1920s/2025 Tonaharp/Coburn Quarter-Tone Frankenstein Guitar
So this instrument is fantastic in many ways. It's a tour-de-force of Ancel's continuing skills-building and thirst for off-the-wall, bizarre contraptions. Its body is from a 1910s/1920s Tonaharp Hawaiian guitar and Ancel repaired its many wrongs and also completely rebraced it to an x-pattern with carbon-fiber-reinforced bracing. Its neck is a parts-grade/damaged Bourgeois replacement neck in flamed maple that he picked-up from a dealer in Pennsylvania, as I recall. He fit a non-adjustable truss rod in it and then fit it to the body and installed a bridge, fretboard, and all the running gear.
To top it off, he installed quarter-note half-frets up to fret 5 just to muck with all of our heads -- and then added a "not" to the Bourgeois headstock inlay, done in gold-sparkle fill. I mean -- right? The Weymann-like staining of the flamed maple neck is also right on-point for the look of the instrument and its period of build.
Now that it's been strung-up for some weeks, its sound is really settling-in and opening-up. In the demo video, I played it in open D minor, which seems to suit the dissonant nature of the odd frets. Max did a much better job of using the quarter-note frets to get some truly odd chord voicings than I could get. My brain is so rooted in oud, saz, and bouzouki-like sounds that I immediately opt for some sort of droney music to use such things.
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