theMountainview Publishing, LLC

TMReportThe Player’s Guide to Ultimate Tone

Rare & Cool

INSIDE Affordable and toneful

gear frm Canada.... The Traynor Guitar Mate

Reverb and YBA-1A Mark II amplifiers

3The PRS HX/DA

30 watt

32010 Les Paul Junior –

cheap and worthy

4Rare excellence...

the cutom builtguitars of Juha Ruokangas

&Chuck Thornton

7The Ruokangas Duke

9The Ruokangas

Unicorn

12The Captain

Nemo

15Chuck Thornton

10th Anniversary Model

17Thornton

Contoured Legend Special

18KCA NOS Tubes

If you haven’t discovered vintage tubes it’s time you

did!

Thornton Legend SpecialGiveaway!

$15.00 US, March 2015/Vol.16 NO.5

www.tonequest.com

We live in an era where cheap guitars have gotten better and custom-built guitars are as good as a guitar can possibly be with absolutely no compromises. Lucky us. We are truly living in the

golden era of guitar building in 2015, and guitarists have never had it so good. You can spend a few hundred dollars for a player that won’t let you down, and thousands for a signature, custom hand-made guitar that simply defines the builder’s art, and we are featur-ing examples of both in this issue. If you are in need of an affordable and fully serviceable electric we have that here, and if you have decided it’s time to experience the very best of the builder’s art we are featuring those, too. And if you are in need of an affordable hand-wired vintage amplifier you’ll find them here as well.

The key to successfully shopping for gear today is knowing what you want and why. With so may guitars, amplifiers, effects and pickups available today, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the choices available to you and do nothing, or worse, make the wrong decision. The gear we have selected for this issue presents

a win/win on all counts, even if you are contemplating a liquidation sale and the purchase of a $10,000 electric guitar as a signal that you have made your peace with the quest for tone and are now prepared to go for greatness. It’s OK – these expensive, custom built signature guitars are hard to find and

rarely offered for sale because they are so special, and their owners know it. Regardless, if you

aren’t famiiar with builders Juha Ruokangas and Chuck Thornton it’s time you became

familiar with their excellent work, as their vision and attention to detail is unmatched among all contemporary builders. Even if owning one of their guitars is a fantasy, you will learn a lot about the state of the art in modern

guitar building and acquire a valu-able perspective that can help you make

sound decisions in the future. Quest forth and enjoy…

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015

1971 Traynor Guitar Mate ReverbHow an amplifer that sounds this good could be relegated to such obvi-ous obscurity escapes us. Certainly many were made – we found three listed for sale on eBay at prices that ranged from $795 (ours) to $895. Featuring a tall cabinet with a single 12”

Heppner Alnico speaker, the Guitar Mate is a full-featured 25 watt amp with bass and treble EQ, reverb and tremolo. Traynor was known for using premium components, and unlike many Fenders the power and output transformers in our amp are original. They made them to last. Inspection of the hand-wired tag board revealed an array of yellow mustard caps and one replaced orange drop cap, otherwise original to 1971. Overall, this amplifier appears to have been robustly constructed of solid wood with an overbuilt circuit board con-sisting largely of mustard caps. All good and very un-Fender like indeed. The Heppner speaker sounds very good with an even frequency response and good power-handling for this 25 watt amp, which sounds just a hair louder than a typical Deluxe reverb. The Traynor stays clean at moderate volume levels all the way to ‘7’ on the volume control, and then spills over into lush overdriven tones from 7 – 10. The bass and

treble controls are very effective in shap-ing tone,

the reverb is excellent, as is the tremolo, with a tubey throb that is very controllable in speed. All in all, the Guitar Mate is easily comparable to a Fender blackface Deluxe Reverb, if a little louder with a less scooped tone. At 45 pounds it remains portable yet robust, and the tall cabinet allows the amp to achieve a certain level of projection and presence that surpasses the Deluxe Reverb. Tonally the Traynor seems to be a bit of a chameleon – the array of mustard caps gives it a full, rich tone with outstand-ing bass and midrange response, and smooth, even treble tones that fall somewhere between a Marshall amp and a Fender without the midrange EQ. No wonder since the Traynor uses a pair of EL84 power tubes and 12AX7s else-where. You might think that the tone would be more com-pressed with the 6BQ5/EL84s but it really isn’t. We love the tone of this amplifier – it is eminently appropriate for clean tones, rock and blues, and on the vintage market the price certainly seems righteous. At +40 years of service our amp needed nothing in the way of tweaks or repairs, it is dead quiet at idle and sounds as good as it gets. Very vintage as

only a point-to-point amp can sound, toneful and willin’. If you want to learn more about Traynor amps there is an excellent and

detailed history written by Mike Holman online – over 60 pages of indepth historical data spannning 1963 to 1991. You can reference this detailed information at http://www.yorkville.com/downloads/other/yorkvillehistory.pdf.

November 1974 TraynorYBA-1A Mark IIThe Traynor YBA-1A is technically categorized as a bass amp, but you would never know it by playing through it. Scored on eBay for $500, it is one of the most toneful dual EL34 amps we have ever owned – for guitar.

Exploring vintage point-to-point amps like the Traynor is always enlightening if not surprising. Unpacking a stout amp like the Traynor leaves

clues to the mindset of the seller as you cut through multiple layers of rock & roll tape, padding, more tape and padding. When you finally have the amp freed from its protective lay-ers of packing material it doesn’t take long to appreciate what the seller was so determined to protect. The Traynor head alone weighs 43 pounds – a piece of kit as the Brits would say that was built to last, and it has, sounding as robust and noise-free as it did the day it was made. The durability of Traynor amps is nothing if not impressive.

Controls are simple enough – two inputs for volume I and II with bass and treble EQ, a Range control for low end and an Expander control for the upper mid and treble frequencies. To say that these controls work brilliantly for guitar is an under-statement. The Mark II is a deadly guitar amp in the style of a Fender Bassman or Showman perhaps, yet the Mark II pro-

duces a bigger, rounder tone with slightly more depth than a typical Fender. The extremely useful Range and Expander controls move the focus of the amp from full and

cover story

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015

rich to brighter still with excellent bass response, and both controls are extremely useful with guitar, acting as a separate tone stack that alters EQ in an interesting and very pleasing fashion. We don’t know exactly how these controls work, but they work brilliantly for guitar. The Mark II is powered by dual EL34 tubes and three 12AX7s. There is a fan inside aimed at the power tubes, and like the Guitar Mate Reverb the MarkII has obviously been purpose-built to last. The back

panel features a speaker jack and extension speaker jack, on/off switch, a circuitbreaker switch, and a 200 watt power

outlet. All very utilitarian and useful. Our guitars sound huge played through the Mark II, but this amp isn’t so loud as to become unuseful in 2015. Yes, it has the volume and power of a Bassman, but it is a tone that doesn’t leave ears ringing – in other words it isn’t a hurtful tone, but smooth, rich and musical. Actually, the Guitar Mate Reverb and the Mark II share a lot in common tonally and in terms of feel, the Mark II is just creates a slightly bigger tone.

As the Brits would say, the Traynor is a professional piece of kit, clearly built to last. We love the tone of it, its presence in the room, and the obvious build quality. If you can find a YBA-1A you will not be disappointed in the stellar tone and character of this amp. Oh, and we should add that it is a great, great bass amp, too! Both of the Traynors reviewed here are excellent amplifiers. They don’t cover up the tone of the gui-tar with heavy distortion, yet they both possess plenty of at-titude while allowing the tone of your guitars to shine through and drive your guitar and your music. Quest forth…

Paul Reed Smih teamed with amp builder Doug Sewell to design amplifiers that range in power from 30 watts to 100 watts. A reader sent us his 30 watt PRS HX/DA combo and

while clean headroom is limited, as a rock amp the PRS is an excellent choice. Controls are very straightforward – HX/DA

Gain, Bass gain. treble, middle, bass, Presence and Master Volume. Three toggled tone switches on the main panel basi-cally control and shape the overdriven tone of the amp versus cleaner settings. Unlike a classic Fender head, however, the PRS does not develop a lot of clean power. This amp seems to be made for use with variable levels of mild to intense distor-tion. The overall tone of the amp is rich and full-throated. Dis-tortion begins to influence the tone at around 6 on the volume control. The effect of the bass, midrange and treble controls is minimal as tone controls go – basically this amp has a fundamental and very usable tone that doesn’t change a lot as you adjust the controls with the exception of the three toggled HX/DA controls. In thiis regard it shares a lot incommon with the Texaplex PRS head we reviewed previously.

Back panel controls include 4 and 8 ohm speak-er and extension jacks as an option to the stock 16 ohm speaker out, left and right bias pots and a master

on/off and standby switch.

