2016 Pheo UN Whitewash

Every guitar by Pheo is a one of a kind work of art, but more importantly it also sounds great! Play it acoustically and you’ll hear how resonant and clear it is with its round, full high notes.

The pickups are a real ‘66 Fender mustang in the neck and a custom wound hot Fralin in the bridge. These pickups are vintage mounted on a type writer mechanism. You can slide them along and get an endless variety of colors to play with. Slide the right pickup all the way to the right and it’s like a strat bridge pickup or slide it closer to the neck to darken it up and you can do the same with the neck pickup.

It’s also very comfortable, light weight and easy to play. This guitar was meant to be like his favorite ‘55 Strat. This guitar was originally at Destroy All Guitars, who only deals with top notch guitars. Sylvester (Pheo) himself told me that Cliff is kicking himself for selling it because it’s every bit as good as any vintage Strat he’s owned

Here’s a a quote directly from the maker about Pheo’s unique and refreshing approach to making guitars:

"In 1996, I asked myself, can I build a guitar the way I approach my paintings? The answer was yes, and I have pursued guitar making as my main artistic expression ever since then.

What I have learned from thirty years of study of 20th Century master visual artists, Giacometti, Cezanne, Matisse, Johns, and others, is an economy of technique, doing what is necessary to get the job done, nothing more, nothing less. The work of these great artists is about expression above all, and all gratuitous craft is rigorously paired away. Most fine guitar making is obsessive about craft perfection. Mine is not. I strive to build instruments that sound exceptional, play beautifully, and are extremely interesting to look at. Each instrument is a unique prototype. The instruments aren’t gratuitously tidy or perfectionistic or consistent. In fact, they are quirky, mercurial, and personal. I rip them apart and rebuild them until I find them terribly exciting. Perfect guitars are great, but there are plenty of those. I’m searching for something more raw, more direct.

You know the occasional vintage guitar that just stands out, that has a uniqueness and character that can’t be matched? Most makers try to achieve that by refining production criteria until they can make that consistently. I don’t. I fiddle with each prototype until it reaches that place, then begin a different instrument. I’m interested in the first one, the one that embodies the curiosity, the search, the experimentation, the rethinks, the one with the scars and saw marks."