Buying a custom guitar can be a scary process. I am always worried about putting effort and money into an instrument that I wont get to play until its finished. When I started planning my guitar with the people at Born they made process easy and painless. I wasn’t familiar with all the technical specifications so instead they had me tell them what type of features I’d want and helped narrow down the specifics.
I’m a producer and the guitar would be living in a studio so I needed it to be very versatile. We landed on a Tele style body (their OG Drop model) with a Bigsby bridge. It has a single coil bridge pickup and a humbucker neck pickup with push pull coil tapping to use the single coil. They explained all of the types of wood and how each one would effect the tone. We went with a swamp ash body and redwood top. We were even able to chose the exact piece of wood so we would know exactly how it would look. For the neck, they asked which guitars at the studio I wanted it to feel most similar to. I showed them our original ’54 Les Paul Jr. They examined and measured the neck and said no problem.
When the guitar arrived, I couldn’t have been more pleased with it. It had great tone, complete versatility and quickly became my choice over any of the Telecasters in the studio. In single coil mode it had the brightness and chime that I would expect from a beautiful Tele without so much of the brittle twang. In humbucker mode it became thick enough for big rock tones and was my choice over many of the studio’s Les Pauls. The neck played like a dream and the thing kept its tuning through anything.
Since getting this guitar last year, it has become one of the most used guitars in the studio and has ended up on countless records. I would certainly use Born for my next custom guitar and would recommend them to any serious players looking a versatile and reliable guitar.