The stock Celestion speaker seems well-matched to this amplifier with a dominant tone that reveals a strong low end. midrange and treble that is not too sharp or dominant in the

style of a Jensen. For cleaner tones the master volume must be turned up signifi-cantly, but again, these are not pris-tine clean tones. The PRS seems to be voiced

for overdriven tones more so than vivid clean tones, and we found a sweet spot that seemed to reveal the strength of the amp that made adjustments to tone controls less evident. This is one of those amps that is easy to dial in, but we wouldn’t describe it as being extremely versatile in terms of tone. It is what it is, and what it is is a good amp for hard rockin.’

How much should a solid Les Paul Junior cost? We scored a 2010 model in excellent condition for $699 and it seems as if this is exactly what a good Junior ought to cost.

amps

TQ

PRS HX/DA 30 WattPRS HX/DA 30 Watt

Les Paul JuniorLes Paul Junior

TQ

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015

We went trolling on eBay and found our 2010 model among a number of Juniors in roughly the same price range – mostly newer Les Paul Junior G-Force mod-els with electronic tuning. No, it isn’t a Custom Shop model, but did we miss any-thing? No, we didn’t. Our guitar has been played but not abused, with zero fret wear, and just a few minor belt buckle scratches on the back. Described as a great player, it is all that, and the single P90 sounds exactly s it should – balanced and ballsy with excellent bass and mid-range response as well as smooth treble tones. We have

done a lot of pickup swaps over the years but this Gibson P90 isn’t begging to be replaced. Far from it. All we really wanted was a Junior that had been used but not abused, with clean frets, a great P90 and a decent weight. At 7.75 pounds we acquired a solid mahogany Les Paul Junior that met our needs perfectly, and it came in a brand new Les Paul case. Mission accomplished, proving once gain that you don’t have to take out a loan to buy an eminently playable and toneful guitar made in the USA – Nashville no less.

What we like about this guitar in particular is that it needed nothing to sound and play its best. The workmanship is abso-lutely flawless throughout. The Junior tunes up nicely and stays in tune even with extreme string bends, just the way we like it. The tuners work extremely well – tight and precise with no sloppiness or slipping. The weight is perfect and nicely balanced along the full length of the guitar. The red-dish brown finish is thinly applied so that you can feel the grain peeking through, and we love the color. The center seams (two) are barely visible (you have to look for them) and the fingerboard is a dark chocolate consistent along the entire length of the neck, close grained and smooth to the touch. Nice. The frets are perfectly dressed with no wear. The neck shape is a classic, large enough to be comfortable but not clubby. We also like the adjustable compensated steel bridge and the way it positions each string closely over the pickup polepieces. This is the right way to design and build a guiitar at any price. We will raise the action slightly on the treble side, but the way this Junior was designed and built will require no further adjustments. Pyramid strings will enable it to sound and feel even better.The CTS pots are smooth and precise, and the pickup measures a perfect 7.66K. There is just enough wear on the front of the body

below the bridge to verify that this guitar had been played, and that’s fine with us. Honest wear is better than a used guitar that was never used, or ‘fake’ wear, eh? With the exception of certain Gibson custom shop models that we love, you could easily own four solid body guitars like this for the price of one Custom Shop model, and give up nothing in terms of playability and tone. Our Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster cost about the same, and they too are both as good as it gets. Our Junior proves that you don’t need a lot of money

to play great gear. Quest forth…

We spend quite a lot of time reviewing moderately priced production guitars like the Les Paul Junior. As production guitars go it is well worth your attention. We also feature

truly custom-built guitars made by true artists who compromise on nothing when building a gutar. These builders aspire to a higher calling, and they succeed, fre-quently boasting of owners who have purchased multiple models, some times as many as 10-20 or more. In the orbit and rare air of truly custom-built guitars Juha Ruokangas and Chuck Thornton consistently set the standard by which all custom electrics are judged. Their guitars are not only works of art, but exceptional players with equally exceptional tones. No, they are not cheap, but you can’t build at this level otherwise. Perhaps in 1932 you could craft guitars at this level at a modest price point, but even then such guitars were anything but cheap.

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TQ

Juha Ruokangas & Chuck ThortonRARE EXCELLENCE, CUSTOM BUILT GUITARS OF

Juha Ruokangas & Chuck Thorton

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015

We first spoke with Juha Ruokangas in 2005. You need to know that Juha is an artist, and an inspired genius in our opinion. In 2005 he briefly explained how he was building guitars using Spanish Cedar and his Thermo treatment. We have included his original description here, followed by his January 2015 interview. Enjoy…

Electric gui-tar building tradition in Finland is small. Therearen’t too many older builders around – only a handful. Twoof these

gentlemen, Matti Nevalainen and Rauno Nieminen were the teachers at the Finnish guitar making school. Naturally, years studying in the school taught me a lot about various traditional building techniques, materials, lacquers, glues and all that. When you graduate from such a school, however, there’s no way you can be a master of the art of making gui-tars. What you get is a good base to build on. I had read a lot about guitar making prior to the luthier school. I kept con-stantly comparing what I had learned from the books to what the teachers and senior students taught, and I talked about it, too. “Why do you do it like this – Benedetto does it all differ-ently because of this and that…” It took a year or so for me to understand that there are as many nuances of doing things as there are builders, and that a certain method isn’t necessar-ily better than the other. All the book wisdom was very useful for me, and by combining that with some very good things the Finnish luthiers did, I believe I got a good view of what kind of guitars I wanted to build and how I wanted to build them at my own shop, which I dreamt of already.

TQR: So how did things progress? Were there any signifi- cant discoveries or failures along the way?

I started my company officially in 1995. By summer of 1996I had managed to build my workshop, started offering localrepair services and I got some custom guitar orders in, too. The early works were replicas of the good old Fendermodels, a couple of Les Pauls, Rickenbacker bass copies and stuff like that. I also built some wacko one-offs for crazy players wanting to literally stand out from the crowd. Repair work is a very, very important way to learn – to understand how guitars are built, and to observe the good and bad in a guitar. This leads to understanding what you want to do in your own instruments, why, and how. I started to slowly gain a reputation as being a sharp-eyed repairman and custom

guitar maker. I got customers who had gone from brand to brand for years to find the ultimate guitar for themselves. Eventually, I did manage

to make some of these guys happy, and this paid off as word of mouth started spreading. I think this must be the same old story in many ways – good quality work always brings you more work. However, I wanted to move forward. My idea had been to design my own things. My first love in electric guitars was the Les Paul, so that’s where I was headed. PRS guitars were coming on strong, and I found the looks and attitude of those guitars naturally awesome, but I wasn’t too much into that hybrid thing with the 25” scale length and tremolo. So, my first model, the Duke, took two years to design and was born out of my love for the Les Paul. I sold the first real Duke in the end of 1997 to Jukka Tolonen, a legendary Finnish fusion/jazz player. His spectacular albums have been released in the U.S., also.

I loved the sound of certain 50s’ Les Pauls I had a chance to play. I wanted that sound. But there were certain ele-ments in the Les Paul that I wasn’t too thrilled about – the balance when you sit down isn’t exactly perfect. So I wanted to change that. I have studied and experi-mented a lot with various wood species, and the clos-est I can get to the genuine

Honduran mahogany (the lightweight stuff Gibson used only in the ‘50s and beginning of the‘60s) is wood called Spanish Cedar (Latin, Cedros Odorata). It’s the wood that classical guitar makers build the necks from and it has nothing to do with Western Red Cedar. It’s a nice tone wood with a surpris-ingly similar appearance to mahogany, even though these woods are different species. The cellular structure of Spanish Cedar is very similar to mahogany, the wood is lightweight yet very stiff (it doesn’t bend easily) which makes it excellent and stable for necks. When I tap a piece of genuine Honduran Mahogany it rings like a bell. So does Spanish Cedar. When I tap the modern, so-called Honduran Mahogany (which is not from Honduras and hasn’t been for decades), it rings very much lower-pitched, and the tone is sort of dull and muffled. And yes, the mahogany today weighs a ton, generally. The

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015 6

Latin name for Spanish Cedar comes from the odor of the wood, which is very dis-tinct and strong. The most com-mon thing built of Spanish Cedar must

be the expensive cigar humidors. Also, an interesting detail from history is that Lebanon Cedar (also a species belong-ing to the Cedros Odorata family) is the very wood that the temples of God were built from in the ancient times of Europe. So, the body and neck of my first official model, the Duke, are of Spanish Cedar. It works so well that I haven’t really considered using any other wood. I use mostly ebony for the fretboard of the Duke. Generally, the quality of ebony has gone down and it takes a lot of time to dry it long enough to make it safe to use. Some manufacturers don’t use ebony at all anymore, but I do, and I still give a 20-year warranty for these guitars. When selected and dried properly, ebony is superior for this kind of guitar, with no dead spots, a slick feel, and a very even tonal response. The Duke tops used to be made from either maple, alder, or our specialty, Arctic Birch. Nowadays it’s quite rare for us to build anything other than Arctic Birch top guitars.

