RedwoodTigerMalibu

RedwoodTigerMalibu

$2,495.00

Tags: Amp Cabinet Abbreviated, Bluetooth Amp, Boneyard, Cantilevered, Copy Available, Found Object, Integrated Speaker, Reclaimed Instrument, Stave

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

A full-custom RedwoodTiger rebuilt with upgraded pickups, fresh fretwork and improved onboard amp controls — slimmer, easier to operate and refined around the way its owner actually plays.

Out of stock

A full-custom RedwoodTiger rebuilt with upgraded pickups, fresh fretwork and improved onboard amp controls — slimmer, easier to operate and refined around the way its owner actually plays.

RedwoodTigerMalibu is a custom-built Rubÿtone originally completed for Jack in 2021 and extensively rebuilt in 2025.

The design began with Jack’s own list of requirements. Being from California, his first choice was a redwood beam. He wanted a 3-and-3 headstock with a maple fingerboard, a humbucker at the neck and a single-coil pickup at the bridge. Put those ingredients together and the direction seemed obvious to me: Telecaster.

The resulting guitar combined those familiar cues with Rubÿtone construction, onboard amplification and the found-object approach that makes each instrument its own design rather than a reproduction of something else.

When RedwoodTigerMalibu returned to the shop in 2025 for a broken tuner, I used the opportunity to go much further. The pickups were upgraded, the frets were leveled and polished, and the amplifier installation was redesigned so its presets could be controlled without reaching around behind the guitar. The revised arrangement also allowed the instrument to become thinner.

What came back for a tuner repair left the shop as the FULL CUSTOM version of RedwoodTigerMalibu.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod, Structural Reinterpretation
Construction	Cantilevered, Hollow-Body
Body	Eminee plastic toy guitar
Beam	Redwood Water Tank Stave
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Maple
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	25.5"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Telecaster Hardtail
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Seymour Duncan Humbucker
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Seymour Duncan Little ’59
Pickup Switch	3-Way Toggle
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Vintage Chicken Head Knobs
Amplifier	NUX Mighty Lite
Power Supply	2 9v. Rechargeable batteries with On-Off-On Rocker Switch

RedwoodTigerMalibu

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.28 / 10

334 / 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

From Broadway to FULL CUSTOM

I met Jack because I used to walk past him every day on my way to work in Union Square.

He was the doorman at a hotel on Broadway, and Jack is outgoing. He likes to chat. So after passing each other enough times, we got to know one another.

I also discovered that he is a hell of a music maker.

We kept in touch after he moved on to another job when the hotel closed for renovations. Then one day he contacted me and said he'd been looking at the Rubÿtone website.

It was time to place his order.

Being from California, the first thing on his list was a redwood beam.

The rest of his requests began pointing the guitar in a direction of their own. He wanted a 3-and-3 headstock with a maple board, a humbucker in the neck position and a single coil at the bridge.

That sounded like a Telecaster to me.

So that became the starting point—not to build a Telecaster, but to take the things Jack liked about that combination and see where they went when they became a Rubÿtone.

RedwoodTigerMalibu was completed for him in 2021. Even then, I knew there were things I might eventually change. In particular, I had already thought about upgrading the pickups.

A few years later, the opportunity presented itself.

Jack brought the guitar back with a busted tuner.

A busted tuner doesn't require rebuilding a guitar.

But once RedwoodTigerMalibu was back in my hands, I started looking at all the things I could do differently now. By then I had several more years of Rubÿtone development behind me, and I wasn't particularly interested in simply replacing the tuner and handing the guitar back.

Jack chose the direction for the new pickups, and I went through the frets, leveling and polishing them. Then I turned my attention to the onboard amplifier.

The earlier arrangement worked, but operating the amp presets required reaching around behind the guitar. I redesigned the installation so those controls could be reached properly from the playing position. The new arrangement had another advantage: it allowed me to make the guitar thinner.

At that point, this clearly wasn't a tuner repair anymore.

The guitar Jack had ordered was already custom. But now I had the opportunity to take everything I had learned since building it and apply it to the same instrument.

So I decided to take RedwoodTigerMalibu all the way to FULL CUSTOM before I gave it back to him.

That is one of the things I like most about having these guitars come back through the shop. A Rubÿtone doesn't necessarily have to remain frozen at the moment when I first hand it to its owner. Sometimes the original idea is still exactly right, while the ways I know how to execute it have moved forward.

Jack still has the guitar he ordered.

It's just had a few more years of Rubÿtone added to it.