Guitar gear Heads interview
this was about 2 years ago, at the very beginning. It interesting to see where we started and where we are now. Now we have 3 models with two more in the works, just ready to come out, our strategy of selling is tending towards online...and we are getting great accolades from those who play our guitar... that is all good..
This month’s featured manufacturer interview is with a new company out of Vancouver, BC called “Liquid Metal Guitar”. I recently had the chance to talk with founder Phil Cook.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your company Phil. Can you tell our members a little about how you got started in the guitar business, and the concept behind “Liquid Metal Guitars”.
Thanks for the opportunity to talk about what we love to do, build and play guitars. Liquid Metal came out of that love of guitars and it is a collective, all the guys in the company play guitar, they all get what the “it” thing is about guitars that affects us so.
For me, I have always played and tinkered with guitars. From way, way back, I enjoyed looking for sound and tone and look. I loved the systems that produced the guitar sounds, you know a certain amp with a certain guitar with certain pickups, like have a Joe Bardon on the Neck and Seymour Duncan on the bridge, try out passive or active for the texture in a song, there are 187,000 different ways to make cool sounds. That always got me going and then add to that the absolute joy of playing guitar with a bunch of guys, - - two chords in and they’re your friend. And then invariably we start talking about the set ups, either set ups they did themselves, or setups well known player’s were using, who has what guitar and how they got that particular sound. I mean the conversations you can have with a guitar over your knees are endless, absolutely positively endless and we just never seem to tire of them.
Another thing I enjoyed, a guilty pleasure, was watching the car and bike guys on the TV shows. I laugh at it, but it’s true. I love those shows. The way they worked with cars and motorcycles and metal and coming up with very slick shapes and looks and ideas that totally revved me up. I remember this one episode, Chip Foose took an old Chevy and lowered it, stretched it out a bit, put a huge honking engine in it, and changed the old lines enough to make it new looking, stunning looking, and then the way they painted it made it.
I kept thinking that a guitar, a metal guitar could be cool, like what they were doing. Working in metal seemed to present tons of very, very cool options for looks. Using cars and bikes as the inspiration, you know like the paint and shaping and chrome, I knew guys would love it. I, the most typical middle aged guitar guy there is. (I joke, that I look in the mirror each day at my market profile. I am he.) Anyways, if I loved the idea of a cool chromed metal guitar, then others of my tribe would as well and there was, there is, nothing like it out there. We are beautifully unique.
The second thing was that I did want to be in the guitar business. I love what the guitar is, what it represents, the noise it makes and I totally dig the people who play guitar, I wanted to be in and around them. Not as a hanger on, but a part.
It seemed to me that the combination of automotive and rock and roll, chrome and guitar was an absolute natural.
With that, you now have The Liquid Metal Guitar Company.
Aluminum guitars have been around for awhile although not in the mainstream guitar industry. What sets your guitars apart from the very few others who have tested this market over the years?
The look, the chrome, the metal, it is brilliant and bright and unique and cool. And the sound, we have incredible sound. We have pickups made by one of the highest regarded guys in the business exclusively for the qualities and dynamics of our metal bodies and that we can put it all in the hands of a player at the same price as most custom guitars.
I understand that the manufacturing process of your guitars is very time and labor intensive. Can you tell us a little about these processes and what techniques may be unique to Liquid Metal Guitars.
Yes, but that’s what makes it special. Over the years, we have figured out what works best for sound in the body of the guitar, we have come up with a proprietary widths and thicknesses, that has the best sustainability and dynamics. We have learned how to cut the body to the approximate shape and weight we needed, at a cost that is acceptable, we learned a ton of tricks.
The hand polishing and smoothing is still one man, one wheel and time, the aluminum smoothed, sanded to a 600 finish for chrome but worth it in the end.
Chroming and painting, although done in other parts for cars and stuff, was a challenge for us. Chroming is surprisingly fickle, electricity is run through anode and metals and sometimes ends up here and sometimes there. We ended up with pretty Frankenstein stuff at the beginning. We needed to nail down a process that consistently worked for a large object that is always inspected close up, cause our guitars sit in someone’s lap, inches away from their eyeballs.
We had to find out through trial and error what combinations plated our bodies perfectly, so that it was smooth and glossy and just like liquid metal. That’s what I kept telling everyone, remember, we are liquid metal, that is what we are after, liquid metal.
The set up of the pickups and neck angle was easy after that.
Many people probably do not understand just how much work goes into the research and development of a product like this. Can you tell us a little about the obstacles you had to overcome during the design process?
Yes, it has been a learning experience for sure, from the couch watching TV till now, probably three years, a tad longer than I thought it would take. And yes, there were indeed obstacles.