We also use Spanish Cedar for tops occasionally, as well as spruce. The look of the Finnish Birchwood is unique, and it works perfectly in union with a

Spanish Cedar body and neck and ebony fretboard. The fig-ured Arctic Birch is very rare; we go out and buy whole logs and cut them ourselves. We are currently the only company on earth that can actually supply guitars with Arctic Birch tops on a consistent basis, and I’m very proud of this, no mat-ter that it takes a lot of work to get the wood. It’s worth being able to offer something unique that has a personal touch from my home country. The Duke guitars are built with traditional techniques and no CNC is involved. The series are kept very small (10-15 pieces in each batch) to maintain focus on the detail. When there are too many guitars in a series, you very easily get blinded by the mass of it. I don’t want that to hap-pen, of course. Extreme quality is our number one priority always, in everything we do.

We use polyurethane lacquers for all our instruments. I knowsome nitrocellulose fans may be shocked by me saying this,but I’ve gotten far better tonal results by using polyurethane

rather than nitro. You see, nitro lacquers today are definitely not the same as they used to be in the ‘50s. Modern nitro lacquers include plastic components to make them work a biteasier and have better filling and sanding qualities. The major drawback of having plastics in nitro is the way

they dry. A new nitro-lacquered guitar feels gummy and sticky for many, many years to come. Dirt gets into nitro lacquer very easily, but is very difficult to remove from the surface. On top of these “feel” issues, using rubbery lacquer doesn’t exactly improve the tone… The secret of an old guitar having thatthin nitro finish is the fact that the guitar has been played a long time, and the lacquer is brittle and dry, so it doesn’t muffle the vibrations. The best method of finishing an electric guitar in my opinion is to do it with polyurethane as thinly as possible. This lacquer dries hard with no gumminess. It’s easy to keep clean and the feel is nice and smooth. I like it.

We use a unique drying method for the wood that is different than others called “ThermoTreatment” for all alder, maple and Arctic birch we use (Spanish Cedar is not treatable, at least yet). This process dries wood in a very special manner, imitating

the natural aging process. When wood ages, the cells harden, resins crystallize and the organic “junk” from the pores of the wood cleans out over years. The ThermoTreatment does these same things. These are studied facts – the cellular structure of treated wood resembles the aged wood cells near 100%. The pores are clean, all resins have either dissipated or crys-tallized, and the stiffness of the wood is increased. Also, the wood is more relaxed after treatment, as the mechanical ten-sions are relieved during the process. Tone is a more subjective matter. I share the opinion of manyof our customers, as well as various magazine reviews thathave stated that there does seem to be a difference comparedto “an average new, good quality instrument.” The key factorto achieve the “vintage vibe” everyone keeps raving aboutseems to be able to make the instrument vibrate in certainways while playing. The highs, middles and bass must reso-nate in correct relation with each other, and the neck has tobe stiff in order to avoid dead spots and overbearing indi-vidual resonant frequencies. The ThermoTreatment does

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015 7

dry the wood differ-ently from the usual methods – that’s a researched fact. The most apparent tonal change caused by ThermoTreatment is in the middle frequencies, which

are always quite different when comparing a new “average” bolt-on guitar and one that has been played and aged. The middle rings differently. The first impression might be, “This new,‘average’ guitar sounds brighter than the aged one.” The actual phenomenon is that as the mids ring better, the highs aren’t as emphasized, making the guitar sound more balanced and fuller. While I am perhaps incapable of being totally objective in evaluating this, many people – not knowing each other’s reactions – have felt this same thing about our guitars. At present, Mojo and VSOP models make the most of this, as alder and maple are always ThermoTreated for these gui-tars. For Duke series guitars, the Arctic Birch tops have been dried with this special method. Spanish Cedar we’re working on, but it seems not as crucial to do, as this wood performs perfectly as it is, dried with conventional methods, seasoning, etc. Another nice thing about ThermoTreatment is the appear-ance. As you look at the neck wood of the Mojo Grande you notice that it has this nice tanned look – and that is the natural shade – no color is added to the lacquer at all. The tan shading caused by this method goes through the wood, not just the surface.

Tone CapsI recently spotted a common but incorrect explanationof what a guitar tone control does in your magazine thatstates, “The tone cap isn’t conducting your tone at all – it’smerely rolling off some treble to ground.” This is a commonmisconception... What you actually have is known as a resonant circuit. When you put an inductor (pickup), resis-tor (tone pot), and a capacitor (tone cap) in series as used in a guitar, you indeed have a resonant circuit. I have enclosed photocopies from a classic textbook on the subject, and I’ll give you a few tips on how to tell if your resonant tone cir-cuit is working properly: As you engage your tone control (turning it down, or more ‘on’) the color of the tone should change, a bit like a wah pedal, but not as radical. A wah is a

resonant feedback circuit controlled by your foot changing the resistance setting of the pot. B. As you turn down the tone control, the volume of the treble strings

should not drop more than a very slight amount, if at all. Think of the early Clapton and Leslie West ‘woman

tones.’ If the volume of the high strings dropped much at all, there would not be enough signal to get that excellent sustain they both achieved. Since a pickup has inductance and resis-tance, it’s a resonant circuit unto itself. The volume pot adds additional series resistance and affects the total resonance. That is why the value of the volume pot is so important. A high-value volume pot tends to raise the resonant point, while a low-value pot of course will lower the resonant point. One last little tip that may be hard to believe until you try it... When installing a tone cap in your guitar, use test leads to jump in a particular cap and listen to how the cap affects the tone as you turn the tone control down. Then, if you reverse the leads on the same cap, it will sound different! Solder the cap in permanently using the direction that sounds best.

The DukeThe Duke is the first guitar model I designed and I still make. I built the first prototypes back in 1995-1996. The Gibson Les Paul was my first love of electric guitars, and the Duke follows the Les Paul footsteps in

many ways, even though I aimed at a more modern and ergo-nomic design. The scale length and neck angle are however the same as Les Paul. With the Duke I also introduced two unique wood materials that we’ve become known for over the years. The body/neckwood I use is Spanish cedar, and at the time I started using it, nobody else did –– in electric guitars, I mean. Spanish cedar has been traditionally used in the more valuable classical guitar necks for its stability and light weight. I apprenticed at a classical guitar workshop as a young man, and that’s where I found the material I remember carving two necks – one of light weight Honduran mahogany, and another one of Spanish cedar. I was thinking that both of those necks were super light weight, they behaved the same way when carving, they had the same tonality when working with the wood and tapping them – but they smelled very dif-ferent from each other! I asked the master builder about this, and learned a lot about the qualities of Spanish cedar, which

guitars

Juha and Jol Dantzig

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015 8

aroused the obvious (for me, at least, cause I was defi-nitely geared towards

making electrics rather than classical guitars) idea: I wanna make electrics out of this stuff! At the time it was already real-ly difficult to find consistantly light weight Honduran mahog-any, and I – like so many other builders before and after me – was on the trail to find my Holy Grail of electrics – and I had a feeling that Spanish cedar could be my ticket. When I built the first electrics out of the stuff, I was totally thrilled – such a fantastic, BIG sound! Nobody used Spanish cedar in electrics, so I would stand out from the crowd... I thought this is a good thing, but oh boy…

Another wood species I introduced with the Duke was arctic birch. It’s a special type of birch that grows here in Finland and elsewhere in Scandinavia. The flamed figuring can be super beautiful, and a little bit different from maple, too. The most important thing is however the tone. When I first built a guitar made of arctic birch and spanish cedar, I totally fell

in love with it, and now, after 1200 or so instruments made with this rec-ipe, the love affair has just gotten deeper and deeper.

When designing the Duke, I felt that the most important thing for me was to overcome the cumbersome playing position when strumming a Les Paul on my lap. It felt like the guitar is so back heavy and wants to lean backwards, no matter how I sit. So I came up with the asymmetrical shape of the Duke. The asymmetrical headstock shape also has a point to it - the bass strings travel longer distance whereas the treble strings a bit shorter. I was looking for easier bending, and more open and dynamic low notes… I’m still really proud and happy about how the Duke turned out. I went back to the “Les Paul inspired” subject more than 10 years later, that time challeng-ing myself to offer something that is very retro in sound and looks, but nevertheless offers something new and unique to the table. That guitar was to become the Unicorn model.

HumbuckersWe started with special humbuckers for the Duke. I had manyideas, first tonally and then also visually, after I realized that this guy could actually build me something else other than the usual humbuckers. It turned out that some of my visual ideas actually had some affect to the tone also, and so by this “accident” we got it even better than we had hoped for.

