HarmonyPal

$1,295.00

Tags: Amp Cabinet Abbreviated, Bluetooth Amp, Copy Available, Garage, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument, Self-Standing, Stave

Categories: 24" scale, Pro, Short Scale, Simple, Solid Body

A 24-inch-scale busking guitar built around a Harmony PowerPal and the bung-hole stave from an oak wine barrel — positioned over the speaker so your picking hand can actually shape the sound coming out.

Bung10 combines a vintage West German Framus multi-laminated maple neck with a wine-barrel-stave structural beam and a modified Harmony PowerPal amplifier.

The Framus neck uses the distinctive multi-ply laminated construction associated with the company’s Folk and Western instruments. The narrow alternating laminations create a strong, stable neck with a visually distinctive striped appearance.

A wine-barrel stave forms the central beam. Its original bung hole is positioned directly over the speaker cone, where it functions much like the sound hole of an acoustic guitar. The opening also allows the sound to be altered by changing the position and shape of the picking hand over the bung hole while playing.

The Harmony PowerPal amplifier system has been extensively modified and expanded, including Bluetooth connectivity. A Fender MiniTwin enclosure houses additional speakers used with the expanded audio system.

Bung10 is currently in the Garage with its original expanded amplification system intact. The guitar is a candidate for a simplified retrofit using a modern NUX amplifier while retaining its Framus neck, barrel-stave structure and functional bung-hole speaker opening.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Experimental Build, Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Hybrid Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, Structural Reinterpretation, Whole Integrated-Amp Build
Construction	Simple
Body
Beam	French Oak Wine Barrel Stave w/Bunghole
Neck	Maple, multi-laminated
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	24"
Number of Frets	20
Bridge	Stratocaster Tremolo / Whammy Bridge
Tailpiece	Thru-Beam Ferrules
Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Tri-Sonic
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	Harmony PowerPal
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

HarmonyPal

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.33 / 10

336 / 360 points

playing

Fun to Play

The first test is whether the guitar makes you want to keep playing it. A high score means the instrument feels inviting, responsive, and rewarding rather than merely interesting to look at. The best examples have enough soul that you forget you are evaluating them and simply keep going.

Playability

Measures how naturally the instrument responds to ordinary playing technique across the neck. Action, fretwork, neck feel, access, and setup should work together without asking the player to compensate for the design. A strong score means the unusual construction never becomes an excuse for compromised playing.

Ergonomics

Considers how comfortably the instrument sits against the body, hangs from a strap, and positions the hands. Weight distribution matters as much as total weight, especially when found objects or onboard amplification shift the center of gravity. The most artful solutions make an unconventional shape feel surprisingly natural.

Tone Quality

Judges the character, clarity, richness, and usefulness of the instrument’s core sound. The goal is not one supposedly perfect tone, but a voice with musical identity and enough detail to reward attentive playing. The highest scores go to guitars whose sound has real soul rather than merely acceptable frequency response.

Tonal Versatility

Measures how many genuinely useful sounds the instrument can produce rather than simply counting switches and settings. Different pickup combinations and controls should create musically distinct choices that a player would actually use. A clever circuit scores higher when its versatility feels purposeful instead of complicated for its own sake.

Amplification

Evaluates how convincingly the guitar performs through its intended amplification system, whether external or built in. Output, clarity, noise, feedback behavior, and usable volume all matter. For self-amplified Rubÿtones, a high score means the amplifier feels integrated into the instrument rather than attached as an afterthought.

build

Fit & Finish

Evaluates the precision and care visible in joints, edges, fretwork, hardware installation, surfaces, wiring, and final setup. Handmade character is welcome; carelessness is not the same thing as character. A strong score shows experienced workmanship while allowing the object to retain the marks and soul of its previous life.

Portability

Measures whether the instrument’s mass and dimensions make sense for the way it is meant to be used. A guitar with an onboard amp may reasonably weigh more, but every added ounce should earn its place. High scores reward designs that are easy to carry, hold, busk with, or live with without sacrificing the idea.

Reliability

Rates the likelihood that the guitar will keep working properly through normal playing, transport, and repeated use. Structural joints, wiring, controls, hardware, and power systems should feel dependable rather than experimental in the risky sense. A high score means the wit of the design is backed by experienced engineering.

Repairability

Considers how sensibly the instrument can be serviced when something eventually wears out or fails. Standard parts, accessible wiring, replaceable components, and understandable construction all help. The strongest designs are inventive without turning a future repair into an archaeological excavation.

Solutions

Scores the quality of the solutions used when unconventional materials create unconventional problems. Beam placement, neck angle, pickup clearance, feedback, balance, and internal packaging are all opportunities to demonstrate experience. High scores go to solutions that are technically sound and artful enough to look inevitable afterward.

Integration

Measures how successfully all the unrelated parts become one coherent working instrument. Neck, beam, body, hardware, electronics, amplifier, and found objects should cooperate mechanically and visually. The best integrations have a kind of soul: the parts stop looking assembled and start looking as though they found each other.

design

Innovation

Measures whether the guitar introduces a genuinely fresh idea, solution, relationship, or way of thinking about an instrument. Novelty alone is not enough; the innovation should improve the object, deepen the concept, or open a useful new possibility.

Shouldn’t Work

Rewards designs that appear improbable but succeed because the underlying engineering is sound. The wit comes from the gap between what your eyes expect and what your hands and ears discover.

Beauty

Judges visual appeal without assuming that beauty must mean polished, conventional, or expensive. Proportion, material, color, age, texture, and restraint can all create beauty in very different ways.

