Lap6

$1,200.00

Tags: Boneyard, Copy Available, Original Available

Categories: 25.5" scale, Conventional, Pro, Simple, Slide Guitars, Solid Body, Standard Scale

Six strings, no frets to worry about, and a completely different relationship between your hands and the guitar. This is Rubÿtone lying down.

Lap6 is a 24-inch-scale lap steel built from maple and redwood salvaged from the UWO shop scrap bin. Its original construction dates to 1995.

The instrument has a maple neck, redwood fingerboard with 16 fret positions, and a Rubÿtone Musical Ear headstock. A flat-top guitar bridge supports the strings.

An active EMG 85 provides the magnetic pickup signal, while an under-saddle transducer provides a second pickup source. The two pickups are selected with a three-way toggle and controlled through two volume and two tone controls with knurled knobs.

The under-saddle transducer is supported by an onboard preamp powered by a rechargeable 9-volt battery. This allows the piezo and magnetic pickup systems to be balanced at the instrument and combined through a single output.

Lap6 is one of two instruments created by separating a double-neck lap steel originally built from scratch in 1995.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Lap Steel
Approach	Found-Object Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Conventional, Simple, Solid-Body
Body	ScrapBin
Beam	ScrapBin
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Redwood
Headstock	Rubÿtone Musical Ear
Scale Length	25.5"
Number of Frets	16
Bridge	Flat-Top Guitar
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	EMG 85
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	UnderSaddle Transducer
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	2 x Vol. 2 x Tone
Knobs	Knurled
Amplifier	On-Board Preamp
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Lap6

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.31 / 10

335 / 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

The Beautiful Half

Lap6 and StandingSlide started life as one instrument.

In 1995, during my final semester finishing my BFA at UWO, I decided to build a lap steel from scratch for a sculpture class. The maple and redwood came out of the scrap bin in the school shop.

At the same time, I was building my 6-String Bass 1995 in much the same way. That project got most of my attention, and the lap steel didn't get as far before the semester ended.

My objective with the lap steel was pretty simple.

I wanted something handy.

So naturally, I built a double-neck.

That turned out not to be handy at all.

Two Necks Were Not Handier

The double-neck made sense as an idea. Two necks could give me different setups and different tunings without having to change anything.

Then I put the thing on my lap.

It was big. It was awkward. It was difficult to handle. I had added possibilities while defeating the main reason I wanted a lap steel in the first place.

So the project sat that way for more than 20 years.

Eventually the solution became obvious.

I cut it in half.

One sculpture became two instruments.

One half became Lap6.

The other became StandingSlide.

And once I separated them, they went in two completely different directions.

StandingSlide became the experimental one.

Lap6 became the beautiful one.

Two Very Different Ways to Hear the Strings

Lap6 has an active EMG 85 as its magnetic pickup. I've always liked what that pickup does with slide.

But I also installed an under-saddle transducer, which hears the strings in an entirely different way.

Originally, using both pickups meant running two cables to a two-channel amplifier so I could balance the signals independently. It worked well, but it wasn't particularly convenient.

More recently, I added an onboard preamp for the piezo and remade the control arrangement so the two pickup systems can be balanced at the instrument and sent through a single output.

That made the piezo sound better, too.

It also produced something I hadn't really anticipated. When I move the slide all the way toward the bridge and get extremely close to the under-saddle transducer, I can get sounds that don't behave like an ordinary magnetic-pickup lap steel.

So even the more resolved sibling still has a few tricks in it.

Back to the Original Idea

What I like most about Lap6 is that separating the original double-neck didn't destroy the sculpture I made in 1995.

It revealed what was wrong with it.

There were two perfectly good instruments in there. They just didn't need to be permanently attached to each other.

StandingSlide gave me somewhere to continue experimenting.

Lap6 became the lap steel.

The same maple and redwood that came out of the scrap bin at UWO in 1995 are still here. The instrument has changed, the electronics have improved, and one enormous double-neck has become two very different guitars.

But Lap6 finally accomplishes the thing I was after when I started.

I wanted something handy. It just took me more than 20 years to cut away the other half.