% room humidity will be affected and depending on how the grain was cut this can greatly affect the resonating response over time. We apply different procedures to open the pores once the finish is cured to replicate the reso-nance response of a well-seasoned vintage piece of wood.

Torrefaction process has proved to be unsuccessful for our wood parts. I’m sure it works for some other builders but it’s just not our cup of tea. According to our experience it has an undesired stiffness effect which greatly affects the parts, particularly the necks as they go through our aging process, sometimes leaving bowing/deviations which cannot be solved with the classic vintage truss rod adjustment system. After a few unsatisfactory tests, we have ruled this out. I guess we are too old school.

TQR: What type of frets do you prefer?

We like to use Jescar frets, Nickel Silver 18% alloy. We are using 4795

(0.095”x0.047”) with tang width 0.021” for all our standard solidbody guitars and 43080 (0.080”x0.043”) with tang width 0.02” for our hollow body pine guitars.

TQR: Where do you get your hardware - bridges, etc…?

As you know my day job is related to tooling manufacturing for the plastic injection industry. My family business started making molds and tools in Spain in the 1950s. Nowadays we are using our CNC know-how not only to cut wood but also to machine our own OEM hardware parts. We are producing

builder

-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.19 N.6 April 2018 11

our own version of bridge plates, knobs, jack cups and string trees. We have about five different pickguard models which we cut in-house. We also source parts from Hosco-Gotoh in Japan, and WD Music, Rutters Guitars, and Allparts in the US. For 250k pots we started using basic CTS and then moved to the square MECs. Last year we switched to an upgraded CTS version with a 36-144 g/cm torque and 60:30 audio taper, which are the correct vintage specs for 1950s Centralabs. For capacitors we have been using Luxe Caps and Russian PIO K40Y-9 and K42Y-2.

TQR: What are your favorite pickups to use?

The sound of the original vintage guitars is imprinted in my brain. I wish we had a time machine

to go back in time and buy the pickups through the back door of the Fender and Gibson factories of the 1950s. Since this is not possible we strive to faithfully recreate the most important factors of the classic pickups: magnet/coil type and process. Fifteen years ago we carried a very extensive research on actual 1950s pickups which was published in the Blackguard Book and we are sticking to those recipes. We have a very cool winding machine here with a good variety of coils and magnets, but I can’t disclose much about these extremely classified matters. If I may I will go on to tell you that you’ll have a hard time telling apart our guitars from real vintage examples with your eyes closed.

Many people have perished trying to discover some of the best kept secrets of our civilization like the Lost Ark or the formula of the Coca-Cola. I’d like to say our formula is even more secret and historically important, hahaha! Having said that, we still believe the way you wind, how you direct the coil and the tension you apply is as important as using the correct type of coil/magnet material. Our Strat style pickups are faithfulreproductions of the 1954/56 white bakelite/ash era. For Tele style pickups we offer the standard 1952 version and the slightly hotter 1950 Broadcaster style which lots of customers favor nowadays. Our PAFs and soap bar P90s are also faithful recreations from the 1950s.

TQR: We know that you strive for a consistent tone with your guitars, but have you experienced the occasional magical Tele that emerges from your production?

Yes but that’s all pretty subjec-tive I am afraid. Out of any given batch I may

like to keep certain guitars with me for a while because I feel at home with them maybe because they remind me of my favorite ‘52 Tele or ‘50 Broadcaster. But after eight years of manufacturing we are offering a very consistent product in every way. All our instruments share the same basic specs but each has its own personality. I am afraid every person has a different concept of what the ideal guitar should be. That is why we offer a wide variety of aging levels, finishes, routing specs, pickup combinations and neck profiles. Remember we don’t take custom orders so the guitar you buy from us is the same Billy F. Gibbons, Arlen Roth or Julian Lage is using. Great players like them use run-of-the-mill Nachoguitars picked up from a standard production batch.

TQR: What’s in the future of Nachoguitars? Will you continue to build Blackguards, and are there any other models you are considering?

Right now the line has expanded to 1952 slab body Blackguard Basses, Contour body style 1954 guitars (both tremolo and hard tail bridge configuration),

1950-54 Blackguards, 1954-57 Whiteguards and 1949 pine hollow body Prototypes. With the pine Prototypes we have rec-reated the same chamber design found on the original proto II from 1949. We are now working on a new batch of these pine guitars which will feature aged gold finish and P90/PAF style pickups. We made up this story of Les Paul meeting Leo Fend-er in 1951, just before Lester got finally involved with Gibson. They made a trial run of guitars using leftover feather weight chambered pine bodies from 1949. Les favored the lightweight and adjustable bridge/pickup system from Leo but he wanted to convince him to go F holes and neck through design, which finally never happened. A few guitars were produced during the test stage but they were lost in history until we recently discovered them inside an abandoned Houston barn near Billy

builder

-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.19 N.6 April 201812

F. Gibbons’ old neighborhood. We are now offering these as avery limited special edition not only in gold finish but also inblonde, stripped natural from white/red and black.

TQR: Have you built guitars for any famous players we might not be aware of?

We have built guitars for Redd Vol-kaert, Jeff Tweedy, Billy F. Gibbons,Julian Lage,Javi Peña,Arlen Roth,Bill Hullet,Clay Hullet,

Ryan Wariner, Paco Pascual, Matt Read, Michael Minnis… Some famous players in Spain like Javi Peña are giving great exposure to our guitars.

TQR: Can you tell us a bit about the new book project you are about to release?

It is called the Pinecaster book www.thepinecaster-book.com and includes an in-depth research of the history of the electric guitar, from the late 1920s

through the 1930s and on to the late 1940s, where the Spanish solidbody electric guitar as we know of today was launched. It is kind of a prequel of the Blackguard book, where we dig deep into the key players of these pioneer years who surely influenced Gibson and Fender.

A simple question like “who invented the solidbody electric guitar?” may get many different answers from vintage guitar aficionados. We are trying to shed some light here and put everything in perspective on a single timeline, analyzing contributions from all inventors and producers during this very exciting period. The pre-production period of Fender takes a leading role in the book content therefore the book title “The Pinecaster”, which refers to the pine guitars made during Fender’s prototype stage. Did you know Fender used at least five different models of control plates during 1949-51? TQ