THE STORY

Loud Wasn't Good Enough

This story started with another guitar.

Years ago, I spotted a cheap red, white and blue acoustic guitar at a truck stop in Texas. It wasn't a particularly important guitar, but the colors immediately made me think of the Naked Cowboy in Times Square, so I bought it. Eventually it became his.

That could have been the end of the story. Instead, it became the beginning of one of the longest-running experiments in Rubÿtone history.

The Naked Cowboy plays in one of the least forgiving environments imaginable for an amplified guitar. Times Square is already loud before anybody starts playing. He didn't want to carry a conventional amplifier, so the guitar itself needed enough power to compete with everything happening around him.

But his request wasn't simply to make it louder. What he wanted was “loud and clear.”

Those turned out to be two very different assignments.

Times Square Became the Test Track

Putting a speaker into a guitar isn't particularly difficult. Putting a speaker into a guitar with magnetic pickups, turning everything up loud enough for Times Square, and expecting all of those parts to behave themselves is another matter.

More volume created more feedback. Moving the speaker changed its relationship with the pickups. Phasing mattered. Tone controls mattered. Frequencies that sounded fine at one volume could suddenly take over when the volume went up. Every solution seemed perfectly capable of introducing another problem.

So the original Naked Cowboy guitar kept coming back.

It went through four significant revisions, but they weren't structural rebuilds. The basic guitar remained recognizable. What kept changing was the amplification—the amplifier, speakers and the solutions to problems that appeared every time we tried to make it louder and clearer.

Some ideas worked. Some worked until the volume went up. Some mostly demonstrated what not to do next time.

The Naked Cowboy became the test pilot, and Times Square became the test track.

Then There Were More of Them

The original guitar also developed quite a family.

I personally made three Naked Cowboy copies. Later, I discovered that he had commissioned more through Guitar Center in Times Square. I saw at least three of those guitars myself and became friendly with the technicians there.

That's an important distinction in the history of this guitar. The original didn't become six different guitars through a series of rebuilds. It had four major non-structural revisions of its own, while the idea was also being copied and interpreted in other instruments.

That makes Naked Cowboy one of the Rubÿtones with the most relatives.

And all of them existed because of the same unusual job description: make a guitar that can go to work in Times Square.

The Modifications Actually Mattered

At one point, amplification became a problem for reasons that had nothing to do with electronics. After an encounter with a park ranger shut down his amplified playing, the Naked Cowboy eventually sold the original guitar back to me for $100.

By then, he had paid me more than $900 for modifications to it.

That might sound crazy until you hear what he told me.

The modifications had tripled his tips.

This wasn't just me obsessing over speakers, feedback and amplifier circuits anymore. The guitar was a working tool. Making it louder and clearer had a measurable effect on what happened when he took it to work.

That gave all of those experiments a very practical purpose.

What I Learned From It

The Naked Cowboy guitars taught me a great deal about what happens when the amplifier stops being a separate box on the floor and becomes part of the instrument.

The speaker, magnetic pickups, resonating body, amplifier, controls and power supply aren't independent pieces anymore. They become one system. Moving one component can change what another component does, and increasing the volume can expose problems that weren't apparent at lower levels.

Those lessons followed me into later Rubÿtones. Speaker placement became more deliberate. Amplifier integration became more sophisticated. Feedback stopped being a single problem with a single solution and became something I had to consider throughout the entire instrument.

The Naked Cowboy guitars weren't the end of that development. They were where I got a lot of the education.

And there probably couldn't have been a better laboratory than Times Square.

In Times Square, loud is easy. Loud and clear took some work.