TigerJazz

$3,495.00

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

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

A vintage plastic Emenee Tiger transformed into a professional electric guitar with a whiskey-barrel beam, Seymour Duncan Antiquity Jazzmaster pickups and an onboard NUX Mighty Air stereo amp.

TigerJazz transforms a vintage Eminee Tiger plastic guitar body into a full-scale professional electric guitar built around a 25.5-inch Stratocaster-style neck and an oak whiskey-barrel-stave beam.

A pair of Seymour Duncan Antiquity Jazzmaster pickups gives the instrument a traditional Jazzmaster-style neck and bridge combination, with a three-way toggle and rhythm-circuit slider providing two distinct control paths. Vintage chicken-head knobs bring the controls to the front of the instrument, making the electronics part of the visual design rather than hiding them behind the body.

A Fender-style top-loading hardtail bridge mounts directly to the structural system. The Eminee body is therefore free to serve a different role—as the instrument’s visual identity and as part of the enclosure for the onboard amplification.

The NUX Mighty Air provides rechargeable stereo amplification, Bluetooth connectivity and wireless operation from an internal USB-C rechargeable battery.

TigerJazz brings together several ideas developed through earlier Rubÿtones: the plastic Eminee Tiger body, beam-based construction, Jazzmaster electronics and self-contained stereo amplification. Rather than being another experiment to determine whether those ideas work, it uses them as established ingredients in a more developed design.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, Structural Reinterpretation
Construction	Hollow-Body
Body	Eminee plastic toy guitar
Beam	Wine Barrel Stave
Neck	Maple
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	25.5"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Fender Top-Loader Hardtail
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Fender Jazzmaster Pickup
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Fender Jazzmaster Pickup
Pickup Switch	JazzMaster Slider + Toggle Set-Up
Controls	JazzMaster Original
Knobs	Vintage Chicken Head Knobs
Amplifier	NUX Mighty Air
Power Supply	USB-C (Internal Rechargeable Battery)

TigerJazz

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

9.78 / 10

352 / 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

Back to the Tiger

The Eminee Tiger has been part of Rubÿtone for a long time.

It started life as an injection-molded plastic toy/student guitar from the 1950s and ’60s. That's probably not the object most people would choose as the foundation for a serious electric guitar.

Which is one of the reasons I keep coming back to it.

By the time I built TigerJazz, though, I wasn't trying to prove that a plastic Tiger could become a real guitar. I already knew that.

I had also learned something important from Viola2025.

I had built Viola2025 partly because I wanted to compare an intact wooden viola body with the plastic Tiger body. The viola turned out to be warmer, but it wasn't simply a matter of wood being better than plastic. They had different personalities.

More importantly, Viola2025 helped crystallize the way I was thinking about the whole structure.

The beam could carry the parts that actually make the guitar a guitar. The donor body didn't have to do that job anymore. It could provide the enclosure, the shape, the visual identity and its own contribution to the sound.

Once I understood that, I could come back to the Tiger with a different objective.

TigerJazz wasn't another test. It was a refinement.

This time I paired the Tiger with a full 25.5-inch Stratocaster-style neck and an oak beam made from a whiskey barrel stave.

Then I gave it something the original Eminee Tiger could never have imagined:

Jazzmaster electronics.

I used a pair of Seymour Duncan Antiquity Jazzmaster pickups with the familiar rhythm-circuit arrangement, but I wasn't interested in making the guitar look like a Jazzmaster. I wanted those electronics to become part of the Tiger.

That meant bringing the controls forward.

The chicken-head knobs and switches are right there on the face of the instrument. They're easy to reach, but they're also part of the composition. Instead of looking like controls that had to be accommodated somewhere, they became another element I could design around.

The amplifier followed the same progression.

Earlier Rubÿtones taught me that putting an amplifier inside a guitar wasn't enough. Where it sits, how much enclosure it needs, how the controls are accessed and how it relates visually to the donor body all matter.

The NUX Mighty Air gave me stereo speakers, rechargeable power, Bluetooth and wireless operation in a compact package. By abbreviating the amplifier cabinet and integrating it into the design instead of simply