Sure, I’ve played guitars with great humbuckers and been very happy with them, especially many wonderful vintage bridge pickups, so I could have been happy with many commercially available brands of bridge pickups. My

concern was always the neck humbucker, which more or less always seemed not to be on that same tonal level as the bridge unit in many expensive, calibrated sets available. I thought they were either too loud, muddy, or not singing enough.

I have a good friend and customer, Peter Lerche, a top Finnish player, with whom we started developing the idea of a specific neck humbucker which would solve all those problems. Peter had very interesting ideas of how to make the tone right. A year or so later we came up with the current Dukebucker Classic neck pickup, which can be described with one word… clear. With clarity I don’t mean that you can’t overdrive it into a huge, thick singing voice, but I mean it’s all there – string-to-string definition, punch, and attack no matter what settings on an amp you use. You can make it as muddy as you like with the tone control, but still the distorted tone is usable and you have a certain amount of articulation left so the pickup is usable virtually with any set-ting you can imagine. I haven’t heard another pickup like it. The bridge pickup follows the classic recipe except for the visual things that altered some of the inner construction, but

it ended up sounding killer! The Dukebucker Classic set is the most popular of our humbuck-ers. We don’t have many hum-bucker options and I don’t think you need many options, only a few very good quality things that will work perfectly when matched to a guitar. The guitar itself shapes the basics of the tone – the pickup can’t invent missing frequencies or attack for you!

SingleSonicI am a big fan of P90 pickups, and therefore it was a naturalthing to develop something related to that for our guitars. Iwant to keep things focused and simple in a functional way.That’s why our P90 style pickup – the SingleSonic – is avail-able only in our special humbucker-sized housing. When youorder a Duke or one of our bolt-on models, the Dukebuckers and SingleSonics are interchangeable without alterations to body cavities, pickup-rings or pickguards. It’s a nice thing because tastes change, and our guitars can be fine-tuned easily

guitars

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with different types of our original pickups specially developed for these guitars. The SingleSonic housing, as stated earlier, is the same as the Dukebucker. The bottom plate is vulcanized fiber instead of metal and the coils and magnets are seated on a custom-routed maple ring. The coils are vacuum-waxed and after assembly the whole unit is waxed again. The pickup

is covered by a nickel silver open cover fitted with an ebony faceplate with mother-of-pearl or abalone ‘R’ inlay. One build detail worth mentioning is the stable, 3-point mounting, which

enables more precise height adjustment. The build quality of this P90-style single coil pickup makes it as quiet as a true P90 pickup can get. In my personal opinion, there’s noth-ing that beats the SingleSonic pickup with its powerful, open, breathing tone. It truly succeeds to combine the meaty tone of a humbucker with the dynamics of a Strat single coil. No compression here…

2015Last time we spoke it was late 2005 I think – that’s 10 years ago! My company celebrates it’s 20 year anniversary this year – time flies! I actually dug up that interview you did back then, and read it through out of curiosity, and to sort of “calibrate” myself as to what I have already told you. And yeah, I’ve talked a lot! I noticed that basically my philoso-phy as a builder hasn’t changed at all, but I have re-focused in some ways, too.

Back in 2005 I said that I use CNC for cutting bodies, necks, etc. Well, I would guess that these days most builders, big

and small, do that. But I have actu-ally aban-doned all computer controlled machinery whatsoever

in 2008! In the article written 10 years ago I talk about small-scale serial production, the modern technology serving us better in certain things, etc. That’s all true of course, and I see the CNC, laser and all the modern gadgets basically as tools that enable people to do what they want, just like the old-fashioned routers and milling machines. However, at some point I realized that the business growing from a one-man-shop to a (very) little factory was not what I wanted. Today Ruokangas Guitars is a total of 5 persons, including myself and my wife. All of us are professional luthiers –- also my wife. She doesn’t build guitars anymore (due to wood dust allergy) but the rest of us make guitars from scratch, master built, the old school way. We don’t do any serial production at all, and we use no automated production methods. I find this the optimal way towards absolutely non-compromised quality, starting from the very roots of the process. It’s all about love and passion, priorities… In that old TQ article I talk about that love. I also talk about choices in life, and living in the moment. This decision to abandon the modern production technology was for me simply a continuation of that ideology. The modern way easily detaches you from the roots, and you may end up unwillingly on a path you never wanted to embark on.

The Unicorn and Beyond2008 was a big change for my company. I had partners who felt

otherwise about the direction my company should take, and I decided to buy them out. So I ended up selling my house and my Harley – a very enlightening “letting go” process, actually, and took the wheel 100% back to myself. That same year I also started designing the Unicorn model, that has become my best selling model. It’s very obviously also a continuation to my earlier guitars, using the same tonewood species that I so much love to use, still doing the thermo treatment cause it’s every bit as great a method as it ever was…

A few years after buying the company back I also bought an old manor building which was renovated to “the perfect guitar workshop,” or at least the kind I envisioned it to be. That’s where we have continued our work ever since, in the countryside, happier than ever. And by the way, I also got my official Master’s Degree as a luthier in 2009… Not perhaps something that was much needed, but it meant a lot to me personally, and also it forced me to study some areas I felt I was weakest at. In Finland, to achieve the master’s degree in our profession is a really thorough and demanding process. Therefore there isn’t more than a handful of master luthiers in Finland…

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The UnicornFor me, the Unicorn was a second challenge to solve the same equation that first time resulted as the birth of the Duke model. The Gibson Les Paul 1959 is often depicted as the holy grail of electric guitars. I’ve had my chances to play a few of those old instruments over the years, and there were two par-ticular instruments, owned by collectors in Finland. One was a 1957 gold top, and the other one a 1959 burst. Both all original. Both light weight. Both of them excellent, transparent sound-ing musical instruments. A quality not so often found in newer guitars of this type. As we all know the mahogany

quality changed, the Les Pauls became generally a lot heavier (than they were ever designed to be!), and eventually these problems were solved by drilling or routing holes to the body (weight relief, as it’s called). Well sure, it helps with the weight a bit, but a heavy piece of wood drilled full of holes does not equal with a light weight solid piece of wood – it’s just common sense.

I have my “trademark reci-pe” of tonewood, that I knew would sound awesome also with a more traditionally de-signed guitar than my Duke was. So I decided to chal-lenge myself back in 2008. Could I create something

that captures the essence, the soul of those old wonderful guitars from the 50’s? Something that would feel and sound familiar, but at the same time offer something genuinely fresh to the table as well.

I found myself struggling with the exact same problems as I did more than 10 years earlier with the Duke. My way is not

to replicate what already ex-ists. I look at the essence of a guitar with the attempt to un-derstand why does a guitarist experience this instrument to be so exceptionally great? What makes the guitar tick? Next I look at the shortcom-

ings – does it break easily? Does it balance nicely? Are there some details that I can do better with what my know-how and experience? The next step for me is to see where do I have room to make the guitar look like mine without compromising the big picture, which in this case was to create my interpre-tation of a classic. My take on a myth.

The material choices were obvious to me. We had by the time built hundreds and hundreds of guitars made of Spanish Cedar and Arctic Birch, and it was a killer combination, that provided such a lively, warm tone

every single time! And I was really curious whether there is a clear audible difference between the Duke and the new guitar (that didn’t have a name yet..), given the fact that the Duke is a more modern design, and I was attempting to dig down to the roots with the new design…

When you look at the Unicorn body shape in general, it looks familiar all right, but I’ve actually tweaked the position of the waistline of the body quite a bit downwards. This makes a dramatic difference in the balance of the instrument when you play it sitting down. The Unicorn balances on your lap perfectly well. A detail that can not be said of it’s role model.. The round body cutaway pays homage to such iconic luthiers as Charles Stromberg and John D’Angelico, so in that sense I decided to go even further back to the past than the Les Paul was. The headstock shape continues my thematic 2-step carve design. This is something that I introduced first time in the Duke model. I had never seen anything like that before. Later on many have done something similar, and I’d like to think that maybe I have a small role to play in introducing such a detail back in the 90’s for the first time.

As every guitar repairs-man knows, the Achilles’ Heel of Les Paul is the headstock. It snaps off all too easily. I would estimate that there must be tens of thousands of Gibson Les Pauls out there with

snapped off & repaired headstocks..! So when designing the Unicorn I wanted to make sure my guitar is not that fragile to break. With the Duke I had improved this detail with two things, making the headstock angle less steep, and by add-ing maple splines into the neck to strengthen the fragile area. With the Unicorn, I desperately wanted to make the steep 17° headstock angle, cause it does have an affect to the tone, and also playability. I did not want to sculpt a volute behind the neck, either. I wanted to see if it’s possible to make a stronger neck without compromising the angle or the delicate looks. So I ended up making a quite a complex construction where the grain-runout of the headstock is minimized by making the headstock of a separate piece of wood, adding maple splines, which together with the laminated structure of a thick ebony veneer and fretboard create a multiple laminated structure that is much stronger than the old guitars. There is a massive

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video diary on YouTube of the design process of the Unicorn guitar. On the 17-episode documentary I go through every step of the design process and reveal a lot of detail on my approach to making guitars. In episode 6 (I believe that’s the one) I talk about the neck construction, and end up standing on the laminated Unicorn neck - without breaking it. Up to this day I haven’t heard of one single Unicorn that would have a broken headstock, and there are already way over 100 of them out there, shipped all over the world. However, don’t start stepping on your guitar necks now at home – not a good idea, ha..!

