Let me tear the guts out of this thing…
A guitar like a race car
The Mojo King model started out as my “midlife crisis” guitar in 2012, as some of you may remember. When I turned 40, I couldn’t afford a race car, so I ended up designing this guitar instead!
The Project Valvebucker
Now the Mojo King takes the next step, or literally speaking, a leap to the unknown! We’ve been working on the Project Valvebucker® for a long time, and even though we’ll offer this special pickup in a lot of different guitars, the Mojo King felt like the perfect choice as the platform to finalize the wiring on – and this, ladies and gentlemen, is that instrument.
Let’s do it again.. and again..
You wouldn’t believe how many times we’ve teared the guts out of this guitar, replacing circuit boards, tweaking the grounding, testing tubes, changing caps, measuring resistances, capacitances, voltages or what not. We’ve assembled – disassembled – reassembled the guitar to the extent that the screws didn’t hold anymore and the body became all scratched and dinged up…
It’s alive!
The good news is that we did it! The guitar sounds fantastic. We perfected the Valvebucker® circuit and now we can offer it as a very cool and certainly a unique custom option in our guitars. It’s alive!
Ahem… this particular Mojo King is not for sale, though. No – it’s mine! My precioussss…!!!?
You can find more info about the Valvebucker here – complete with audio clips, video and more photos.
P.S. I ended up parting my ways with this guitar after all. I lent it to Sonny Landreth, and he ended up using it at various recording sessions. The track Cryin’ Shame by Dion is one example. One thing lead to another – and long story short – Sonny wanted to buy the guitar, and I let my greedy paws off of it. Better this way, for both of us!
