Cool Hunting

Bruce Jacob's pioneering instrument fuses his two passions—guitars and computer system engineering—to create Coil Guitars. Coil revolutionizes electric guitar customization, allowing guitarists to engineer their favorite tones without having to open up (and potentially damage) their instrument's circuitry. We spoke to Bruce to find out more about what makes Coils a must-have for the discerning guitarist.

There are a multitude of different guitar production agencies and designers in the field today. What were these lacking that inspired you to create your own line of guitars? What elements distinguish your products from other guitar designers and manufacturers?
I grew up playing guitars that had a wide palette of sounds, not by choice but by luck. My first electric (an Electra Outlaw) was simply what they were carrying at the place I took lessons. My second (an Ibanex Roadstar) I got when I heard my band member's Ibanez and thought, "Wow, I need that sound." Those were my only two electrics for almost 20 years. Both have very wide ranges of tones they produce and when I bought a new guitar in 2003 (off the net), it was the first time I played a guitar with what I would consider a limited palette. It felt black and white, compared to full color.

So I looked into why I felt dissatisfied with that guitar (which was really expensive and should have been a home run by all accounts). After some research, I figured out how to get a huge range of tonal possibilities and then a student of mine pointed out that my experimental set-up was actually the product. So I decided to see if other people are as crazy about lots of tones as I am.

The bottom line is that we give guitarists way more sounds than they will get in other guitars, at a fraction of the price of guitars with similar specs. We give end-users the ability to experiment with different tones in a non-destructive way (e.g. one of our switches lets you fully customize all the settings of the guitar, without having to rewire anything). And, most importantly, we do it in a way that is simple and easy at performance time—one or two switches on the front of the guitar and that is all. I don't know many guitarists that want to fiddle with a half dozen knobs, levers, and push/pull pots to get their sound. That works fine in the studio, where the atmosphere is relaxed and you can make mistakes. Playing live is a different matter; the guitar has to be dead simple. I think we've achieved the best of both worlds: dead simple, with the widest possible range of sounds.

The Angel, Ronin, and Shogun body designs all hail from very familiar construction shapes. What are the functional and acoustic qualities that you are able to achieve from the Hammer's (pictured below) more atypical design?

Read more from Bruce and see additional images after the jump.

The shapes are all about coolness and very little else. A solid-body electric is not nearly as sensitive to shape as a semi-hollow body or full-on hollow body, (each of which is less sensitive than a true acoustic). So you can focus more on the looks of the thing and the comfort of playing (how it fits to the body, where it hangs relative to your hands, etc.), because your changes are not going to change the sound dramatically. Plus, we do the neck-through thing, where the neck itself is the most important resonant piece—this just emphasizes a designer's ability to focus on shape and less on how the shape affects the tone. The nice thing there is that you free up the designer to explore coolness with very few restrictions. And I think the Hammer succeeds there pretty well.

But before we move on, I do want to point out that the Angel is a bit deceptive in its familiarity. The body shape is an exaggeration of the Les Paul, following the curves to their logical conclusion. But more importantly, on the Angel you've got that neck-through design that lets you get way up on the neck to reach frets you can't easily get to on the Les Paul (and a few frets the LP doesn't even have). I think that is one reason why the Angel was easily the most popular guitar at the WMUC Radio-Station Jam we held a month back. People have certain built-in expectations of the limitations of a classic single-cut and they are pleasantly surprised when they pick this one up and find those limitations aren't there.

To what degree are your guitars customizable?
The electronics are fully customizable. The on-line store has a configurator that allows you to put whatever circuits you want into a guitar—you choose a guitar, and then we put whatever electronics you want into that guitar. When the guitar arrives, you can play around with the settings further to define your own sound.

In addition, we do something unlike other manufacturers. We intentionally look for body tops that are unusual in their wood grain. Large manufacturers do not want variability; they want one picture of the guitar, and they want all of their manufactured guitars to look like that one picture. In contrast, we want wild-looking grain patterns (because they look cool), but that means your guitars are going to be relatively unique—this is hard to deal with if your customer receives a guitar, then points to the catalog picture and says, "Hey my guitar doesn't look like the guitar in the picture. I want one that looks like the picture!" We intentionally go there. The inventory is online with images of each guitar. We've got hi-res blow-ups of each picture, so the guitar you see is the one you're getting. When we go to significantly larger inventories, this may not scale, but that would be a good problem to have, in my book.

What type of musician are your guitars geared towards? Are you looking to target a more metal, classical, jazz, country, etc. crowd?
Yes. But seriously, check out the videos (before I have to yank them). Guys are playing rock, metal, country, jazz, and it all sounds good. The out-of-phase settings are twangy and have great bite for distorted solos and have a full-on country vibe when picked clean. There's lots of bass as well as clarity in the guitars, which is great for jazz. Frankly, I was amazed at how well they sounded playing metal. One thing that I will point out, the Bartolini pickups are out-of-this-world sensitive. They have excellent depth and clarity, with both bass and punch. Any jazz or classical player (or anybody else who really wants expression in solos) is going to kill for them.

Coil Guitars are available on the Coils site, along with more information on customization and selection.