Sometimes you hear these claims, that the wood of an electric gui-tar doesn’t

matter cause it’s the magnetic pickup that catches the signal solely from the string. True – the magnetic pickup doesn’t un-derstand wood vibration. But the string does. The string is at-tached to the guitar from both ends, and when you put energy to the string with your fingers, the vibration transfers to the body and neck of the guitar through those connection points. The guitar itself starts to vibrate. And as any vibrating object, the guitar has it’s resonance peaks, and frequencies that cou-ple other frequencies that stop vibrating faster, and so on. So you could say that every detail in that guitar – construction, wood materials, finishes, types of bridge and tuners down to the smallest detail like the bindings, screws and all that contributes to the way the guitar vibrates. This vibration trans-fers also back to the string, manipulating the way the string vibrates.There are harmonics that couple, others that decay faster. If the guitar has for example strongly vibrating mids, then you hear the acoustic sound of the guitar mid-rangy. The strings sounds more mid-rangy too. And this “filtered”

sound of the string is then caught by the pickup, and the energy travels through the cord to the ampli-fier and eventually to the speaker element and back to the room. When

you dial up volume higher, you won’t hear the acoustic sound of the guitar anymore. But STILL you can hear that mid-ranginess, if that was in the acoustic sound of the guitar. And now, in fact, the guitar itself acts in another role as well. The sound pressure in the room makes the guitar vibrate, too. Now the body and the neck vibrate not only by the energy fed by the string, but also by the energy “on the air”. And everything affects to this signal chain – the type of amp, speaker element, cabinet, room size, wall materials… So there’s a complex amount of variables that contribute to how does that electric guitar sound like. But still, the bottom line is, that you have

to have a healthy starting point. A healthy frequency range in your guitar, that is! For example, if your guitar doesn’t have crystal like highs, you won’t hear crystal like highs from the amp either, no matter what pickups you swap in,

or whichever amp you choose. If the highs aren’t there, they aren’t there. You can’t create the highs from thin air!

So what is the role of a pickup, then? My idea to make the per-fect electric guitar is to succeed in creating a guitar with open sounding and dynamic properties. An instrument that reacts sensitively to what the player is doing. The acoustic tone of the guitar needs to be balanced in a certain way. It’s important to have emphasize certain lower mids in the tone, otherwise the tone won’t cut through. So when I have that transparent, unlimiting tone in the guitar, I try to emphasize this transpar-ency to the pickup as well. So I’m not usually too keen on super high output pickups, cause they tend to shape the sound so much – filtering is another word for it. You can tweak a lot the character of your guitar by choosing the pickup right. A humbucker always compresses the tone a bit, but that’s ok,

that compression is part of its charm and soul. Old humbuck-ers aren’t often 100% humbucking though, cause the coils are not identical with each other. This can

be an asset – you can have a great humbucker tone, but still maintain some of the dynamics of a single coil pickup. So this is one of the features I wanted to do with our Unicorn Custom pickup. I also wanted to tweak the outputs of the bridge and neck pickups so that they would make sense. All too often the neck pickups push too loud in relation to the bridge unit. So we made the neck pickup quite a bit weaker than usual. You can balance with this really nicely by magnets, coil height, wire gauge and type and other mechanical details of the pickup. Even though you put less windings on the coils, you don’t need to lose the singing quality of the neck pickup. You can have it every bit as creamy and thick, but at the same time, you can gain tons of clarity. I don’t mean necessarily cleanliness. Clarity means better definition. With such pickup you can crank up your amp and drive it with heavily layered overdrive, and still you can hear all the notes of a chord. You gain versatility and musicality.

I feel I succeeded with the Unicorn very well. It is a differ-ent guitar from the Duke. It is also a different guitar from a modern Les Paul. But it IS surprisingly similar with many of

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the old ones. When I had built the first Unicorn guitars I had chance to arrange a very inter-esting A/B test that featured an original 1959 burst Les Paul, an R7, R8 and R9 reissues, and 2 of my Unicorns. We had a bunch of good guitarists, a choice of amps, and we did some recordings too – those are online, it’s the episode 16 of the Unicorn Video Diary. I’m sure you’ll find all the vids by googling “Ruokangas Video Diary”. Listen to the video with

high end speakers or quality headphones and form your own opinion. When that A/B test was made, most people in the room shared my (understandably extremely biased) opinion, that surprisingly the Unicorn was more a soulmate of the vin-tage Les Paul than the modern lookalikes (which were great guitars too, by the way!) by the original manufacturer...

I’ve been working the last years on a very special guitar – sort of like a fantasy trip to an alternative past. It start-ed on a long car ride with a friend – a crazy

friend, I might add… We talked about the evolution of guitar, and somehow our conversation boiled down to this question: “What if the electric guitar would have been invented in the 19th century?”… I was driving, and my friend was checking the internet on his cell phone, scanning through historic facts about the era of the second industrial revolution, leading to inventions like electrification and the telephone. We were conjuring up theories about why wasn’t the electric guitar invented earlier than in the 1930’s, while a magnetic pickup was a much older invention (telephone, 2nd half of 19th century). Digging up more and more facts we came to the conclusion that technically the electric guitar could have been invented for example in 1885. But – the motive to invent it would have needed to be something else than what it was in the 1930’s. Why? Because the loudspeaker was not invented until the 1920’s! So why would some wacko even come to think of an electric guitar so much earlier? Well, assuming that someone would have come to think of it, we went on brainstorming on all the possibilities. We were like little kids, enjoying the high ride of creativity…

After this initiation, I continued working on the idea, fasci-nated by certain elements that had popped into our minds on that car ride. Visually I ended up using my Unicorn guitar as the basis of this “first electric guitar in the world”, as I

had tentatively (and provocatively) named the project by then. This felt like a logical step for me, since I had designed the Unicorn model to show my respect for the traditional elecric guitar. I wanted to chal-lenge myself to create something that looks familiar enough so that the players would not be scared of it, but at the same time would be a

genuinely new, fresh take on the design. The Unicorn is influ-enced by the original Gibson Les Paul guitar in some ways, while the body shape pays some homage to old jazzboxes by Stromberg or the old German manufacturer Höfner. So back to my project… It was to become a some sort of mash-up of the Unicorn, a violin and a classical guitar. Heavy European influence – that’s what I wanted to achieve.

The most intriguing fea-ture of this new old gui-tar was to be the pickup, however. This is the idea that blew us away on that brainstorming car ride. We were reading

through history – we read that the vacuum tube was invented as early as in the late 19th century in order to amplify the telephone signal to enable long distance calls. That was the “Eureka!” moment for me. I asked: “Has anyone ever tried to do an active guitar pickup with tube technology?” I couldn’t find anything. Well, yes, I did find that there’s been some acoustic guitar piezo preamps with tubes in them, but I couldn’t find any reference anywhere about an active pickup, made with tubes. I’m now talking about a pickup like EMG does, for example, but in this case we wouldn’t use transis-tors at all. After this initial idea I started to play with the visual design, and the pickup morphed into this large round object resembling the placement and looks of a classical guitar soundhole. One idea led to another – magnetic pickup stuck to the round hole, tubes and the preamp glowing below, an old, framed convex glass covering the whole thing… It looked wacko all right, but at the same time, this thing could have actually been invented in 1885, and it could have looked like my invention too.

Somewhere down the road the guitar was renamed Captain Nemo. I guess it came from the looks of the pickup (like an ancient diving helmet glass) and maybe also from the whole Victorian style the guitar had developed into, resembling

review

Captain NemoCaptain Nemo

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13

somehow a Jules Verne’ish steampunk item. I never intended to make this steampunk

though. I was on the trail to make something that could have existed for real, and I also wanted to make it fully functional – unlike most steampunk stuff is.

