I’ve written about the album, Candy Macabre—out streaming and on vinyl May 31—and the way I’m defining the “success” of the album. Because there is no good reason to buy an album in the age of streaming, I’m doing a few promotional stunts to entice people. There’s the pop-up shop in the Asheville Mall, and there’s this—the Candy Macabre guitar!
In addition to streaming, the record is coming out on blue vinyl in a limited edition of 200. One of those 200 will contain a “golden ticket” that entitles the finder to the guitar, which features the album cover art. So in addition to some other goodies, buying the album on vinyl will effectively enter you into a raffle to win the guitar. I’ll have the guitar on display in the store, and I might even play it there a little bit.
I’ve built a few guitars in the past, and I’ve learned some things along the way. I thought it might be fun to share a bit about the guitar-buliding/art process, so here goes.
I’ve had the Candy Macabre collage a long time, and when I first started thinking about the guitar, I thought I would feature just the lion lady (and not the rest of the collage), and I played around with placement.
I liked this layout because I was initially planning to install a Bigsby-style tremolo. And it was this image placement that led to the guitar having only a single pickup, instead of the traditional two pickup configuration for a tele. I’ve never built a guitar (or owned a guitar) with a Bigsby, and I thought it would be fun. I also visually like Bigsbys, and I like that they don’t require a big loss of wood mass from the guitar body like a strat-style fulcrum trem.
The Bigsby would have taken up a big portion of the surface area of the guitar, limiting options for image placement. I ultimately decided to forego the trem in favor of more lion-lady images, and I’ll share more of that in a future post.
This is a Fender-style guitar (which is the only kind I can build—I’m not a luthier). I love Fender-style guitars, and I’m a sucker for Fender aesthetics. I was thrilled when Instagram started serving me an ad for custom guitar headstock logo decals in the Fender style. I was suspicious, but took a gamble, and I’m pretty happy with how the headstock logo turned out.
That’s it for now. I’ll share more about the process of building the guitar in some future posts. If you can’t get enough, subscribe to get access to the Collage of the Day Program, which delivers an animal-headed pin-up model to your email inbox at 5:30 AM EST every week day!