Okay, time for a mini-history of Mosrite. Some of these facts might be a tad off since it's all light-duty internet research. Anyway, Semie Moseley started his own guitar company after leaving Rickenbacker in the late 1940s or early 1950s. He got some finance and business help via a pastor named Wayne Boatright - which his how the name came to be - it's and amantopiea of "Moseley" and "Boatright" - ie MOSRITE. In the 1950's he had a story that almost sounds like my perpetual "garage luthery" story of my own - literally working out of a toolshed in someone's backyard getting the company started. Toward the end of the 50's as his guitars got better, he started getting some celebrity endorsers such as Joe Maphis. However, the band/musicians that put the brand on the map were the Tacoma Washington Surf/Instrumental band - The Ventures. The Ventures worked with MOseley on Mosrite's flagship model - the "Ventures" model, which spawned spinoffs known as the "Ventures II" (used by Johnny Ramone), the Mark IV and Mark V (used by Ricky Wilson of the B-52s, and marketed under the barnd "Gospel" later on and used by Kurt Cobain). That's what this build is based on. Semie had a LOT of ups and downs in the industry, coming and going every so often until his passing, after which, his DAUGHTER has taken over the company as he taught her the business and luthier skills as well. BTW, I chose that album cover cause the surfer chick on it is hawt to go with those Mosrite headstocks, LOL.

Here's the real "inspirations" behind this build - Kurt's Phase IV Univox, late sixties "Gospel" Mark V, Ricky Wilson's BLue Mark V, and Ricky Wilson's burst Ventures.

It's obviously Kurt Cobain and Ricky Wilson were major influences on this project. I was in a huge B-52's phase at the time and studying Ricky's unorthodox playing techniques and tunings, and had been a huge Nirvana fan since way way back. See, I never though I could find nor afford not even a cheap copy! Copies of these guitars are even harder to come across. Univox used to make a model called the "Hi-Flier" that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana used a lot, but because Kurt used them, they are now over $500+ and impossible to find in the wild (and him smashing them didn't help much either). I'm still kicking myself for missing out on a $384 Hi-Flier in 2005 at Tommy's Guitar Shop in Everett. Sure, Eastwood makes copies, but they too are $400+. There are other copies as well that are not as accurate. Which leads to the final reason why - why put myself through so much waiting and torment when I can BUILD a copy myself. When you have 32 guitars on the rack and enough curves to work off of to create a Mosrite-like body yourself for $15....why spend anything more? Plus I had a stock pile of used parts - a wonderbar, 4 humbuckers to pick from (EMG and First Act), and a Kay KE-17 neck.

Basically, the idea initially was 2 EMG Humbuckers that I had laying around (60 in the bridge, and an H in the neck - to emulate the LOOK of the Mark V), Washburn Wonderbar, Kahler Tremolo, and a white pickguard with a blue finish. I did not own any other "Blue" guitars in an actual "blue blue" color at the time. I just had my Sonic Blue Jag-Stang and Sonic Blue Musicmaster guitars. I did the mockup in microsoft paint since there's no "Flash" programs anymore on the internet and no way for me to make something that looked like this using any of the builders that ARE around (like Kiesake Image Modeler or the Offset Dressing Room). Also, I would have to do a lot more wood working.

Then I refined the shape a little by using my Jazzmaster for the bottom of the body - upside-down of course, because I knew that the shape of the Mosrite guitars had the bass-side bout "jutting out" a little more than a upside-down strat body shape would on what is the "bass" side - but the angles were off - so I took the Harmony H804 and traced that into the shape as well, and that resulted in the shape I wanted. I think I also used some of the Vester Concer II and Hondo PAul Dean II in there as well. My initial sketch just looked like a left handed strat with offset horns. I spent about 2 hours looking at pictures of Kurt and Ricky's guitars to get a good look at how I got the shape right. Knew I wanted to keep it more of a "fender slab" style shape instead of the Roger Romeissel "German carve" style because that would be a lot easier (maybe later, I'll make a second, more Mosrite-like prototype WITH a German Carve someday). Another thing I had to take into consideration in this body design was a compromise between neck stability and upper fret access. You see, Kurt Cobain and Ricky Wilson were not exactly the kind of guys playing screaming solos up near the 20th+ frets - but, well, I AM! I'm an 80's schooled player, so I needed this Mosrite to have those "shred machine" capabilities. On offset Fenders, this is easy because Mustangs and Jaguars have AMAZING upper fret access, but Ricky and Kurt's Mark V's had their neck joint at around the 15th or 18th fret - that's pretty deep into the body, and while I CAN stretch my hand over that and manage (I do it on acoustic a lot), It's not comfy. And as I'm building this body to MY specs, I can have the upper fret access however I want.

