And Then There Were Eight

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Published on Monday, 18 May 2015 00:00

Written by Frank J. Pasquale

LAnd Then There Were Eight

The Conceptual Birth of the Pasquale Revelator 8 Guitar

I truly am blessed to be able to do what I do. As a guitarist I have been infatuated with the electric guitar since the first time I saw Eddie Van Halen play one in 1984. As a custom builder I have bene infatuated with the electric guitar since the first time I tore apart my Kramer Focus 2000 in 1986. After putting it back together and  tweaking the neck and the Floyd Rose Tremolo, I set out on a life of  tinkering with guitars that eventually led me to my own company and my own designs and I have been at it ever since. Now that I have my own company I have the ability to let my imagination run wild and create what I see in my head. It is a true blessing to be able to imagine, design and create a working piece of sonic art completely from scratch.

One of the added blessings that I get to experience is that of working with incredibly talented musicians and artists. Most of my clients are high end professional players who want to design something that is completely unique and specifically dialed in to their exact musical preferences and playing styles.

I recently had this experience with Drew Creal who is our very first Pasquale Custom Guitars Endorsing Artist.  Drew first came into my shop over a decade ago as a 16 year old wonder kid prodigy. Even at 16 it was obvious that this kid had not just talent but a true gift of musical comprehension as well as a full functional understanding of how to use gear to achieve the sound that he was after.

Now, 10 years later, he has overthrown all sonic boundaries and achieved new musical textures with his current project Muir, which is an ethereal, cinematic, post prog-rock wave of sounds that truly must be experienced to understand. Muir relies heavily on alternative tunings as well as multiple sonic variations of clean, dark and heavy tones to take the listener through a truly unique auditory adventure. To achieve these sound textures, Drew has a bevy of custom PCG guitars at his disposal. In fact the entire Muir debut album was recorded using Pasquale Custom Guitars exclusively.

 
Recently Drew contacted me about a new project that would allow him to use one single guitar to achieve the entire Muir experience. He wanted an 8 string guitar with enough musical variation to allow him to be able to use his alternate tunings as well as standard tunings and be able to handle the sonic variations achieved in all of his other guitars.

This was going to be a challenge because his other guitars were made of varying body woods (Mahogany and  Padouk) as well as varying fingerboard woods and varying pickup configurations(EMGs, Dimarzios, etc) So to get one guitar to meet all these specifications was going to be a daunting challenge. Fortunately for Drew, daunting challenges are what we do best. We approached this project as a complete new concept design from the ground up and Drew and I met late in December of 2015 and began the preliminary design phase.

The first thing he agreed upon was the body design. He definitely wanted it to be one of our Modern 24 designs because he liked the shape and contours of our Pasquale Modern Series Guitars. So our first challenge would be to get 8 strings on a guitar body that was designed to hold 6… No problem, we would redesign the body shape to be true to the original but still meet the size requirements of the larger neck.

Our next challenge was to dial in his pickup selection. Drew’s typical pickup design is that of our STM 3500 guitar which consists of 2 humbuckers with a single coil in the middle. This is attached to a push pull tone pot to split the neck humbucker to a single coil. I have since dubbed this set up “The Drew Creal Stack”. This gives a pretty varied selection of tones and a lot of versatility and control from the guitar. However he only wanted a 2 humbucker design because he did not like hitting a middle pickup when he played fast aggressive picking passages. So our next challenge was to find a way to get a middle  single coil tone sound from 2 humbuckers…No Problem, we contacted our friends at Nordstrand Pickups and had them design a custom set of Nordstrand NVH Hot 8 Humbuckers. We would run em to a 5 way switch with split coils to allow a multiple variation of tones.

We put our minds to the challenge and set out to design our Pasquale Revelator 8 Guitar with the prototype for this model being the Drew Creal Signature Revelator 8 Guitar.

 
Stay Tuned for more blogs to come about the specific details about this unique custom build.