Ol Red

$900.00

Tags: Boneyard, Copy Available, Garage, Integrated Speaker, Original Available, Reclaimed Instrument, Spirit Level

Categories: 24.75" scale, Hollow-Body, Pro, Simple, Six-String Guitar, Standard Scale

A rough-and-ready 15-inch viola-bodied electric built around a pine carpenter’s level, stair-tread trim and Harmony PowerPal amp — a Rubÿtone exercise in making the most out of the least.

Ol’ Red is built around a 15-inch viola body with a pine carpenter’s level serving as the central structural beam.

The instrument uses a substantial neck designed without a truss rod, a rosewood floating bridge and a single humbucker. Its compact component layout keeps the construction deliberately simple.

A Harmony PowerPal provides the amplifier system, using an MD-20 amplifier circuit. The amplifier controls are mounted directly on the front of the instrument, allowing access to the complete control interface while playing.

The original surfaces, exposed construction and aged appearance remain part of the instrument. Ol’ Red is currently in the Garage because the existing amplifier circuit is producing unwanted noise. The amplifier can be repaired or replaced without changing the basic construction or front-mounted control arrangement.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod
Construction	Simple, Hollow-Body
Body	15" Viola
Beam	Pine Carpenter Level
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	24.75"
Number of Frets	20
Bridge	Tune-o-matic
Tailpiece	Eminee Tiger Toy Guitar
Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup	Generic Replacement
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	Fender MiniDeluxe MD-20
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Ol Red

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

8.89 / 10

320 / 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

Making the Most Out of the Least

Ol’ Red is one of the simpler Rubÿtones.

A 15" viola body. A pine carpenter's level for the beam. A rosewood floating bridge. One humbucker. An amplifier built into the body.

There isn't much on Ol’ Red that doesn't absolutely need to be there.

Even the neck fits the idea. It's unusually substantial—thick and stiff enough that it doesn't need a truss rod. It isn't complicated because it doesn't need to be.

But my favorite thing about Ol’ Red is how it became a guitar.

The Mock-Up Just Kept Becoming the Guitar

Most Rubÿtones go through some version of the same process. I assemble something, learn from it, take it apart, reconsider it and put it together again.

Ol’ Red didn't.

The mock-up worked well enough that I kept moving forward with it. One decision led to the next, and somewhere along the way there wasn't a mock-up anymore.

There was Ol’ Red.

That also explains why it looks the way it does. It's roughed up. Things aren't overly refined or disguised. There was never a moment when I decided that the experiment was finished and it was time to make everything look new.

Somehow, the whole thing looks like it might have been built 50 years ago.

I wouldn't want to clean that up.

The roughness isn't something waiting to be corrected. It's part of what the guitar became.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

The amp is making noise.

That's really it.

The Harmony PowerPal uses an MD-20 amplifier circuit, so the easiest solution would be to replace the old circuit with another MD-20 and keep everything essentially the same.

That would probably be the most faithful solution.

But easy isn't necessarily the most interesting option.

The small amplifiers available now give me choices that didn't exist when I built Ol’ Red. I could use the repair as an opportunity to put something newer inside it.

What I don't want to change is one of the things I got right the first time: all of the amplifier controls are right there on the front of the guitar.

I like that.

Fortunately, I don't need to change the construction to preserve it. A different amplifier circuit could live behind the existing interface, keeping the controls accessible from the front and leaving the character of Ol’ Red alone.

So I have a choice.

I can replace the MD-20 and preserve the old system almost exactly as it was, or I can put something newer behind the familiar exterior.

And if somebody becomes interested in Ol’ Red before I make that decision, we can make it together.

Either way, I have no intention of making this guitar look more polished, more refined or more finished than it already does.

I just want it to be quiet when it's supposed to be quiet.