I had a local dealer in Hollywood who said, “You know, if you assembled some guitars out of these parts, I could sell them.” So we did a few pieces here and there. We were doing a lot of OEM small manufacturer stuff and selling to stores because people were building parts guitars. I was selling bodies and necks to John Suhr at Rudy’s Music Stop, Roger Sadowsky, and Jim Tyler-a bunch of guys that didn’t have the facilities to do it themselves.
After a year, I moved into a 1500-square-foot industrial space just across the parking lot from where we are now. It soon became clear that if I was going to do this on a serious level, I needed more space. What prompted you to start making guitars? Anderson’s employees joke that, because Jesse Flynt selects customers’ gorgeous maple tops, he can’t show his face to the public or he’ll never be able to live a normal life again. That first year we lived on those pickups-we still make them to this day. After I got through making necks and bodies in our garage during the day, we sat up making pickups every night. I set up a little pickup-making shop in the kitchen of our house. and made a deal for me to make them 300 Strat pickups. Schecter Japan contacted me and we sat down at Carl’s Jr.
#Tom anderson guitars reviews how to#
The American Schecter factory closed a few months after I left, and nobody knew how to make pickups. What fed our family that first year was that Schecter Japan needed American-made pickups. I wasn’t planning on being a guitar manufacturer. The first year, I ran the company from my garage, and the plan was to just make bodies and necks. Did you start mostly making necks, bodies, and parts? We had a two-year-old and a baby due in two months, but it worked out. Still, I came home from work and told my wife that I quit my job. He said, “If you really want to do what you want, you need to start your own company.” That was the furthest thing from my mind. Until then we had made everything at Schecter: we had a metal shop and a wood shop, and we did the finishing right there. They sent me to Japan to source stuff for them, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. In 1982, Schecter was floundering financially and they brought in some investors who decided to make stuff overseas because it would be cheaper. I was thinking about getting married, so I went to work building guitars with Dave Schecter in 1977. In the late ’70s, when disco happened and the playing situation got bad, it became obvious that I wasn’t going to make a living playing. I would gig at night, and during the day I would do repairs at music stores around the area.
I still loved guitar and did a lot of tinkering on my own guitars: taking them apart and changing pickups, etc. Then I realized that I wasn’t going be a rock star and buy my parents a condo on Maui. I had a band in sixth grade, and later I made a living playing around LA for about five years after high school. Yeah, I started guitar when I was eight years old, convinced all through school that I was going to be a rock star and buy my parents a condo on Maui. Tom Anderson testing out a Bigsby-equipped Atom Special. We recently had the pleasure of hearing this American success story-and Anderson’s new take on one of the first electric guitar designs- firsthand. Then small builders like Schecter and Jackson began a trend toward custom-crafted guitars tailored to needs that weren’t being met by the big boys-like the desire for locking tremolos, thinner necks, and more modern aesthetics.Ī product of those heady times, Tom Anderson has risen from humble beginnings in his kitchen and garage to be one of the most respected names in the thriving custom guitar market. Until the ’80s, guitarists mainly played mass-produced instruments: Fender, Gibson, Gretsch, or Rickenbacker-that was pretty much it.
0 kommentar(er)