Jorma Kostamo, the father of one of my employees is a retired army intelligence officer, an engineer by education, and has worked all his life with vacuum tubes. Jorma has designed the preamp schematics for the ValveBucker® (as the pickup was named and trademarked later on), and he also was happy to work on even my craziest ideas, which were then executed if they felt right. So I was figuring out the motive – why was this electric guitar invented, if you

couldn’t plug it into an amp and loudspeaker..? Well, a “tele-phone speaker” was invented all right (obvi-ously, being the same thing

as the magnetic pickup in a telephone, just reversed), even if the signal quality was somewhat poor – so in theory a person could have plugged the guitar into a headset and rocked on without disturbing others. Another motive could’ve been that the player could’ve plugged the thing into the telephone line, called the operator, asked to connect (distant call) to his gui-tar teacher (who has also such an electric guitar in his posses-sion), and the two of them could’ve done the first remote gui-tar lesson “online” – each of them playing the electric guitar and listening to each other through the headsets. Wild, haha! So anyway, this very rational path of thought was the source of my next bright idea for the guitar. If the player can plug it into a telephone line, it means that he can’t hear the signal by himself, so the guitar needs two things: 1) A sustain meter to tell that the guitar is operational, and 2) A display to show

how loud the signal is. Obvious, right?)

First of all, the tube preamp needed an external power source. So we made a box to be held on the floor, probably the first

active DI box in the world, ha! Basically the box was only needed for the power transformer to provide the correct volt-age to the guitar, but we figured that we could put a dual nixie tube display in the box as well. The idea was that the display would show the guitar volume pot position from 0 to 11. A great idea (!), and my engineer told me: “Yeah, no problem” – and then a year later he comes up with this pile of schematics and explains that it’s a bit of a challenge to show the display and what position the volume is in. But we did it anyway, and the size of the box on the floor grew consider-ably bigger! We also placed the sustain meter to the guitar, in the position where you would traditionally have the 3-way pickup selector toggle switch. I also wanted the guitar to have 4 pots just like the Les Paul, just because it was a fun detail. But I only had one pickup. So we ended up in installing a 3 band tonestack to the guitar!

When the Captain Nemo was getting ready, I have to con-fess that I had no freaking idea what it would sound like. Nobody knew! We were experimenting on so many levels, that the outcome was

a complete mystery. I guess I was hoping that at best the pickup would work decently. Maybe like a regular guitar with a tube preamp on the floor, or something. I humbly admit that I did expect that the project would be more of a gimmicky sort than something fundamentally successful. You know, all the elaborate wood carvings (by master carver Jani Rinta-Keturi) and other visual details turning heads, but that’s about it… And I really thought that would be enough, cause such an outcome was worth the fun of the process itself!

The Captain Nemo was for a some sort of a trip - conceptual art, one might call it. I’ve received quite a few emails and phone calls asking about the availability and price. This gui-tar took many years in the making, and like every prototype of something, it’s really impossible to give it a pricetag that would even pay the cost. I have thought about it back and forth whether I should offer the guitar on A custom order basis. At the moment, I’d say it might become available at a later point, once I figure out in what exact combo should that happen. The way the first one was done is totally over the top mad, but surely we could tweak this into something doable and accessible. However, first of all I want to focus 100% into the development process of the ValveBucker, which I find might be something remarkable, big time. Something, that could be applied to many of our guitars and even beyond. So those of you waiting for the Captain Nemo - patience, please!

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So when I plugged the thing to an amp for the first time, oh, boy was I struck with surprise. We have a stock Peavey Classic 30 combo in our guitar assembly room, and that amp had never ever before sounded like THAT. The dynamics were superb,

and the depth of the tone was indescribable – such clarity and musical definition, that I must say I hadn’t heard any-thing quite like it ever before. There was an acoustic quality to it, something like having a piezo installed in the guitar, except this one didn’t have any of the typical piezo sizzle, but instead a beautiful acoustic timbre to the tone, unique and very surprising. I was absolutely stunned by the sound qual-ity, and at the same time puzzled like hell! How could the guitar sound like that? We had a long talk with Jorma about it, and finally we came to realize, that our idea that evolved to be the ValveBucker® – to make a round box in place of the sound hole of a classical guitar, and to place the magnetic pickups and the tube preamp in that box – these elements had caused an unexpected “side effect”. The magnetic field of the pickup is right next to the tubes, which have iron inside them. The magnetic field “talked” to the tubes! This added a whole new dimension to the tone! It’s not the same thing at all as having a signal chain of a passive pickup, combined with a tube preamp placed somewhere outside the guitar, or even inside the guitar, but further from the magnetic field of the pickup(s). The tonestack also functions in this application in a very interesting manner. You can tweak a dozen different sweet spots from the pickup, sometimes sounding like a pow-erful rock guitar, other times deceivingly close to an acoustic steel-stringed guitar and then some!

At this point in time we are experimenting with the next prototypes of the ValveBucker®. We’re learn-ing to understand better why it works like it does. We’re trying different things to learn the fundamentals better. I’m convinced our R&D process

will have great results already during 2015, and I feel strongly that the ValveBucker® may well be one of the greatest and most important inventions I’ve ever had a chance to work with in my whole career. The next goal is that you’ll hear the ValveBucker® in our “normal” range of guitars.

This crazy trip to an alternative past resulting in the birth of the Captain Nemo guitar was quite a lesson to me personally. It was a great reminder: Let your creativity roam free! That is the only way to genuine innovation – to tune up your antennas to the most sensitive frequencies, to listen, to have fun, to free your mind! The Captain Nemo guitar is a very cool conceptual design project for me, but the outcome was so much more than any of us involved could have ever anticipated. We did not expect to invent the ValveBucker®, and even if we did, we never expected it to sound like it does, in such a fundamental way different from anything that existed before. What a joyful ride it has been, and I’m so much looking forward to what comes next!

The DukeSince they are somewhat rare, and especially in the USA, we asked Bob Willcutt to send us the Ruokangas Duke he had in stock. We have reviewed thiis top of the line model before, but it had been a long time and we wanted to experi-ence Juha’s work again. We are happy to report that little has changed with the Duke, still one of the most finely crafted and designed guitars we have ever played.

In terms of appearance and tone, the Duke uniquely combines Spanish cedar with an Arctic Birch top. As Juha observed, Spanish cedar shares the appearance and resonant proper-ties of rare Honduran mahogany. You can hear and feel the resonance when you play – even unplugged. Weigh-ing 7.6 pounds, theDuke is perfectly balanced. The ebony fingerboard is utter perfection, the fret work perfectly executed and the rounded neck shape is brilliantly conceived,

uniformly comfortable with no taper evident along the full length of the neck. The carved arctic birch top is highly figured with a 3-D quilted pattern, and the unique carved shape of the Duke body is perfectly proportioned. Th headstock features a raised, carved top in black laquer with matching ebony 1:21 tuners that work flawlessly. The Duke features three controls – a single volume knob and dual tone contros for the 3-way pickup selector switch. The custom Ruokangas pickups utlilize adjustable polepieces witha distinctive pearl inlay on both.

Tone The Ruokangas humbucking pickups deliver all the tones you could want from a traditional two pickup neck/niddle/bridge arrangement. The Ruokangas pickups are exceptionaly tone-ful with treble that is pleasing without soundng shrill or too thin, excellent midrange balance and deep bass tones, even on the bridge pickup. String definition and note separation are excellent, enabling each string to be heard as part of a chord

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rather than sounding murky and vague. These pickup also capture a certain single coil quality of clarity and definition despite being humbuckers. They are very clear in the style of a single coil, with excellent clarity and presence, yet entirely noiseless. Even play-ers who don’t normally wam to

humbucking pickups will like this set. Excellent all around. The Ruokangas Duke is a testament to the highest aspirations of the builder’s art, perfectly executed, brilliantly conceived, inspired and inspiring. You can see, feel and hear the quality of this guitar, once again confirming that we truly do live in the golden era of guitar building. Quest forth…

www.ruokangas.com

Chuck Thornton 10th AnniversaryIf you have been with us for a while, you know something about guitar builder Chuck Thornton. We won’t pretend for a minute that Chuck isn’t one of our very favorite guitar builders. In fact, many of his customers own many of his guitars, like 20 or more. He’s that kind of builder, inspired by a vision that is entirely unique, yet stunningly approachable. Working solo in the woods of Maine, Chuck has a vision that translates into beauti-fully made instruments with a

big WOW factor, as in no one else on the planet is building guitars quite like Chuck’s. Still, you needn’t make such a huge leap to embrace them – they are familiar, with thought-ful design enancements that make them so appealing. Now it’s fine to build attractive and creative instruments, but they must also be great players, too, and this is where Chuck’s guitars really shine. The man has a feel and a keen eye for ‘play-ability’ that is difficult to describe., but he clearly understands how to design and build guitars that are a joy to hold and play. Chuck understands what we like in exceptional instruments – the feel and look of them – and he builds guitars that meet that rare standard of being playable, toneful and attractive in a uniquely appealing style. If you were to play a Thornton we have no doubt that you would agree. The goal of this article is to inspire you to do just that, and who knows? You may be lucky enough to win one of the very same guitar models reviewed here. Enjoy…

