I play Simmons guitars; they're all I own now. Each one was handmade by my buddy Casey Simmons, whose day job is restoring vintage airplanes at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. I've championed various other instruments over the years such as the Ovation Breadwinner, G&L ASAT, and the low-impedance Gibson Les Paul Recording; but Casey's guitars are truly great and I am incredibly fortunate to call him a good friend. As for amplifiers...scroll down and it's a whole 'nother story.

So folks, by popular demand, here's a rundown of my crazy guitars.

The guitar I am most identified with is the Simmons "Crazy Joe" Trifonic, my main instrument since July 2005. What’s so special about this guitar? Well, its most important feature by far is that it says “CRAZY JOE!” on the neck in mother-of-pearl!

All kidding aside, Casey and I really put a lot of thought into every detail of this guitar’s design and construction, which began in late 2004. I told Casey I wanted a big, heavy, fancy, Cadillac of a guitar with my name on the fretboard and a body shape I sketched out during a particularly boring Ph.D. seminar class. Casey had his own ideas about what types of construction would be the sturdiest and have the best tone. The end result is a guitar that is truly unique.

In the initial planning stages, Casey and I talked a lot about construction styles and how they affect the guitar's tonal response. At the time, he was quite taken by the high-end Rickenbacker 381, and its influence on the design of the Trifonic is unmistakable; just witness the German carve and zero neck angle. Less obvious is the neck-to-body joint which, like the 381, has a neck tenon that extends much further into the body than most set-neck guitars. In our case, it goes all the way to the end, making it a hybrid between set-neck and neck-through-the-body designs. It's a very strong joint and a very efficient mode of vibration transfer.

For tonewoods, we chose African black limba for the neck and white limba (also known as Korina) for the body. These woods are not particularly dense, but when used in a solidbody guitar 1-3/4” deep and 16” wide like a hollowbody, the result is not exactly a lightweight; the guitar weighs close to 13 pounds! All that mass really contributes to the guitar's clean, sustaining, even tone. The neck is very large - I asked Casey to make the biggest neck he could get out of the piece of lumber - and has a pronounced “V” shape. I'm told it resembles a 1920's Gibson L-5 neck. The 12"-radius fingerboard and headstock overlay are ebony.

Ah yes, the electric ukulele. I conceived this twisted idea in 1992 and built it in eighth-grade shop class after school. Actually, my teacher Mr. (Rich) Allen did most of the work on the two-piece walnut body, and its workmanship is perfect. I made the original neck, which was curly maple with four strings no truss rod, and it was a true piece of crap with terrible fretwork that warped immediately. Casey Simmons made me a new six-string octave-up neck out of Honduran mahogany with a Bois de Rose fingerboard in late 2005 so I could pretend like I’m Joe Maphis (yeah, right) and installed G&L ASAT MFD pickups like my Trifonic.

The scale length of this instrument is quite a bit longer than it should be for an octave-up guitar. The good thing is that it keeps the frets from being too close together, but as a result the strings are at ridiculously high tension, even with .009’s, and the high-E string will break on tune-up if you don’t take it really easy - I broke three trying to record a 30-second part on the “Electric Ukulele Rag” from the Sweatin’ Bullets Over You EP. In fact, I tuned it down a step-and-a-half for “Remington Rock” on The King of Nerd-A-Billy. But the tone of this instrument is really special; perhaps because of the ultra-high tension and super hi-fi pickups, it eerily resembles the sped-up Les Paul/Mary Ford guitar sound. I used it all over the place on The Doctor Is IN! album. Someday, I plan to make a truly evil instrumental album using it...stay tuned!

I call my main amp the "Peacekeeper," tastefully named after the ten-warhead ICBM of the 1980's. It's really not super powerful or insanely loud, but it's the closest I've come to a pure, unrestricted engineering effort and it's all I use now. What's different about the amp? For starters, the power supply, amplifier, and preamplifier are on separate chasses with military-style Jones-plug umbilical cables connecting them together.

The "Peacekeeper" amplifier; preamp/reverb unit (top), amplifier (middle), and
power supply (bottom), back when it used 6L6GC's.
Image © 2013 Joe Tritschler

Why did I make it this way? One reason is because the amplifier uses the least-efficient mode of operation possible; Class A1 parallel-single-ended triode connection, for you amp nerds. By contrast, most guitar amplifiers use push-pull pentode operation, which is 3-4 times more efficient for a given size and cost. Basically, I've got four 6CA7 output tubes and a 200W-sized power supply and output transformer just to get 30 watts output. Building the whole thing on one chassis would probably have resulted in someone's death or a major hernia operation. Each piece is actually very manageable weight-wise. Separating the sections also makes for an extremely quiet amplifier.

Why such a weird approach? Well, I've been using triode connection in guitar amps since 2001, but this is the most luscious-sounding amp I've made yet. I have to thank my uncle Joe Mahalka and Dr. Brad Dean for encouraging me to go single-ended. I'll likely never go back.