Uno

$2,500.00

Tags: Boneyard, Cantilevered, Copy Available, Found Object, Garage, Integrated Speaker, Original Not For Sale, Reclaimed Instrument, Stave

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

The first Rubÿtone: built from the neck of the guitar I learned on, truck-bed hickory and whatever was at hand—now evolved with Blackstar stereo, Grandma’s turkey-roaster speaker cabinet and USB-C GarageBand connectivity.

Uno is the first Rubÿtone—and the current version is the result of more than fifteen years of continuous evolution.

Built around the wide neck from my old Atlas guitar and reclaimed hickory dunnage, Uno now combines a Blackstar stereo amplifier system with speakers housed inside the lid of my grandmother’s turkey roaster. A Ford F-150 mirror cover, Telecaster control plate and magnetic iPhone charging mount remain integrated into the design.

USB-C connectivity brings the latest version up to date with my current GarageBand setup. Uno functions as a guitar, portable stereo system and mobile music-making platform—the latest version of an idea that began with a guitar built to take to Thailand in 2010.

Evolution is the design.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Experimental Build, Found-Object Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Hybrid Build, Reclaimed-Instrument Build, RestoMod, Structural Reinterpretation
Construction	Simple, Hollow-Body
Body	Grandma's Turkey Roaster Lid
Beam
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock
Scale Length	24.75"
Number of Frets	22
Bridge	Ebony Archtop Bridge
Tailpiece	Trapeze Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	Fender Telecaster Neck Pickup
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup	Fender Telecaster Bridge Pickup, Fishman Triple-Play Hex Pickup
Pickup Switch	3-Way Lever
Controls	1 Volume / 1 Tone
Knobs	Faceted Pointer
Amplifier	Blackstar Fly3 W/Extension Speaker
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Uno

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

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 is still one of the things I love about Uno. 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 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.

Thailand and Back

The first version of 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. I took it to Thailand and brought it home a much better friend than when we left.

Around that time I started carrying a guitar to work more and more often, until eventually bringing one along became an everyday habit.

And because I was carrying Uno around so much, I kept thinking of ways to make it better. It went through several substantial revisions. Stereo Bluetooth gave it another life as a little boombox that I could play along with. Eventually I added MIDI and GarageBand connectivity, along with a magnetic iPhone charging mount.

My idea was to have an instrument I could use not only to practice on the way to work, but to actually make music on my iPhone while I was moving through the city.

The Latest Uno

The newest version takes another fairly big turn. I removed the previous amplifier, but I didn’t remove the two jobs that an onboard amplifier had been doing. I separated them instead:

the electronics and the speaker cabinet became two different design problems.

For the electronics, I went back to the Blackstar stereo setup that I’ve used successfully in other Rubÿtones.

For the speaker cabinet, I went considerably farther back—to my grandmother’s turkey roaster.

The lid became the new speaker enclosure. I love that something which lived in my family for an entirely different reason can now become a functional part of the first Rubÿtone.

Not everything needed to change. I retained the Ford F-150 mirror cover and the Telecaster control plate, because by now they belong to Uno’s visual language.

The magnetic iPhone charging mount remains as well, while the connections have been updated to USB-C, keeping the instrument compatible with the way I now use GarageBand.

Uno has never really been a finished design followed by a series of repairs.

Evolution is the design.

It started as a guitar I could take to Thailand without worrying about it, made from the neck of the guitar I couldn't bring myself to throw away and pieces of hickory I couldn't bring myself to leave on a jobsite.

Since then it has changed as the way I travel, practice, listen, record and build has changed.

I already made a few songs with it. The dream is still the same:

make an album on my iPhone, entirely while I’m on my way to and from work and everywhere else I have to go.