Beetle

In the past decade a terrible epidemic has descended on eastern canada. A tiny invasive beetle called the Emerald Ash Borer has wrought devastation on the forests and urban canopy of my home, Ottawa, Ontario. Burrowing under the bark of the northern white ash, it chews through the living cambium layer and slowly but inevitably causes its demise.

Out of lemons, make lemonade: luckily, ash can be made into furniture, guitars or, failing that, excellent firewood. And from all this devastation at least we have Beetle, a requiem for that noble tree and a paean to the irresistible force of unnatural selection.

A simple guitar, sleek and useable, Beetle is easy to approach and easy to get the most out of. Besides the beetle-killed white ash, the only other wooden part is the Walnut neck, making this an entirely local-woods instrument. The neck is ebonized to match the hardware, and utilizes a hollow carbon-fibre core. By a unique process, the carbon tube is inserted without front or back routes, resulting in a seamless, monolithic neck that is quite light but superbly stiff.

The single pickup is a version of the classic PAF humbucker custom-built by local genius JD guitarworks. A single excellent pickup with a single volume control is indeed all a player needs to realize an amazing tone.

The only other pieces needed to finish this puzzle are my own design of bridge, 3-d printed in an amalgam of stainless steel and bronze, 24 medium-tall stainless-steel frets, and my own “wrap-lock” tuner system, which doesn’t require any extra hardware at the nut.