9 Moons Ago

Well, it’s about bloody time! Anyway, here’s the post I’ve been dragging my feet on for different reasons, but rather than dwell on that, here’s my rundown of the Ken Stringfellow guitar project:

In late 2000, a group of 6 people from three countries got together in an online forum and decided to make a guitar for Ken Stringfellow, a guitarist, keyboard player and singer of the Seattle based band, the Posies, and a backing musician for several groups, including R.E.M.. Each person on the forum had specific roles in the construction of the guitar, but everyone voted on the main elements of it’s design. My husband (a friend at the time), Cameron, was the Luthier and has written about the process here. My contribution to the project was designing the inlays for the neck of the guitar. I chose a few songs that easily suggested recognizable symbols and drew some designs for posies. The selection included an sunburst for the song “Flood of Sunshine”, a couple of broken records for the song “Broken Record” (surprise, surprise), a bow and arrow which refer to the origins of Ken’s last name, and the number “23″ which has been a “mythical” number to the group. We also decided to have 23 frets for this reason when the usual number is 22. The group voted on their favourite designs and this group of sketches were the final approved batch:

Here’s a picture of what they looked like completed:

Pictures of the construction and more details are included in Cameron’s rundown, so I’ll just jump right to the pictures of the final product in use at a show we attended last year:

The guitar was a blast to work on, it sounds and looks great in concert, and we’re so glad that Ken loves it so much. And another exciting thing about this, is that the guitar is featured in a cool and funny video, which you can watch here. (Ken’s the one wearing the white tie.)

Now we’ve just got to get busy on one for the other frontman of the Posies, Jon Auer!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Art & Creating, Black & White Drawings, General, Making Stuff, Music, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.