WECHTER
PATHMAKER PM-7352
BY ADAM PERLMUTTER
Abe Wechter has enjoyed a long and enviable career as a luthier. Back in 1975, he started
a 10-year run working as a designer and in artist
relations at Gibson—a fortuitous gig that found
him designing guitars for such legends as B.B.
King and Al Di Meola. But his still-growing
legacy as a builder of original and significant
instruments was seeded in his partnership with
Richard Schneider and their Kasha guitars. These
radically braced instruments were licensed by
Gibson for a time, and also became iconic in the
form of John McLaughlin’s famous Shakti drone-string guitar.
Wechter left Gibson in 1984 to build high-end guitars in his own shop. By 1994 he had
arrived at a new original design, the Pathmaker.
Wechter thought this model would have appeal
in the form of a more affordable, factory-built
version, so in 1997, he set up a factory in
Paw Paw, Michigan, to build the bold-looking
Pathmaker acoustic—a guitar that features a
striking double-cutaway body and 19th-fret
neck-to-body joint.
Does-It-All With Distinction
The original Pathmaker was always a distinctive, well-proportioned design. And those visual
themes remain very much intact—and recognizable—on the solidbody PM-7352. The guitar
is built around a solid mahogany body with a
3/4" curly maple top and a 25"-scale mahogany
neck that sports a ebony fretboard and a curly
maple headstock cap. While the Pathmaker’s
signature double-cutaway silhouette looks more
conventional in the form of a solidbody electric,
the guitar has a few unique tweaks to enhance
Seymour
Duncan
Triple Shot
Each of the Pathmaker’s
pickups is housed in a
Seymour Duncan Triple
Shot mounting ring, a
device that features miniature
toggle switches for selecting
coils to create parallel, series,
and single-coil configurations.
