Urban

$495.00

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

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

It was built around a MIDI system. Then the MIDI system found another guitar. What remains is a cherry carpenter’s level, pieces of an old Harmony, an onboard amp—and a Rubÿtone that isn’t quite finished telling us what it wants to be.

Urban is built around a vintage Stanley carpenter’s level made from cherry, retaining its original wear and Genuine Cherry stamp as the structural and visual center of the instrument.

An Epiphone mahogany Special neck with rosewood fingerboard attaches directly to the level, with old coins used as washers so the neck attachment does not obscure the original Stanley markings. Sections of an old Harmony electric-guitar body provide the shapes needed to support the instrument on the player’s leg, carry the amplifier and complete the otherwise skeletal structure.

The onboard amplifier was reclaimed from an Urban practice amp and integrated directly into the guitar rather than retaining its original cabinet.

Urban was originally built around a Fishman TriplePlay MIDI system and was consequently known simply as MIDI. The TriplePlay was later removed and transferred to Uno, leaving the Urban amplifier to provide the guitar with a more appropriate permanent name.

Urban is currently in the Garage because its physical composition still feels unfinished. The iPhone mount creates a visual space above it that calls for a top horn, while the removal of the TriplePlay also leaves the pickup system open for redevelopment.

Rather than completing those decisions in advance, Urban offers an opportunity for its next owner to contribute something personal to the design—including, potentially, an object of their own that could become part of the guitar.

Additional information

Instrument Type	Guitar
Approach	Boneyard Build, Front Integrated-Amp Build, Hybrid Build
Construction	Simple
Body
Beam	Cherry Carpenter Level
Neck	Mahogany
Fingerboard	Rosewood
Headstock	Standard Guitar Headstock, Repaired Headstock
Scale Length	22.5"
Number of Frets	20
Bridge	Tune-o-matic
Tailpiece
Neck Pickup	P-90
Middle Pickup
Bridge Pickup
Pickup Switch
Controls
Knobs
Amplifier	Keith Urban Mini 3Watt
Power Supply	9V Rechargeable Battery

Urban

Rubÿtone Guitar Scorecard

7.97 / 10

287 / 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

Everything Has to Start Somewhere

This guitar started as an experiment with the Fishman TriplePlay. I had done a lot of recording with a Roland Ready Strat and its MIDI system, but latency was always part of the deal. Years later I started seeing the Fishman systems on eBay and eventually found a used one at a price that made me want to try it.

So instead of simply installing it on another guitar, I built a guitar around it.

The backbone is a particularly nice old Stanley carpenter's level made from cherry. It had already seen plenty of use before it came to me, and the age and wear were part of what made it worth using. I especially wanted to preserve the Genuine Cherry stamp, right where Stanley had put it.

Even the neck attachment had to work around that decision. Old coins became washers behind the neck screws rather than adding something that would cover up the part of the level I wanted to see.

The neck is an Epiphone mahogany Special with a rosewood board, but the skeletal structure still needed a way to become something comfortable to hold.

Pieces from an old Harmony electric guitar solved that problem. They were moved around until the lower section provided a natural place to rest the guitar on the leg while also supporting the amplifier. Another piece gave the MIDI controller somewhere to live.

The old Harmony wasn't being reconstructed.

Its shapes were being asked to do completely different jobs.

The Urban Amp

The amplifier came from an Urban, one of those small amps marketed toward beginning guitar players. That's where the guitar gets its current name.

There is something appealing about taking a product intended as a player's first amplifier and looking past the category it was sold in. Once the cabinet is out of the equation, what remains is an amplifier circuit, controls, a speaker and a collection of parts that can be put to work somewhere else.

It doesn't know that it was marketed to beginners.

So the Urban stopped being a little practice amp and became part of the architecture of the guitar.

Everybody has to start somewhere. Not everybody has to stay there.

It Isn't MIDI Anymore

For a while, MIDI really was the point of this guitar. The Fishman system had its place in the structure, the body pieces had been arranged partly around it, and the guitar was simply called MIDI.

Then I built Uno.

Uno needed the Fishman TriplePlay more than this guitar did, so I took it off and moved it over. The name MIDI stayed for a while.

The MIDI didn't.

Eventually that stopped making sense too. The Urban amplifier, which had quietly remained part of the guitar all along, supplied a much better name.

Urban.

The Reason This Rubÿtone Is in the Garage

Urban looks unresolved.

And it isn't the missing MIDI system that's bothering me.

It's the iPhone.

The phone has a functional place in the design, but visually it calls for something above it. The lower part of the guitar has enough structure to make sense, while the upper side seems to stop before the shape has finished saying what it wants to say.

It needs a top horn.

I could go into my own Boneyard, find something interesting and finish it myself. But that may not be the most interesting ending for Urban.

Maybe the person who wants this guitar has something in a closet that they can't part with. An old guitar body. A piece of an instrument that belonged to somebody. Something they've been saving for years without knowing exactly why.

Maybe we cut the top horn out of that.

Or maybe we go considerably further.

We could remove the solid-body pieces that are on Urban now and use an old guitar body as raw material for a completely new design—keeping the beautiful cherry Stanley level, the Epiphone neck and the basic architecture while changing the objects that make the instrument comfortable to hold.

And with the TriplePlay gone, there's another opportunity waiting:

Pickups.

Maybe Urban deserves a really cool set.

That's why it stays in the Garage. The MIDI experiment that originally gave us a reason to build it has moved on to another Rubÿtone. The iPhone is telling us the shape isn't finished yet.

Now we get to decide what belongs in that empty space.