Meat

$495.00

Tags: Complete Amp Cabinet, Copy Available, Found Object, Garage, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument, Spirit Level

Categories: 25.5" scale, Pro, Simple, Six-String Guitar, Solid Body, Standard Scale

An exceptionally lightweight electric guitar whose raw, fleshy appearance inspired its new name, built around a featherweight body and pine carpenter’s-level beam, with a Fender Hardtail bridge, cello tailpiece, single humbucker, and onboard Blackstar Fly 3 amplifier.

"Meat" is an exceptionally lightweight Rubÿtone built from the body of an inexpensive solid-body guitar and a pine carpenter’s level used as the central structural beam.

A 25.5-inch Strat-style neck with a rosewood fingerboard establishes familiar electric-guitar proportions. The hardware includes a Fender hardtail bridge, cello tailpiece and a single humbucker, keeping the layout deliberately simple.

A Blackstar Fly 3 amplifier is incorporated into the instrument. Both the original guitar body and the pine level are unusually light, giving Raw Meat a noticeably low overall weight despite the additional structure and components.

Raw Meat is currently in the Garage because the bridge position prevents proper intonation and needs to be corrected before final setup.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod, Structural Reinterpretation, Whole Integrated-Amp Build
Construction	Simple, Solid-Body
Body	Stratocster
Beam	Pine Carpenter Level
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	25.5"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Fender Top-Loader Hardtail
Tailpiece	Cello Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Humbucker
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	Blackstar Fly 3
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Meat

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

8.72 / 10

314 / 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

It Used to Be Balsa.

For years, this guitar was called Balsa.

The name came from the weight.

The body started life as an exceedingly cheap—and not particularly well-made—guitar. But there was something about the wood that interested me: it was incredibly light. The pine carpenter’s level I used for the beam was remarkably light too.

This is one of those Rubÿtones where the value of the original instrument doesn't have much to do with its usefulness as material. I wasn't interested in restoring a cheap guitar. I was interested in what was there that I could use to make a different one.

A 25.5" Strat-style neck with a rosewood board gave it familiar proportions. I kept the rest fairly simple: a Fender hardtail bridge, cello tailpiece and a single humbucker. The Blackstar Fly 3 provided the amplifier, and running through the middle of everything was that remarkably light carpenter's level.

The result was light enough that the material itself gave the guitar its name.

No, it wasn't actually balsa.

Then Somebody Saw the Meat

The name lasted until a client came over to buy a guitar and brought a friend with him.

We spent about three hours together. His friend was extremely knowledgeable and inquisitive, and in some ways he ended up doing more of the selling than I did. His curiosity kept the guitars coming out, and I showed him about half of the collection in detail.

Even after all that, he was still thirsty for more.

Eventually his attention went to Balsa. It wasn't one of the guitars I was showing off. It was hanging back in the shadows, partly obscured by some of the better guitars in front of it.

He looked at it and said it reminded him of raw meat hanging in a butcher shop.

That was it.

Now that he'd said it, I couldn't see it any other way.

Balsa became Raw Meat.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

The bridge is in the wrong place.

It needs to be moved—or replaced—before the guitar can be properly intonated. There isn't anything fundamentally wrong with the idea of Raw Meat. In fact, the combination of that exceptionally light body and lightweight beam is exactly what I want to preserve.

This isn't a guitar where I'm waiting for some entirely new idea to tell me what it should become. I already know what needs to happen.

When I Have More Time…

I'll deal with the bridge.

Moving it means changing something that has already been built: filling the existing holes, establishing the correct location and deciding whether the Fender hardtail is still the bridge I want to use.

Once that's resolved, Raw Meat can be properly set up and intonated. Then I can look at the rest of the guitar and decide whether anything else deserves attention before it leaves the Garage.

Sometimes a Garage project is waiting for inspiration.

Raw Meat is mostly waiting for me to move the bridge.