Sculpture

Considers the guitar as a three-dimensional object even when nobody is playing it. Silhouette, negative space, depth, structure, and the relationship between functional parts should reward viewing from more than one angle.

Coherence

Measures whether the many materials, colors, shapes, and components read as one intentional composition. A Rubÿtone can be busy, strange, or witty without looking accidental.

Relic

Rates the visual and emotional value of genuine age, wear, patina, scars, repairs, and evidence of earlier use. Authentic history carries more weight than artificially manufactured distress.

concept

Stage Presence

Measures how strongly the instrument communicates from across a room or under performance conditions. Silhouette, scale, color, movement, and unusual construction can all contribute before a note is heard.

Stands Alone

Judges whether the instrument feels complete and compelling without requiring a long explanation of why it matters. The story may deepen the experience, but the object should already make a persuasive case visually and musically.

Material Story

Considers how much meaning comes from the history and previous purpose of the materials themselves.

Transformation

Measures how completely the original object has been given a convincing second identity without erasing where it came from.

Boneyard Score

Rates how deeply the instrument embodies the practice of building from saved, secondhand, leftover, or previously overlooked materials.

Necessity

Asks whether each major component has a reason to be there. Extra hardware, controls, decorative pieces, and technology should contribute to function, story, balance, or visual composition.

personality

Story

Measures the strength of the narrative carried by the guitar’s materials, development, accidents, people, places, and decisions.

Surprise

Rates the number and quality of discoveries the instrument offers after the first glance.

Conversation

Measures how naturally the guitar makes people curious enough to ask questions.

Cool Factor

Captures the difficult-to-measure quality that makes an instrument desirable before every reason can be itemized.

Identity

Measures how immediately the guitar feels like itself rather than a variation of something more familiar.

Rubÿtone DNA

Rates how clearly the instrument expresses the recurring ideas behind Rubÿtone: reuse, structural invention, functional sculpture, irreverence, and serious playability.

impact

Humor

Measures whether the guitar contains genuine wit rather than a joke pasted onto an otherwise ordinary object.

Punchline

Judges whether the concept resolves into a satisfying final idea—the moment when the viewer suddenly understands why a particular object, material, or decision is there.

Disdain

Measures the willingness to question inherited rules about what an electric guitar is supposed to look like, contain, or be made from.

Rules

Rates how effectively the instrument departs from established guitar-building conventions while remaining musically and structurally convincing.

Copy Potential

Considers whether the central idea could inspire a new custom build without requiring an exact duplicate of the original.

Evolution

Measures how much useful creative territory remains in the idea after this particular guitar is finished.

THE STORY

I Played This One Until the Amplifier Caught Up

Bung10 has been with me for a long time, and I think I played this one out on the streets more than any other Rubÿtone.

I kept bringing it to work with me. I kept playing it. And I kept changing it.

At the center of the guitar is a West German Framus multi-laminated maple neck. Framus used this distinctive multi-ply construction extensively in its Folk and Western guitars, including instruments like the Texan. The laminated construction gave those necks excellent strength and stability, but I also simply like the way they look. You can recognize a Framus neck from across the room.

Then there is the barrel stave.

Music Out of Your Bung Hole

A wine-barrel stave is an essential component of many Rubÿtones. It's what I call the Beam.

Usually only one stave in a barrel gets the bung hole. On Bung10, I positioned that opening directly over the speaker cone. Visually, it resembles the sound hole of a flat-top acoustic guitar, except that this one gives me the opportunity to say that you can play music out of your bung hole.

There is actually more to it than the joke.

Because the opening is directly over the speaker, I can change the sound while I'm playing by changing the shape and position of my picking hand around the hole. Cup it one way, partially cover it another way, move the hand while picking, and the speaker responds differently.

I haven't found many guitars that let me use my hand as part of the speaker enclosure while I'm playing.

Before One Little Amp Could Do Everything

The Harmony PowerPal amplifier went through a lot of changes over the years. I added and adjusted circuits, added Bluetooth connectivity for the boombox function and rhythm section, and used a Fender MiniTwin as a cabinet for additional speakers.

It worked, but every new capability seemed to require another piece.

That's one of the things that makes Bung10 interesting to me now. It shows how I was solving these problems before the newer compact amplifiers made so many of the solutions easy.

Today I can look at that whole daisy chain of circuits, speakers and modifications and realize that a NUX Mighty Air can do most of what I was trying to accomplish in a much cleaner package—and sound considerably better while doing it.

That doesn't make the old experiments pointless. It's the opposite. I learned what I wanted by building it the difficult way first.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

If I'm ever going to start playing Bung10 regularly again, all of that accumulated amplification needs to come out.

I don't want to change the things that make the guitar Bung10. The Framus neck stays. The wine-barrel stave stays. The bung hole stays exactly where it is, because both the joke and the way it interacts with the speaker are worth preserving.

What has become obsolete is the complicated collection of electronics I added over the years.

A NUX Mighty Air could replace much of that with a smaller, cleaner and better-sounding system. Bung10 wouldn't need to become a different guitar. It would simply get the benefit of the technology that finally caught up with what I was trying to make it do.

That's appropriate for a guitar I improved continuously while actually using it.

I carried Bung10 into the city, brought it to work, played it on the street, discovered what I wanted it to do, and added things as I went. The collection of circuits hanging on it now is almost a record of those years.

I don't need to preserve every one of those circuits to preserve that history.

I can keep what made Bung10 worth playing and replace everything that made it difficult.

Or we can take what I learned from this one and start another one for you.