The Story

In 2016 I wanted to buy a guitar, I wanted a semihollow one because I thought I’d mainly play “soft” songs, “light” songs. I’ve always been a ballad guy, so I was considering a LTD X-tone, then I got curious about the Epiphone Casino and Epiphone Dot, I really loved those designs, of course a Gibson ES-335 would’ve been a dream 😻 but I knew I could never afford it.

Then I saw what I really fell in love with, Foo Fighters‘s Dave fucking Grohl’s Gibson Memphis (I think) which is by far one of the most beautiful and powerfull guitars I’ve ever seen:

By the way, blue is my favorite color.

UCG

So in the middle of the process of saving money and trying to find the right match (same difficulty level of finding the right wife) I jumped into Carlos Andrés Pinto, and well, the guy, unkown to most of you, has made two guitars for Metallica (how awesome is that?😻):

• One for James:

• One for Kirk:

And as if this guy didn’t rock enough, he made one for Steve Vai😅:

At this point of the process to decide about a guitar, I was 99% convinced I had to do it with Carlos, but then the toughest parte was still to come…

The design

At the time I was still in love with the semihollow bodies, but I wasn’t sure I really was gonna do ONLY clean stuff, there were definitely some distortion sounding ideas in my head, heavy and even fast songs already written and of course, some kind of hidden love for metal, deep inside, I admire metal so much.

Even before I wrote Unlistened, I already knew I wanted to pay tribute to my aunt ‘Ruby’. So I started drawing (I promise I’ll upload photos as soon as I find them) and the first design I came out with really sucked, I tried to make an R-sahped guitar (R for Ruby) and it looked like a Parker and I didn’t like it and Carlos basically laughed at my face.

Next thing I did was thinking “ok dude, what are your favorite guitars?” and the answer was easy: Dave Grohl’s Gibson Memphis and James Hetfield’s Ken Lawrence Explorer.

In case you don’t know him, this guy’s sick AF!!!!! True artist and master of luthiery. Look at this video so you can blow your mind too:

At the end I draw something that I loved and Carlos did, too.

So here it is! She is Ruby, she changed my life. I had never been so musically productive, and there’s a simple reason. IT SOUNDS AMAZING! For real, it shines in the neck pickup (I prefer single coil configuration there) and kicks ass in the bridge pickup (I prefer humbucker there).

I won’t go any deeper into details, the main idea of this post was the story behind my main guitar more than the technicals. If you’re ever interested in knowing all about it or the symbology behid it, contact me and I’ll be happy to share it with you.

Credits

• Photos: Carlos Andrés Pinto.