Frank J Pasquale Bio

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Written by Frank J. Pasquale

Frank J Pasquale
President/CEO/Chief Builder/ Super Genius

I began my love for the electric guitar in 1984 shortly after seeing Eddie Van Halen in the video for the song “Jump”. Lets face it, who was cooler than Eddie Van Halen in the eighties? Answer: No one!

I got my first guitar shortly thereafter, a Kramer Focus, the lowest end guitar you could buy back then with the coveted Floyd Rose Locking Tremolo. Today we take “The Floyd” for granted but back then it was THE item to have… and thus began my journey.

While learning to play I realized that the Kramer was set up poorly and if I could just make a few adjustments to the string height and the tremolo springs it would make playing it so much easier. Soon after that I had the whole thing ripped apart and reassembled with much better playability.

In the early 90’s I decided to pursue the guitar as a career and enrolled in The Musicians Institute in Hollywood California. I wanted to be around the best players in the world and MI was the place to go. While I was there I wanted to get the absolute best equipment I could find so I sought out Bob Bradshaw to build me the best guitar rack that I could afford and sought out my perfect guitar.  What I found was incredibly disappointing. After much searching I came to the realization that the perfect guitar for me didn’t exist. I wanted specific options that just weren’t available at the time without having to modify a guitar so I decided to build my own custom guitar. The result was a guitar I call “The Log”. It a truly ugly and embarrassing piece of work that I still have to this day. I sounds great and looks awful. Its been built and rebuilt several time and through it all I made every mistake that could be made in building a guitar, nonetheless the learning process had begun.

In the late 90’s I was blessed to meet Mike Lipe whom I believe to be the greatest luthier of our time. In the early 90’s Mike was fundamental in redesigning the entire Ibanez guitar line and his work was pivotal in transforming Ibanez from a second rate Japanese import company into one of the industry leaders in the market  today. He has worked intimately with Paul Gilbert, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani in the development of their artist series guitars and to this day his innovations are the backbone of their guitars.

I began a student/teacher relationship that basically consisted of me bringing my guitars to him to work on them and me pestering him to let me watch while he did. (He finally agreed if I would pay double and not talk while he worked…which I happily agreed to.) After a while he took me under his wing and would give me specific lessons on building and set up. It was through Mike that I learned all the fundamental principles that apply to guitar construction.