THE STORY

This Is the First. Rubÿtone Starts Here.

I wanted to bring a guitar along on my second trip to Thailand, but I didn’t want to spend the trip worrying about one of my good guitars. So I decided to put something together from whatever I already had around.

There are many ways to get it together. This was mine—and this was the first Rubÿtone.

The neck came out of my old Atlas, the guitar I learned to play on. The Atlas had developed bridge problems that could have been repaired, but only at an expense that didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t bear to part with it, though. Instead, I cut out the part I wanted to keep.

In a way, the first Rubÿtone and the Boneyard were born at exactly the same time.

That big, wide Atlas neck was one of the things I loved about the guitar. Years earlier, at Sound Logic in Madison, my mentor had used this same guitar to begin teaching me fretwork, and Petros in Wisconsin had installed its bone nut. The guitar itself had reached the end of its useful life, but the part of it that mattered most to me still had plenty of life left.

The hickory beams along the sides came from another part of my life. During my truck-driving days we called pieces like these dunnage—wood placed under and around freight to protect it from the flatbed and from the pressure of the straps holding everything down. This happened to be some particularly nice hickory, so naturally I kept it.

Years later, it became part of a guitar.

The first Uno used a little Fender Mini Twin MT-10 running on a 9-volt battery. It had volume, tone and gain, and that was enough. The whole point was to make a guitar I could take with me without worrying about it and without needing to carry an amplifier.

I took it to Thailand.

And I brought it home a much better friend than when we left.

That trip changed my relationship with the instrument. I started carrying a guitar to work more and more often, until eventually bringing one along became an everyday habit. Uno also started changing because I kept thinking of ways to make it better.

Those later versions would eventually take Uno far beyond this simple first configuration. But this page preserves the beginning—the moment before all of that happened.

It also established something I didn't fully understand yet: an old guitar didn't have to be discarded because part of it had failed. A useful part, an interesting object or even an unfinished idea could become the beginning of something else.

That idea became Rubÿtone.

The original Uno no longer exists in exactly the form shown here; it evolved into the Uno that I still use today. But I would absolutely build another guitar from this starting point.

If this first Rubÿtone speaks to you, I would love to build one for you. Commissions inspired by the original Uno start at $495.

It wouldn't be a reproduction assembled from identical parts. The whole point is to start the way Uno started—with what we can find, what you bring to it, and what the project suggests it wants to become.