Veillette Custom Electric Guitars

Custom Electric Guitars

For a company that started out with Baritone 12-strings, the idea of a custom electric guitar is obviously not a big stretch! However, far beyond our "standard" models, we've had the chance to build some extremely unusual and interesting electrics over the years. Every musician has different needs — and sometimes those needs just aren't met by something off-the-shelf. Filling those needs is our Custom Shop's specialty.

Click to see a sample of our Custom Electric Guitars

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Joey Weisenberg's custom 6-string electric #667
This guitar was custom-made for Joey Weisenberg, a renowned klezmer guitarist from New York City. Joey needed something truly different to fit his very eclectic, high-energy playing style and very specific needs. Here's what we came up with:

Custom body shape
27 frets
Hipshot "Trilogy" bridge, with 729 different possible tunings (3 different notes per string!), along with pedal-steel type bending effects
Special knob locations for 'rolling' volume and tone while playing
GraphTech "Ghost" piezo bridge
Dual Duncan Vintage Rails pickups
D-Tar Eclipse blender preamp with Blend control

The multiple-tuning bridge and super-flexible electronics let this guitar do just about anything, including things other guitars could only dream of.

Rod Cone's Archtop Terz 12 #819
This custom electric fuses the punchy high-A tuning of our popular Terz acoustic model with the classy and upscale styling of our Elan instrument. The intensely flamed redwood top is carved to a classic arch contour, and positively glows under the high-gloss polyester finish.

Armed with dual magnetic pickups and a piezo bridge, this instrument has an enormous variety of tones available from the active Eclipse blending circuit. The top-loading wooden tailpiece perfectly complements the warm, wooden tone and look of this powerful and unusual electric beast.

Neal Schon's
double Doublenecks #728,729
Legendary guitarist Neal Schon has been a client and friend of Veillette Guitars for years, and has featured his 3 (!) electric Gryphons on stage on the most recent Journey tours.

After seeing and playing Joe's doubleneck, Neal decided he should get on board with some new customs — in this case, a pair of very exotic Doublenecks. The red guitar is a standard-tuned 6-string, with a locking tremolo and dual humbuckers, combined with a D-tuned Gryphon 12-string up top. Custom wiring including a sustainer and Neal's special circuitry finish it off.

The black guitar takes it even a step further — a 7-string electric neck with locking trem, and a 14-string Gryphon with added low A pair! A custom milled 14-string stop tailpiece is just one of many specially-made or adapted parts that came together to make this guitar happen.

Both instruments have mahogany bodies and necks, killer flame maple tops, and Indian Rosewood fingerboards. Lightweight, easy to handle, and stunning, these guitars are sure to catch the eyes and ears of Journey fans when Neal takes them out for the next tour!

Peter James' Nylon 8-string #195
Built for West Coast guitarist/songwriter Peter James, this 8-string Nylon Acoustic/Electric delivers some serious range - it's tuned from Low B to a high A. The demands of Peter's highly original music have led him to a pretty unique guitar.

Mike Pleska's Lefty Baritone 6 #712
An amazing guitar for a truly amazing musician
Doing what we do, it's not unusual for us to meet musicians whose needs are different from those of most guitarists. Well... even those guys are pretty normal compared to "Amazing" Mike Pleska, the proud owner of this beautiful left-handed baritone 6-string.

"Amazing Mike" lives in Chicago, and can make music with just about any object you could imagine. Envision someone jumping mid-song from tuned bottles, to dual trumpets (simultaneously!) to guitar behind his head, throw in a kazoo and a rubber band, and you start to get some idea of what he can do. We've never seen or heard anything like him. His incredible talent has landed him spots on Jay Leno and other TV features, as well as a steady gigging and performing schedule.

This killer piece features every option — dual magnetics and a piezo bridge, and a 'drop top' over an arm bevel. We've never been more sure that someone will use every feature and option the guitar has available — he'll probably discover things we didn't even know could be done with it!

Yukihiro Saitou's Custom Baritone Nylon #539
This Baritone Nylon is loaded with RMC piezo pickups and a Poly-Drive preamp with 13-pin output, ready to drive synths, modeling processors, and all other flavors of high-tech signal processing gear.

On the low-tech side, it sports a gorgeous, heavily quilted maple top with black binding in a deep-red finish, and an ebony fingerboard and bridge with a very custom neck shape. To accommodate his playing style, this guitar was built with a conventional nut (no zero fret). The mahogany body and neck made this always deep-sounding instrument go even deeper.

Lynne Gordon's 14-string guitar #121

This instrument is tuned in all-octaves - that is, all 7 courses are a fundamental-octave pair. There are no unison pairs. The strings on this ranged from a .007" 1st octave, to a .095" fundamental. The custom signature decal was a request from the customer.

Scary to look at, scarier to play....scariest to listen to!

Billy Sheehan's Bari 12 #12
Billy asked us to modify his older MkIII Bari 12 for a more rock-and-roll vibe. Now it's a magnetic-only monster with a DiMarzio bridge pickup, tune-o-matic bridge, and stop tailpiece. What more do you need?

Eddie Van Halen's MkIII Bari 12 #19
with 2 extra magnetic pickups, volume control, and stereo outputs. A pretty massive sounding guitar!