inspired by designs from way back
in the history of 6-string luthiery.
“I had this Stauffer guitar from
1820s Vienna—[Johann Georg]
Stauffer was the guy who taught
C.F. Martin how to build guitars,”
Turner explains. “The Model 1 is
basically a Stauffer with a cutaway
and slight modifications.”
With those roots, as well as
the soundhole look of its unique,
rotating pickup assembly, it’s not
surprising that most people think
the Model 1 is hollow. “But it
isn’t,” Turner says. “It’s a solidbody.
I wanted a mahogany body that
would give it warmth like the orig-
inal Les Paul Custom, the ‘Black
Beauty’—which is all mahogany
and doesn’t have the maple cap. I
was looking for the warmth and
sustaining quality of the mahogany
and the clarity of the Strat.”
However, considering the Model
1’s rather petite outline, what is
somewhat surprising is that the gui-
tar is on the heavy side—but that
seems to lend it a resonance and
character beyond most traditional
electrics. “That’s the combination of
the mahogany and the maple and
purpleheart neck,” says Turner, who
also attributes those properties to the
relatively wideband humbucker and
its ability to remain remarkably clear.
“Then you throw in the EQ, which
lets you do some really trick things
with amp voicings—you know, tickle
the tubes with a nice midrange boost.”
These days, Turner manufac-
tures Model 1 electronics in his
shop and at D-TAR, the company
he founded with Seymour Duncan.
The first Model 1’s electronics—
which were basically a single chan-
nel of parametric EQ without a
bandwidth control—were made by
Jim Furman. When Turner worked
at Alembic, their guitars had similar
features but never quite realized
their tonal potential, whereas his
Model 1 capitalized on an impec-
cable blend of excellent woodwork-
ing, playability, electronics, and,
most importantly, tone.
A Turner masterpiece in production for an undisclosed client. This instrument will have nylon strings and be
equipped to work with Roland guitar synths.
“I kind of like a challenge, so part
of the exercise with the Model 1 was
seeing how far I could take a single-
pickup instrument. It had a frequency
sweep control, and then boost and
cut, and then EQ in and EQ out, and
Volume and Tone. So it had Volume
and passive Tone and an EQ section.”
Naturally, the electronics have
evolved over the years. Considering
its creator, how could they not?
Turner expanded the versatility of
the rotating humbucker by add-
ing a piezo pickup and updated
electronics that allow you to split
the magnetic pickup or bypass the
onboard EQ. Turner is also devel-
oping a more affordable model
without the piezo and EQ circuit.
After turning the electric-guitar
universe inside out, Turner’s next
logical move was back to his acoustic
beginnings. And his purposes there
stemmed from a similar dissatisfac-
tion with amplified acoustic tone.
Some audio engineers have a hard
time listening to music on the radio
because of the poor processing and
mixing common to commercial
music. Turner has similar issues with
recordings of acoustic guitars. “Very
often, amplified acoustics drive me
crazy! God bless him, but I think
Dave Matthews sounds like shit!
That ultra-quacky piezo sound is not
something I like.”
Turner’s issues with piezos in
acoustic instruments is what pushed
him to form an alliance with Duncan
and develop the D-TAR Wavelength,
which uses modeling technology, a
piezo pickup, a condenser mic, and
an 18-volt preamp. Duncan’s VP of
engineering, Kevin Beller, helped
Turner figure out what he didn’t like
about piezos on acoustics.
www.premierguitar.com
spikes of 100 volts out of the pickup. When you lay into the strings,
you get that very first spike. Under
a bridge—under a load—you’re
not going to get 100 volts, but
you’re going to get more than the
nine volts that are available from
the preamp. It clips. And a lot of
the quack is the recovery of the
preamp from that hit. By going
to an 18-volt system, you clean
things up tremendously.
“The other issue with undersaddle pickups is that, compared to
an acoustic guitar, they are relatively
phase-coherent,” Turner continues.
“But the sound of an acoustic guitar
is phase incoherent. It’s all screwed
up, because it takes time for the
frequencies to propagate out into
a top and release into the acoustic
field—and it takes different amounts
of time for different frequencies. And
then you’ve got the low sound coming out of the soundhole, which is
also phase incorrect. So what we have
come to love is the phase incoherency
of acoustic instruments. With a piezo,
