The Eggman Guitar Design, an exercise in self-referentiality

In my last posting here, my tribute to Vox guitar designs, I made reference to a guitar’s self-referentiality… and I would like to stress that while it is a tried and true way to make a guitar design feel ‘whole’ unto itself, it’s not absolutely necessary… there are many famous and beloved guitars that do not use that overriding injunction and do just fine.

But, in my long years of (unpaid) experimentation, I have made a few stabs at developing models that are built entirely from a fairly rigid set of motif parameters. Y’know, just for fun, between SuperModels. This is one of those, a design from about 2007 called the Eggman… an admittedly theoretical endeavour, but not wholly out of the realm of makeability and playability. Probably not a ‘sittin’-down’ gittar, it’s still fairly interesting, simply because it’s pretty much all made from one repeated oval. Both the body and headstock are the same oval, with the cutaways, arm bevels, control routs and TRCs all designed by the addition or removal of that same oval. I would also sculpt the top and back into ovoid radii, making the overall body shape a Droge, like a… Jordan Almond.

As soft as the essential form is, it’s still kind of a pointy ‘Metal’ offering when ‘clipped-out’, in an oddly unforgiving way. Still, the back and the ‘leg-notch’ would certainly benefit from a bit of softening for comfort’s sake. Breaking a body into its four bouts, and asymmetrically at that, generally brings a futuristic, mechanistic feel, but here that’s been ameliorated by using a figured hunk of luscious wood, whose intrinsic organic nature makes the Retro-Nazi in most players relax and take five. It’s nowhere near as overwrought as a lot of scalloped and sculpted Metal axes, and that simplicity also helps tone the whole piece down a bit as well. It just seems like it Ought to Be.

I originally had this dressed in egg-carton colors, but having since discovered Sam Evans’ Cardinal Instruments’ designs, I took the liberty of making it look a bit like his models, as that’s the only company I can imagine doing this one. (Not that I’m necessarily suggesting that!).

I fully realize this isn’t a BigBox Guitar Store offering, but somebody ought to see these things, they do illustrate my point. I have two other trials in this vein that are more successful, but I can’t show y’all everything! If any readers do follow the above exercise using other shapes such as triangles, squares or circles please let us know and your designs can be published here for others to look over. Thanks for reading, please come back again for more guitar designs and reviews, or just add us to your Facebook ‘likes’ to get all the latest articles as they come out.