Custom Building Services
Jade Guitars is a full-line repair shop offering a wide range of services that are tailored to your needs. One of the most important services we offer is custom building. We undertake OEM building for domestic and overseas clients, building guitars to their specifications using their components, hardware and electronics. We can also do the same for you. If you have long dreamed about a custom, one-of-a-kind guitar and you have all the parts you need, give us a call and we'll build it for you. We have assembled many guitars with parts from Allparts, WD Music, Carvin, Warmoth, StewMac, Mighty Mite and others, so we have a good deal of experience working with high quality components. Whether we're building one guitar or a hundred, we'll give each and every instrument the same care and attention to detail. For an accurate price for assembling your project, please call or email us.
Our sister division, Drew & Sebastian Guitars, constructs high-end boutique instruments using this same philosophy and at Jade Guitars we are proud to act as the sole US distributor for Drew & Sebastian Guitars. D&S offers many styles of electric guitars and basses which are hand-built to order in the USA. For more details please visit www.drewandsebastian.com
Project/Restoration Guitars
Vintage Harmony/Silvertone Hollow Bodied Electric Guitar
This guitar landed in our workshop in a very sorry state. Initial research strongly suggested that it was a US-made Harmony 'Stratotone' electric guitar from the 1960's. That was partially correct; it turned out that it is actually a Harmony-made 'Silvertone' Stratotone. After considering using it as a 'wall-hanger', we decided to have a go at repairing and restoring it, and make it playable and useable again.
Because of the awful shape it was in when we got it keeping it 'vintage' just wasn't an option, so we decided to have some fun. We added some more contemporary features while trying to retain the original character and sound of the guitar. Luckily it came with the still-working original single coil pickups but needed new electronics, hardware, bridge and tuners.
The configuration we decided upon kept the stock pickups in their original locations, but instead of individual volume and tone controls for each pickup there are now master volume and tone controls with a three-way pickup selector switch. We also installed Kluson tuners with white buttons, and had a white pearloid pickguard specially made for the guitar.
Sound-wise, it's somewhere between a Gretsch Duo-Jet and a Danelectro U2. The original pickups are very weak with a DC resistance reading of only about 3.4k ohms each, so it's necessary to turn up the volume on the amp a bit (never a bad thing!). With the Bigsby-style vibrato it's possible to achieve some nice vintage (albeit quiet) tones. The restoration was documented and recorded with photographs following the entire process, which you can see below.