Our 10Th Anniversary Model is a classic 16” archtop with 3” sides and a 25” scale. Chuck designed this guitar at the

request of some of his collectors to commemorate being in business building guitars for the past ten years. “Since the occasion is a special one, I wanted the guitar to reflect that. While it came in three variations, I started with a three piece neck of figured maple with a rosewood center strip. The sides are curly maple with a rose-

wood center strip, and the back is 5A Western maple with a rosewood center strip. Rosewood bound F-Holes with B/W/B purfling, B/W/B side purfling, B/W/B top purfling with Ivo-roid binding on the top, fingerboard, headstock and pickguard and an added white accent line in the fingerboard, headstock and pickguard. As a finishing touch, there is a strip of the Brazilian rosewood under the fingerboard binding, headstock binding and pickguard binding. The fingerboard, headstock,

pickguard and tailpiece are Brazilian rosewood, and I designed a fingerboard and tailpiece inlay specifically for this guitar. I really put my heart and soul into this one. (Though, I could really say that about every instrument I make!) There are three varia-tions of the 10th Anniversary model:Curly maple neck, back and sides with the rosewood center strip and Brazilian

rosewood fingerboard, headstock, pickguard & tailpiece and a master grade Sitka spruce top with either a neck humbucker or two humbuckers. Same as 1. but with a 5A western maple top and two humbuckers. Mahogany neck and sides with a curly maple center strip, a Tasmanian Blackwood back with curly maple center strip, Tasmanian Blackwood top with curly maple bound F-holes and ebony fingerboard, headstock, pickguard & tailpiece. The spruce top with a neck humbucker is set up with flatwound strings for a warm Jazz tone.The all maple or Tasmanian Blackwood guitars with two humbuckers I setup with roundwound strings, these models have a big full sounding semi-hollowbody tone with very impressive feedback control. The first ten of these guitars will have the 10th Anniversary inlay in pearl at the 12th fret and serial number 1 through 10 in pearl at the 22nd fret. As of to-day, 8 of the 10 anniversary models have been sold. After the first ten the guitar will get a standard serial number and inlay

at the 12th fret.

One of the biggest bless-ings I’ve had in the last ten years of building guitars is having clients turn into dear friends. This last September we celebrated our 10th anniversary with some of these friends and

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collectors from all over the country. It was a wonderful time hanging out with and having dinner with people who I’ve been building guitars for for years but hadn’t met. Of course, some of my clients come by at least once a year to have dinner and see the beautiful state of Maine while others come by as many as three times a year to eat, drink, and play guitars. I can’t fully express how much each of these relationships means to me and how thankful I am for the passion they bring to my shop.

The Contoured Legend Special is my take on one of the all-time classics, the Les Paul. A client asked me to design this guitar for him because he wanted a Les Paul-style guitar that was highly contoured and much lighter. The CLS starts with a one piece Honduran mahogany body and neck with either a rosewood or Macassar Ebony fingerboard. It can be built with either P-90’s,

mini humbuckers or full size humbuckers. I love this guitar – it is so comfortable to play and has this really cool single cut SG vibe about it. It weighs in at just over six pounds and sounds fantastic.There is a great story that goes with this gold top Contoured Legend Special. This is the second gold top that I built for this client, who also happens to be a ToneQuest reader. The first one was finished in April, 2014, and I had just shipped the guitar to him and posted pictures of it on my web-site. I don’t think he had it two weeks when my phone rang, and it was Walter Becker of Steely Dan asking me if the gold top was for sale. I said it wasn’t and he asked if I would con-tact the owner and see if he would sell it to him. Of course he sold it to Walter so Walter gave tickets for him and his wife to see a concert and played the gold top on a few songs and even called my client on the phone to thank him for parting with the guitar. A few months later, Steely Dan played in Maine where I got to meet Walter for a second time and deliver to him a Blues Queen he asked me to build for him. I also had one of my 10th Anniversary guitars with me that I wanted to show him, and he bought that as well. Walter has now purchased nine of my guitars. Both times I’ve met him and every time

I’ve spoken with him on the phone, he has been a very

gracious, warm and wonderful human being, I always come away feeling blessed to have had the time to get to know him.

We have a new website that I hope will be up by the time you’re reading this article, cpthorntonguitars.com. Please check it out to see pictures of the 10th Anniversary model and hear new sound clips of these guitars as well as the rest of the CPT models. Also look for the next addition to our lineup… we’re bringing back a bass guitar!

Thornton 10th AnniversaryThornton’s 10th Annii-versary #5 is an elegantly built archtop with dual humbuckers, and you won’t find anything remotely like this hanging in a typical guitar store. Thornton uses 5A figured Western maple for the body, and 5A eastern ma-ple for the neck, creating a striking custom instrument that defies the concept of mass production. With a

Brazilian rosewood fingerboard, headstock inlay and bridge, the 10th Anniversary is a truly striking guitar, clearly built to the highest standards of the builder’s art, subtle straight-grained flame figure gracing the top, sides and back with a 3” depth. The amber sunburst nitrocellulose finish is flawlessly applied, and the large oval removable back panel is carved from the same Western maple as the body. A center seam of rosewood runs from the body back through the neck and the sides of the guitar, with fine double black binding decorating the sides of the guitar with cream binding surrounding the top. The two large F-holes in the top are bound with a double layer of fine white and black binding, and the ivorid Gotoh tuners feature a 1:21 gear ratio for smooth, easy tuning. In addition to handcut fingerboard inlays, a 10th Anniversary pearl inlay is set into the fingrboard at the 12th fret, and a small #5 is set into the fingerboard at the 22nd fret. Scale length is 25”, nut width 1 11/10” with a 12” fingerboard radius. The amber volume and tone knobs perfectly match the hue of the amber finish. We should also mention that we really like the modified cutaway on this model…

ToneThe pickups in this model are Wolftone Dr. Vintage, and “vintage” they are. The 10th Anniversary sounds adequately vintage in all three pickup positions, with a soulful tone that does not mirror that of typical new guitar. Treble tones are properly bright in all three positions without sounding shrill or spiky, the middle tones are lush and rich, and the bass tones

guitars

-continued-

TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015 17

are warm and expansive. The 10th Anniversay does have a center block, and while not feeding back and screaming

at higher volume levels, you do get some added sustain and moderate feedback at high volume through our vintage Princ-eton Reverb. More importantly, Thornton’s guitar produces a fascinating range of clean tones supported by acoustic sustain that creates a very cool and desirable voice for an electric guitar – call it old school and very vintage. The treble tones from the plain strings remain clear at all volume levels, while the midrange and bass tones acquire a unique character and sustaining qualities depending on volume. For creative play-

ers who really pay attention to what their guitar is giving them, Thornton’s 10th Anni-versary really serves up a wide range of tones that can support an equaly wide range of musi-cal styles, from subtle jazzy tones to more intense blues and rock. This is a guitar for creative players who can fully mine what the guitar can give them. As far as the 10th Anni-versary goes, you will only be limited by your imagination. This guitar will willingly take

you to a lot of fascinating places if you let it, further defining what a true instrument really should be.

Thornton 10th Anniversary Number 1 We were fortu-nate to have had a subscriber offer his Thornton single pickup model #1 for review – a beautiful blonde with spruce top and flamed maple sides and back – the fist built in the series and a real looker!

Weighing 7.35 pounds, the single

pickup Anniversary #1 is built with a beautiful, close-grained spruce top and gorgeous curly maple back and sides. Also featur-ing a Brazilian rosewood headstock veneer, fingerboard and tailpiece, this guitar is built in a

similar style as the #5 but with one less pickup. It would be fair to say that the lack of a bridge pickup does alter the tone and character of the guitar. Even though we were hearing just the neck pickup, this model seems to sound slightly clearer, with excellent treble and mid tones in addition to bass. The concept of a single pickup model seems to work extremely well, with an excellent, balanced tone that is brighter then the tone of the neck pickup in the two pickup model. In other words, you shouldn’t assume that you’ll necessarily miss the bridge pickup. We really like the tone of this single pickup model – it is versatile, toneful and unique in an old-school fashion. This guitar shares all of the cosmetic appointments described for the #5 Thornton – the bigget difference being the beautifully blonde spruce top. We love this model as much as the two-pickup version, and again, for experienced players this guitar will take them to a lot of fascinating places that other guitars just can’t go. Quest forth…

Contoured Legend SpecialThe Legnd Special is a ‘Junior” type guitar with Honduran Mahog-nay body and neck, Brazlian rosewood finger-board. and enony

headstock. Weighing just 7 pounds 4 ounces, the Special has a 24 5/8 scale length, 1 11/16 nut width and a 12” fingerboard radius with trapezoid imlay and ivoroid binding. Fretwire is 6150 with Gotoh 510 tuners, a Faber bridge and Resomax tailpiece. Pickups are Zhangbucker Cherrick P90 neck and Honk 90 bridge. You’re getting Chuck’s take on a Special in gorgeous, premium mahogany. that features a super deep

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TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015 18

neck pocket that extends midway between the two pickups. Beautifully built with a contoured cutaway, this is an elegant Junior that plays, feels and sounds as good as it looks.

