Taking the Metal Guitar Seriously

There is a class of guitar that everyone already understands should be taken seriously. A great pre-war Martin is discussed in terms of structure, materials, weight, stiffness, response, and the knowledge that went into making it. Lloyd Loar-era Gibsons are treated as important examples of American instrument making. Ervin Somogyi’s guitars are studied because of the depth of thought he has brought to structure, resonance, materials, and the relationship between the instrument and the player. These instruments are treated as serious works of lutherie because generations of musicians and builders have recognized the amount of thought contained in them. I believe a guitar made for extreme metal deserves the same level of consideration.

There are important electric-guitar precedents for this as well. Alembic emerged from the world surrounding the Grateful Dead and helped establish an entirely different idea of what a high-end electric instrument could be. Their instruments incorporated elaborate laminated construction, neck-through designs, active electronics, sophisticated filtering, unusual materials, and a willingness to rethink parts of the electric guitar and bass that other manufacturers largely treated as settled. Their influence reached far beyond the musicians who originally played them, particularly in the development of the modern boutique electric bass and the idea that an electric instrument could be designed as an integrated system rather than assembled from a familiar set of parts.

The guitars associated with Jerry Garcia occupy a similar place in the culture surrounding the Grateful Dead. Doug Irwin’s Wolf and Tiger are revered because they are inseparable from the music Garcia made with them, but their significance goes beyond celebrity ownership. They are extraordinarily ambitious instruments, built around the needs and preferences of a particular musician and developed with a degree of craftsmanship, electronics, materials, and visual identity that made them unmistakable. Decades later, people still study them, reproduce them, write about their construction, and attach meaning to individual details of those guitars. They demonstrate how seriously an electric instrument can be regarded when the music, the player, the maker, and the object become connected strongly enough.

That history matters to me because a serious instrument does not have to imitate a pre-war Martin or borrow the visual language of traditional lutherie to earn legitimacy. It should be judged by how completely it addresses the music it was made for. Alembic did that for musicians working in a very different musical environment. Irwin did it for Garcia. Extreme metal presents its own set of problems, and those problems are equally worthy of serious instrument making.

Very low tunings place real demands on scale length, string construction, tension, intonation, and stiffness. Dense arrangements and high gain make clarity and transient response important in a way that is easy to underestimate until an instrument is actually being used in that context. The low end needs to remain controlled. Fast passages need to speak clearly. The guitar needs to feel immediate without becoming sterile, and it has to remain comfortable and predictable while a player is doing something physically difficult with it for long periods of time. Those requirements cannot be reduced to installing high-output pickups and adding another string.

The mechanical behavior of the instrument matters enormously to me. The mass and stiffness of the neck and body, the way those structures are connected, and the distribution of material throughout the guitar all affect how it responds. A change in neck stiffness, bridge mass, body thickness, reinforcement, or joint construction can change the way vibrational energy moves through the instrument. That affects attack, sustain, resonance, the way different frequencies develop and decay, and the physical feedback the player feels through the guitar.

I think about those things when I build because they are part of the musical result. The pickups matter, and the electronics matter, but so do the pieces of wood and metal underneath them, the dimensions I choose, and the way those parts have been assembled. An electric guitar is still a mechanical structure before the signal ever reaches an amplifier. None of that becomes less important because the guitar may eventually be tuned to F# and played through a tremendous amount of distortion. The fact that the music is aggressive, dissonant, technical, or deliberately abrasive does not make the instrument underneath it less worthy of refinement.

There has always seemed to me to be a strange difference in the way these instruments are discussed. With traditional acoustic guitars, people are comfortable talking about voicing, resonance, stiffness, mass, material selection, construction, and the judgment of the maker. Extreme-metal guitars are still much more often described through specifications: scale length, number of strings, pickup model, bridge, frets, finish. Those specifications are important, but they are not the guitar.

I approach an extended-range electric with the same seriousness another maker might bring to a concert classical guitar, an exceptional steel-string acoustic, or any other instrument whose construction is expected to reward close attention. The musical goal is different, so naturally the instrument is different, but the level of thought is not lower. The materials are chosen deliberately. The structure is considered rather than inherited. Weight and stiffness are controlled in service of the musical response of the instrument. The electronics are selected to work with the instrument itself rather than compensate for decisions that were never made in the first place.

This is also part of why the design of a Bezard guitar no longer begins with an order sheet. If an instrument requires an unusual scale length, a particular piece of wood, a certain amount of neck stiffness, a specific bridge, or a construction method that makes the guitar more difficult or expensive to build, I follow that decision through. Sometimes the right answer is conventional and sometimes it is not. The instrument determines the solution.

The guitars I admire most became important because somebody cared enough about the instrument and the music it was intended to make to take the work seriously. That seriousness can produce a pre-war Martin, an Alembic, a Doug Irwin guitar built for Jerry Garcia, or something that belongs to a musical world that did not yet exist when any of those instruments were conceived. Extreme music deserves instruments made with that same depth of attention, and Bezard Guitars exists to prove it.