08/10/2026
I just wrapped up the first 28” scale Baritone Growler and it came out grand. This one is for our new friend Josh M Josh Milan who we met through our old friend Ernie Jackson Ernie Jackson Ernie has the very first Baritone I made while attending Roberto-Venn and Josh got to play it and fell head over heels! I’ll write more about Ernie and that guitar soon.
As much as I am proud of my work from 25 years ago, I didn’t want to revisit the same body shape as it really doesn’t represent what we do now. I also didn’t have templates from the old days! Thankfully Josh was willing to go with the Growler shape. I always thought the combination of materials was really key to the bass response and feel of the original guitar, so I stuck with a chambered Mahogany body, Maple top, Maple neck and Ebony fretboard (this time Macassar Ebony but close enough). Continued in next slide…
The pickup combination was unique too, and I have no memory of why I chose a Firebird Bridge and Telecaster neck back then but the pickups work great for the low end, and the bridge gives the twang you’d hope for to cut through a mix. We chose Lollar Pickups for what I think of as their Hi-Fi qualities. They’re very touch responsive and paired with Vintage Inspired Pickups 280k pots they just have a great wide spectrum of tones.
I used a Hipshot bridge because the plate is a taller 0.175” so I could keep the neck angle closer to our standard set-neck pitch. The neck is big, and with a 1 3/4” nut width there’s room for the heavier strings and the taper of the fretboard feels less pronounced, something Josh had responded to on the original guitar. We also used Hipshot locking tuners. The 28” scale is tuned to B-b with D’Addario 13-62 strings. The standard 25.5” scale Growler joins the body at the 21st fret, but I wanted to make sure we had a larger tenon to withstand the string tension and balance well, so I moved the joint to the 20th fret and lengthened the joint. Continued in the next slide…
The whole instrument is bound with Ivoroid, sprayed with a Champagne Sparkle Metallic lacquer, and has a gloss clear coat throughout. We used 95x45 fretwire and a 10-12” compound radius fretboard. I al