I assumed aluminum would be a good metal to use, cause of weight etc. So I started my research with that, first to see if there was anyone doing this same thing right now, no there wasn’t. Found some guys in the past had done cellos and violins out of aluminum, read about John Veleno and how he had made a guitar that really caught the attention of marquis players in the late 60’s and found a few other guitar makers, like Kramer, with their aluminum necks and stuff and then I saw the Harley Davidson Strat, chromed Strat at the big music store here. I loved the chrome look, just nailed it for me, it was breathtakingly cool and they had a price tag on it of $45,000 , no kidding, $45,000.
Somehow, I knew that I could do it for just a bit less,
Funny story about getting things going. I had no idea how much aluminum actually weighed, I knew it was light right, that is what we know, aluminum is light, so I ordered a block the size necessary to make a body of a guitar and it was like 45 lbs, too funny, I was shocked, it was 45 lbs of dead weight. I was such an idiot, makes me laugh. I tried to pick it up off the counter and thought this can’t be, there must be some magnetic force holding this down. My mind wasn’t comprehending the weight. But there wasn’t anything holding it, it was just heavy. “well, not nearly as heavy as steel” I was told and yeah yeah, I know and not near the weight of plutonium 3b, either but it ain’t light.
Those are the surprises one gets along the way.
So now I had to find a way to cut it, cut out 40 lbs or so.
All the machine shops I went to came up with astonishingly high estimates to CNC it, cut it, anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000, which was sort of okay for prototyping but not for production. It seemed simple to me, but to them it was immensely and expensively prohibitive.
I also knew that I needed to enlist the mind and expertise of a guitar tech wizard. I had gone and talked to Paul Iverson, he is in our area the best there is at guitar tech, well not just here, he is called upon by some of the best players in the business. He played with Bryan Adams, his own group that has a hit record, learned to build guitars with Jean Larrivee, built his own for while and now has a thriving business being a guitar player’s guitar tech.
One of the most important things I had learned from my past businesses was that finding the best people you can to work with can make such a huge difference and he is the best. I went and talked to him, told him what I was playing with as an idea, he liked it, he was intrigued that I was working in metal and that because of that he would come along for the ride.
So we designed a guitar in wood, knowing we would go to metal, I had some single coil lipsticks spec’ed in, a cool neck we designed and some Gotoh tuners we felt would look great with the whole look and feel.
We took that model, around to all the machine shops and my God, there was this charge and that charge was you can’t do this and you can’t do that. What came out of this was that I needed to have someone on our side who knew well the technology of designing and manufacturing in metal, aluminum.
I found Alex and Brian in my search, these guys and are award winning industrial designers and very important to me, they were both Guitar Players. They took what Paul and I had done in wood and they modeled the guitar in the computer where we could experiment with the shape and configuration. This was great, cause it was a far less expensive and even more important, an efficient way to test out ideas.
Then when that was done, I settled on one shop that was clean, and I mean clean as in not a dump, some of the guys I went to see, had grease on their hands from 1978 and still wore the first set of coveralls they had ever bought.
We had it cut and built it up, wired it up and set it up. It was too heavy, it was at 13 pounds, same weight as some of the old Les Pauls. The interesting thing here was that if you gave both guitars to a guy, a Les Paul and ours, he would say that ours was way heavier, but it wasn’t, it was actually lighter, funny the perception of that, cause of the perception of metal being heavier. We all came to the conclusion that being at the high end of weight was limiting and second the sound was weak. It as like that last sad lonely guitar player 350 miles outside of Memphis with two people in the audience, it was thin and lonely, not at all befitting the brilliant magnificent look.
So we went back to work on the design with a way better insight into what the metal was, what we could do with it and we were able to get where we wanted with look and weight, now we had to get the sound right.
What was involved in getting the sound right?
I used to take the prototypes to bars, you know open mic and jam sessions around the city and let guys play them. We would try different pickups and electronics and get feed back. For every guy there was an absolutely “must have” that they put forward and the more beer they had the more adamant they were about “ you absolutely gotta have this sound, I’m telling ya, ya gotta have it” or this pickup, cant have anything else.
We came to understand quickly that for as many guitar players as their were there were favorite sounds, albeit, variations on common guitar set ups. Their liking of sounds definitely showed an age bias too, the older guys liked a more mellow sound then younger guys turn the gain up and over. All had pickup manufacturers they liked and didn’t like. It was a great experience actually, taught us lots.
We knew for sure that we didn’t want to build a guitar with the same old sound.
What became our mantra, what we did hear from guys in the music business, producers, guys who dig sound and such, was that the best a guitar could be was to have a pure clean sound and that each string’s clarity could be heard.
