Orange

$840.00

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

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

A three-pickup electric that began with one beautiful orange Stratocaster pickup, reinterpreting Les Paul body parts around a built-in carpenter’s level and a rare blonde Blackstar stereo amp.

Orange is a three-pickup Rubÿtone built around repurposed Les Paul body sections and a carpenter’s level used as the central structural beam.

A distinctive orange Stratocaster middle pickup establishes the visual theme. The original Les Paul sections have been separated and repositioned within the Rubÿtone structure while retaining enough of their original shape to make their source recognizable.

A blonde Blackstar stereo amplifier is incorporated into the instrument. Its speaker grille has been refinished to coordinate with the orange theme, which continues through the pickup and matching strap.

The combination of recognizable Les Paul forms, the exposed carpenter’s level, three-pickup layout and integrated blonde Blackstar gives Orange a mixture of conventional electric-guitar references and visibly repurposed construction.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Structural Reinterpretation, Whole Integrated-Amp Build
Construction	Simple, Solid-Body
Body	Les Paul parts
Beam	Cherry Carpenter Level
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	25.5"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Fender Top-Loader Hardtail
Tailpiece	Trapeze Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Fender Telecaster Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup	Fender Stratocaster Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Fender Telecaster Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch	5-Way Lever
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	Blackstar Fly 3
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Orange

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.00 / 10

324 / 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 Started With the Pickup

This guitar started with that beautiful orange middle Stratocaster pickup.

Sometimes a build begins with a body, a neck or a piece of wood that I've been saving for years. This one started with a color. I had this orange pickup, and once it became the center of the idea, everything else started moving in its direction.

This was also one of my earlier attempts at making a Rubÿtone product listing. Looking at the original page now, I can see that I was a little off the deep end trying to be artistic.

Instead of telling you very much about the guitar, I wrote about orange: the exuberance of red and the happiness of yellow. Joy. Sunshine. Creativity. Enthusiasm. Determination. Stimulation. I even got into what having an orange personality supposedly says about you.

I'm tempted to erase all of that now that I have a much clearer idea of what I want these pages to do.

But I don't want to.

That page belongs to the history of this guitar just as much as the parts do. I knew that someday I would have a clearer vision of what Rubÿtone would look like and how I wanted to talk about the instruments. I just wasn't there yet.

Orange was part of figuring it out.

Three Pickups and a Les Paul, Reconsidered

Once the orange pickup gave me the theme, the rest of the guitar had to find a way to live with it. This became another one of my three-pickup builds, giving me another opportunity to explore the combinations and switching possibilities that I keep coming back to.

I particularly like what happened with the Les Paul body parts. I wasn't interested in reconstructing a Les Paul or pretending that the pieces were still part of one. I wanted to keep enough of their identity that you recognize where they came from while rearranging them into something that works within the Rubÿtone structure.

It is less restoration than reinterpretation.

And then, of course, there is the beam.

It's a carpenter's level, built directly into the structure carrying the strings. Which means that after all this cutting, rearranging and reinterpretation of a classic guitar shape, I can still say that I was only trying to create a level playing field.

There had to be a punchline somewhere.

The Cream Colorered Blackstar

The amplifier is another piece that happened to fit the guitar unusually well. It's one of the Blackstar stereo setups I've used in several Rubÿtones, but this particular one has the much less common blonde cabinet.

Against the Les Paul pieces, it looks like it belongs there.

I painted the speaker grille to bring it into the Orange theme rather than letting the amplifier look like something that had simply been attached afterward. Even the strap matches the orange theme. Once this guitar decided what color it wanted to be, there wasn't much point in arguing with it.

So maybe that original product page wasn't completely off base after all.

Orange is associated with enthusiasm, creativity, attraction, encouragement and stimulation. It's friendly and lighthearted but still wants your attention. That description could just as easily have been written about this guitar.

The difference is that now I understand what the story is actually about.

It isn't what the color orange supposedly says about you.

It's what happened when one beautiful orange Stratocaster pickup told me what the rest of the guitar wanted to become.