Custom Tunes: Crafting Do-It-Yourself Personalized Guitars at Advanced Plating’s Guitar Build Workshop
Hot rods and rock ’n roll go together like peanut butter and jelly or lightning and thunder. They’re culturally intwined, both having strong roots in the 1950s and both influencing not only their founding generations, but all those that have followed. Few other companies in the hot rod aftermarket understand this connection better than Advanced Plating.
The Advanced Plating has long been known to car enthusiasts as a first-rate resource for metal restoration and plating, whether it’s brass, nickel, chrome, or even gold. What you might not know is that Advanced Plating also does a lot of work in the music industry, specifically for guitar manufacturers and restorers.
The same high-quality plating you see on some of the finest hot rods and restorations can also be found on countless guitars and other instruments. The company even offers its own line of guitar parts. Goodguys members might also recall that Advanced Plating has long provided a custom guitar painted to match the Goodguys Grand Prize Giveaway vehicle as an added bonus to the vehicle winner.
One outgrowth of that music industry connection is the Guitar Build Workshop, located in Nashville, Tennessee, not far from Advanced Plating’s headquarters. The workshop is designed for music enthusiasts, guitar aficionados, and curious do-it-yourselfers to assemble their own custom guitar during a six- to eight-hour course, and it has become a popular activity for people vacationing in Nashville, as well as a creative outlet for birthday parties, anniversaries, family reunions, corporate team-building days, and more.
Josh Hurst from the Guitar Build Workshop says the courses have been created to simplify and streamline the guitar-building process and make it accessible to novices. “We’ve eliminated all the stuff that requires a dangerous machine,” Hurst says. “We want you to leave with a guitar and both of your hands.” The shop also uses a quick-drying clear satin water-based polyurethane to seal the stain on the guitar body, which allows the body to cure during the course’s lunch break so final assembly can be done in the afternoon.
The process is a little bit like assembling a car – or maybe a model car kit. Participants are provided with a pre-cut guitar body and neck, which they can sand, smooth, and prep. You get to choose your color for a custom finish. Once the protective clear coat is sprayed and cured, you carefully assemble the guitar, adding the neck, pickup, bridge, electronic controls, tuning pegs, and strings. Once the strings are on, the workshop team helps with fine tuning the setup to make sure the guitar will play and sound right when you take it home.
We thought the Guitar Build Workshop sounded like an intriguing activity, so we thought we’d share a little more info and photo highlights of the process. Who knows, maybe it’s an activity you’d like to pursue during your next trip to the Goodguys BASF Nashville Nationals or during another visit to the Music City. After all, a custom guitar makes a great addition to almost any garage, man cave, or even on display in your hot rod’s trunk or interior.
Photos: Courtesy Guitar Build Workshop