ToneThe Zhang-buckers are compara-tively clean and don’t dirty up the tone at high volume the way many P90s will. The bridge pickup is

moderately bright with excellent treble tones on the top, but equally good mids and lows – again, more balance than many P90s. The neck pickup also remains cleaner and less woofy than many neck P90s, with a tighter response and overall voice. Com-bined in the middle these pickups create a smooth midrange tone with excellent string definition. Turning up the guitar or amp still doesn’t compromise the clarity or string-to-string definition of these pickups or create a muddy tone. The Zhangbuckers are clearly built to maintain clarity and definition, and this is good. Individual notes hold up well in chords, and single notes ring with a bell-like quality. Overall, the Zhangbuckers enable the Thornton guitar to avoid stereotyped tones and resonate with clarity and excellent harmonic overtones. The Legend truly sounds and plays as good as it looks. . If the “junior” solidbody design is for you, you won’t find a better playng or more toneful choice than the Legend Special. Lightweight and easy to play, it is a fully optimized and tweaked version of a classic that can really do it all in terms of classic guitar tones. Price: $4,390 as reviewed.

You’ll have no trouble appreciating the higher standard the Thornton’s guitars represent. The obsessive build quality and design are evident as soon as you open the case. Chuck’s guitars sing with a cohesive voice that is entirely unique to his instruments, and in this regard they are not simply beautiful guitars… You can actually hear and feel the difference, and the difference is why so many guitarists own full collections of these wonderful instruments.

That’s right, be entered to win a $4,390.00 CP Thornton gold

top Legend Special just like our review instrument in this issue! All active subscribers will be automatically entered, so simply keep your current subscription active to enter. The drawing will take place when the guitar is available to ship in October 2015 and the winner will be announced in the November issue of TQR. Good luck!

www.cpthorntonguitars.com

True NOS tubes are now in short supply, but we contacted Mike Kropotkin as KCA and asked him to send us what-ever he had in stock. We received a pair of Philips JAN 6L6 WGBs, TAD 6L6WGCs and a pair of Philips JAN 6V6GTs that didn’t survive the trip. They would have sounded truly awesome in our 1960 Deluxe no doubt.

The JAN Philips 6L6s sounded extra fine in our blackface 1x15 Pro as you can imagine. These tubes being small bottles, they possess a unique old tone that is instantly addictive. Notes bloom from these tubes and pick attack is vivid yet soft rather than harsh and abrupt. The sound tends to surround you with a vivid presence and attack like only NOS tubes can. They are magical tubes, and if you haven’t tried them it’s time you did. You’ll be humbled and amazed by how good your vintage amp will sound, and for us there is no go-ing back once you have experienced the magic of true NOS vintage tubes.

The Tube Amp Doctor (TAD) 6L6WGCs are also excellent. We aren’t going to tell you they sound exactly like a pair of NOS RCA 6L6s, but they do get close enough the make these tubes a solid buy that will do justice to your vintage amps. They possess the depth and feel of vintage tubes, with a warmth that is captivating, excellent mids and a smooth and gentle top end that is silky and lush. Recommended for any of your big 6L6 amps.

We were sorry to see that the JAN Philips 6V6GTs didn’t arrive intact, but we have deep experience with this tube and they are simply outstanding in all of your smaller 6V6 amps. If you have not dabbled with NOS tubes and you own vintage amplifiers, it’s time you realized what you’re missing. Even at today’s prices these tubes are worth every penny, espe-cially if you aren’t planing on taking your amps on a 40 city tour… They will outlive you and bring a lot of smiles in the meantime. Tubes are the heart of tube amps, and you owe it to yourself to use the very best. Once you hear the difference you’ll be sold – trust us.

effects

Win A CP ThorntonENTER TO…

Goldtop Contoured Legend Special with P-90sWin A CP Thornton

KCA NOS TubesKCA NOS Tubes

TQ

TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015 19

Mike also sent some really nice preamp tubes - a Mullard 12AT7, GE Jan 5751, NOS Tesla EF86 and a new production Svetlana 12AX7. All were excellent, and we can recommend the Svetlana as a worthy hedge against true NOS RCAs. It isn’t quite the same, but close enough to make this tube a strong buy. Most of our amps are loaded with NOS tubes, but if it makes you feel any better, our supply is pretty much gone now. When we first began publishing TQR you could buy NOS RCA preamp tubes for $25.00. Now they are frequently four times that much, although you can buy used but good preamp tubes on eBay for less, and we do. If it makes you feel any better, just understand that a lot of tubes were used in equipment that did not get heavy use. It isn’t uncommon to find tubes with pleny of life left in them at discounted prices, so if you can’t pay for NOS, we urge you to check out various auctions for used but good vintage tubes. You’ll be glad you did. Many vintage tubes simply sound magical compared to modern alternatives. Quest forth.

KCANOStubes.com, 703-430-3645

All Back Issues on Sale Now in a Convenient and Searchable CD Format!

After 15 years no one can remember what has been covered in each issue of TQR, but you don’t have to… Acquire our searchable back issue index on CD format and you’ll have every issue on your computer in seconds! Spanning Novem-ber 1999 - March 2015, you’ll have instant access to every ToneQuest issue on your PC or notebook computer for just $219.00. To order, simply log on to our web site at www.tonequest.com or call 1-800-629-8663 toll-free. We will rush

your copy of the ToneQuest Archives to you via first class mail along with a special gift of ToneQuest premium guitar picks. Order today!

ToneQuest Straps on Sale

Our premimum German leather straps from Longhollow Leather in Franklin, TN are the most supple, comfortable and attractive guitar straps you will ever use. Reader comments confirm that our straps are just exceptionally comfortable and attractive, worthy of your best guitars. At just $45 each you will treasure these premium fully adjustable straps for years to come. Available in black or chesnut brown, order yours today while supplies last. Simply log on to our website at tonequest.com or call us at 1-800-MAX-TONE to place your order today. All strps are sent via Priority Mail.

Back Issues Available Now If you need a few back issues in PDF or print format to com-plete your collection why not order them today? Please see

our online back issue index for availability at tonequest.com. Some print issue are no longer avialable, all are available in PDF format. To order at just $10 each, log on to tonequest.com or call us at 1-800-MAX-TONE today! Premium tone-quest Pyramid picks included with each order!

TQR

TONEQUEST REPORT V.16 N.5 March 2015

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David WilsonLiz MedleyRick Johnson

Analogman

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Phil Brown

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Don ButlerThe Toneman

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Mike KropotkinKCA NOS Tubes

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Shane NicholasSr. Mktg Mgr, Fender Guitar Amplifers

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Richard McDonaldVP Mktg, Fender Musical Instruments

Joe MloganoskiCo-Founder K&M Anaslog Designs

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James PennebakerArtist Relations, Fender Musical Instruments, Nashville

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Randall C. SmithDesigner & President, Mesa/Boogie Ltd.

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Buddy WhittingtonJohn Mayall & The Bluesbreakers

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EDITORIAL BOARD

Pyramid StringsNow in StockNew Pyramids are in! Pure Nickel Maximum Performance Pure Nickel (original hex core) sets, .010-.046 Light and .010-.048 Light/Medium roundwounds are in stock now, plus Pure Nickel Roundcore Classics, .010-.046 Light and .010-.048 Light/Medium. To order, CALL 1-877-MAX-TONE or visit www.tonequest.com Free Pyramid/ToneQuest pearloid hard picks included with each order!

The ToneQuest Report™ (ISSN 1525-3392) is published monthly by Mountainview Publishing LLC, P.O. Box 717 Decatur, GA. 30031-0717, 1-877-MAX-TONE, email: tonequest1@aol.com. Periodicals Postage Paid at Decatur, GA and At Additional Mailing Offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to:TheToneQuest Report™, PO Box 717, Decatur, GA. 30031-0717.The annual subscription fee for The ToneQuest Report™ is $89 per year for 10 issues. International subscrib-ers please add US $40. Please remit payment in U.S. funds only. VISA, MasterCard and American Express accepted. The ToneQuest Report™ is published solely for the benefit of its subscribers. Copyright © 2015 by Mountainview Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this newsletter may be reproduced in any form or incorporated into any information retrieval system without the written permission of the copyright holder. Please forward all subscription requests, comments, questions and other inquiries to the above address or contact the publisher at tonequest1@aol.com. Opinions expressed in The ToneQuest Report™ are not necessarily those of this publication.Mention of specific products, services or technical advice does not constitute an endorsement. Readers are advised to exercise extreme caution in handling electronic devices and musical instruments.