Do you remember your first electric guitar? In the early days of electric guitar building, you had to struggle not only with the guitar itself, but also with the unwanted background noises that guitars produced in those days, for example, pickup feedback resulting from pickups not yet being wax-potted, or loud humming coming from a loose solder joint. Sometimes the guitar signal would be interrupted when you randomly touched a knob.

Nowadays all these effects have disappeared as a result of technical improvements, although they have become part of music history as archetypes of guitar sounds. They are comparable to sounds such as the scratching of records and skipping of CD’s, which have also become musical archetypes and are often cited in today’s music.

With the tesla I have designed a guitar that, along with modern guitars sounds, also has these primitive sounds at its disposal. Contact points and push-buttons are situated all over the body, which, when pressed, activate the respective sounds.

After I presented this guitar for the first time at the 2000 NAMM show, my first customers included Henry Kaiser and David Torn, arguably the most experimental guitarists of our time.

In the meantime I have developed the Tesla further and there are now two new versions: a version with three pickups, as well as a MIDI version. I’ve also built a few custom versions, such as an 8-string Tesla with a 30 inch scale.