So what we really set our sites on was having the best purest cleanest sound coming off each string of the guitar.
As a couple of guys said it sound great when you make a clean sound dirty, sound awful when you dirty and dirty sound.
With the clean sound you can do anything a ton more options.
That was our goal for sound and that is what achieved.
How did the relationship with Tom Jones (founder and owner of T.V. Jones pickups) come about? Did he approach the pickup design elements based on your prototype, or was he instrumental in the body development features to compliment the pickups he designed?
Tom made what we did, exceptional.
I had talked to just about every pick-up maker there was. Almost all were definitely intrigued with the concept of a metal guitar. Some had great ideas about what may be, a couple told me it was not going to work at all. We tried tons and tons of pickups, sound was okay, some better than others, of course. We all agreed that we wanted to create a whole guitar, not another Strat or Tele that would be a sound-a- like.
I phoned Tom and talked about what I was doing and he got, as is his way, all fired up about what was possible. I took a trip to his shop, took the heavy lipstick prototype with me and we talked and came up with a concept for a pickup that would have a look a bit like the lipstick pickup. I was really pushing for the clean look. We used a blade he was developing and put it under a chromed cover, so it was clean looking.
He had them made, sent them up, we put them in prototype 4. We didn’t get the sound we expected at all, just not loud, kinda muffled. The cover, for the look that I had pushed, was too thick, it wrecked the sound. I was quite bummed. I mean it looked killer, but there was no attitude in the sound.
So, I packed the guitar up and sent it down to him.
He phoned about a week later, totally excited and talking fast, “I had no idea that there was as much dynamic in the metal, there is tons, it’s like bright and alive. We have to go with an exposed pole, I have this design in mind, it will be fantastic for this.”
LMG 6000 and LMG 6001 were born and the sound was amazing not just good, amazing. They have exposed poles, 12 on each pickup, the bridge pick up is taller and fatter and wound more than normal and the neck is smaller and exploits the particularly bright sound the metal gives off.
We have a collector as a client, he has 200 guitars, he has two of the signed Jimmy Page, Les Pauls, that is the type of collector he is. Anyways, he wrote back that the sound of ours is the best of all his guitars, the best….
That was a great validation of what we do.
How many people are employed at Liquid Metal Guitars and how many guitars do you anticipate shipping on a monthly basis?
We have Paul, who assembles and does the final set up, Bernie and James who run the machines, Bob who does the shaping and prep of the aluminum body, Billy Bones who does the painting of the necks. The chroming is done by a shop out in the valley, that does all the custom car and bike stuff, Barry handles the sales and I make sure it all comes together in three part harmony.
We want to do 10 a month. We are heading to NAMM in January to expose our guitar to a wider market.
Vancouver has a very strong music scene. Do you see this to be an asset to the location of your company, and do you have any plans to take advantage of the input of the great musicians in your area?
Absolutely, the scene is amazing here, we have bands coming in on tours and checking in for studio time, Bob Rock was here last week playing our guitar. This is a great, great, guitar he said.. and I got to say “Thanks Bob.” That was kinda neat. I am a fan, I like what he does.
With the music scene here, I am going to be like John Veleno was. He used to go to the shows and just sit off in a corner and polish his guitar and guys would come over and say “what have you got there? “and it was sold.
Love that story, totally see it happening.
Do you feel that your target market is collectors, or players?
We’re pretty sure the bulk of our market is guys from 35 to 65, that love guitars, that have a number of guitars, usually played as kid or young man, didn’t really make their living from playing, but totally get off playing now. Now they have some money and time and enjoy the things they can own.
We have sold a number now to players, serious players. You will see it show up with a few famous folks…
Are you accepting order for these guitars yet, and if so, are you going to sell direct or go through dealers?
We are selling direct now, from the web site word of mouth and our efforts, still. We are planning on going to NAMM in January and use that show to set up our dealer network.
If our members wanted to buy one of these guitars, how would they go about finding one?
Call us or email.
We would be happy to talk with you. And we know it is a big purchase, so, if you are not absolutely totally satisfied, we will send you your money back, of course, after you have sent the guitar back…J
Do you have any plans for new body shapes or models in the future?
yes, we have two models in the works now, one proto-named the cardiac caddy, a liquid metal interpretation of a 57 Cadillac rear fender and then another that is going to take advantage of the acoustic qualities we have uncovered in the current model.
I would like to thank you for taking the time to talk with us Phil. I can see that you are passionate about this product, as anyone in this industry should be. I look forward to seeing you at the NAMM show and seeing one of your guitars up close and personal.
Excellent thanks, we are looking forward to NAMM.
