The Trinity Guitar – TearDrop, Flying V and Horns designed into one!

I had an assignment to design a completely new shaped guitar body for a far eastern guitar company. This is great, I thought, not just designing a small piece, an accessory or a logo but that actual guitar body design! I will share here two variations of my first guitar body design, which I think are great but are not the approved designs that the company is going ahead with. Even so I think I would love a guitar body that was made with one of these shapes!

I call this design The Trinity, because it blends shapes from three of my favourite guitar designs and answers some design issues to make a completely new funky, usable and some would say beautiful guitar body shape. I’ve always thought that The Vox Teardrop and The Gibson Flying V are great guitars but would never really want to pay out for one of them. Being lazy and quite old I prefer to do most of my guitar space rock noodling while sitting down. Neither the V shape nor the Teardrop work very well on the knee… They do do sleek and space-age though, which is something I like, a lot. You can see the underlying shape is a Teardrop, the back cutout is a ‘V’ influence and in a final design the bridge unit and where the strings go through the guitar body can be an echo of that design. Also, though you can’t see it, the headstock on this draft is a bullet/comet type a bit like the ‘V’. For practicality as mentioned above though, the guitar needs Horns! The lower one is needed for the leg rest and the upper one for the strap/balance of shape.

The upper horn is designed like an Art Deco wave form! I wanted the lower horn to be utilitarian so I made it similar in shape to a pistol grip. On the first draft this was more vertical but it was suggested it wouldn’t be as comfortable as it is in this version. So it’s a bit of a compromise.

I did a guitar body design without the ‘V’ influences too, in tandem with this. It’s logical to call this guitar design The Duality!  This shows even more of the offset Teardrop shape that The Trinity is based upon. (Oh, I forgot to mention that I offset the waist of the Teardrop in both designs) A picture say a thousand words and here it is;

The Duality is a bit more conservative but still quite different to anything I have seen available by any guitar manufacturer. If anyone wants the vector shapes/illustrator files for these guitar body models, let me know in the comments below and I’ll get back to you. Also you must remember the finishes and pickups/hardware are just options that I like the look of, anything can be customised. I must get round to drawing some different types of pickups and hardware to add to these guitar body designs and illustrations. Check back for more guitar design reviews soon! Mark

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