The entire shebang was cut in half, then glued together on the spot by drilling and putting four galvanized wood screws in strategic spots in the guitar's body to make sure the glued halves could finish drying before I started cutting it out, and the finished holes would not be visible after the guitar was assembled. When the body dried, I removed the screws I could and filled in the holes with wood filler, leaving interesting looking telltale "Dots" on the body - except where I'd screwed it in where the electronics go - those were routed out with the screws removed later on.

The cutting process started with me using a Irwin flat-pull saw made for sawing dowels flush with the wood to quickly rough out the body. Then the more fine aspects were done with a coarse blade on a coping saw to get the shape right. No power tools were involved in the initial production of this semi-original body design. Then it was HAND SCULPTED using coarse, 60 grit, sandpaper, and smoothed out sanding up to 320 grit.

See, Ricky had no problem with upper fret access because he hardly used the upper frets of the guitar - he stayed in the Money Zone 90% of the time - below the 12th fret. Ditto Kurt Cobain who used the Gospel version of Ricky's guitar. So upper fret access was not an issue for them - for me though - someone who was probably going to be playing something more like "Eruption" or "Blackstar" on this thing after playing "Rock Lobster" or "About a Girl" - means that the guitar needs at least passable upper fret access - so a compromise was made - the neck was set further in, but just out enough to give my chonky and long Nightmare Animatronic hands the room to bend and squeal up around the 22nd fret like the quasi-poodle-hair shredder guy I also am.

Another design consideration was not moving the bridge pickup during this change, because it actually serves a real purpose. See, this guitar basically the cross-pollination of a Superstrat and a Mosrite. A "Super-Mosrite" if you will - the only other one than Robin or Chandler were selling in the late 80's (left) - and mines a lot cooler in some respects. One of these being that I considered TONE quite a bit here. I could have decided to shuffle the bridge pickup forward for that typical fat, woody, guitar tone that every other 25.5" scale 22 fret shred guitar has, but not here. I wanted this thing to truly keep more of it's "Mosrite" pedigree - and Mosrite's have one thing in common with shred guitars - hot pickups - but they are single coils. So I left that bridge pickup smack-dab against the Washburn Wonderbar Tremolo - so far that the bridge saddles can reach OVER the trim ring (LOL). This gives it a very high gain tone, due to it being a 16.5K Ohm Ceramic Humbucker - but it also gives it a LOT of twang for a shred guitar. This decision was made, however, AFTER I chose to switch to First ACt Pickups.

I had 4 pickups to choose from in pairs - an EMG H/60 combo, and a First Act ME437 and ME636 humbucker set. I chose the latter because I wanted humbuckers in both positions, and I wanted a super hot one in the bridge. The EMG 60 is mostly used in the neck with an 81 in the bridge, and the EMG H is a single coil in a humbucker body - so not what I was looking for.

for knobs, I picked these REALLY cool 1970's style project knobs from Vetco. They are like giant Witch Hats with the spindle being the size of a Gibson Speed Knob (!!!).

For the trem, I decided the Washburn Wonderbar was the vibrato of choice for this axe. Turns out it was a rather fitting choice for a vibrato, for multiple reasons. First off, Semie Moseley's original "Vibramute" tailpiece on the original Ventures guitars had the strings attach in a diagonal pattern in groups of three - this was to make the guitar (somewhat) capable of bending chords up and down - like a Steinberger Trans Trem is supposed to do (except without those blasted "calibrated" double ball end, special purpose strings). The second part of this though - was the main inspiration - Ricky Wilson - who used TONS of Alternate Tunings. This guitar is a frigggin tuning monster because of this vibrato. With standard nickel non-slinky strings like bullets or really cheap Dunlops, the guitar can drop it's pitch in tune with each other - AND with fine tuners at the bridge that have a wide swath, it makes it really stealth to drop the tuning on this guitar or change it without making it super obvious on stage. I can also drop the overall tuning down (for the most part). Plans to get a string set together to make this thing basically a "Trans Trem Capable" guitar are in the works.

With all that together, all that was left were the machine heads, which I already knew I was willing to throw down the $40-60 for a set of black H-mount or press-fit F-mount Kluson REvolution Machine heads with Safe-T posts. These are just my personal favorite. For the string path, I opted to use NO string retainers because the breakover over the nut is more than adequate - one of two features I lifted from Paul Dean's dean machine fo rthis guitar - no string trees, and the black anti-scratch pickguard...because the material looks cool, and it's cheap.

The neck position is an 8.4K ohm ceramic out of a ME-437 (Decoupage #1), and the bridge is a 16K Ohm Humbucker out of a ME-636/222 Adam Levine promoted model. Both of these lacked the Series Link, so I took some wire, wired it to the series link, and then that links up to the next special feature.

This was also my first guitar to use "tri-mode" switching on more than one pickup. I developed this originally, to get three sounds out of a single pickup guitar - by way of wiring the Series Link so that it either runs parallel with the primary coil that's always active, runs in series, or is split. And the wiring is hilariously simple. This made the wiring a bit more complex, because now I had 2 on/off/on toggles located behind the tone control for each pickup - one per pickup - and these would give the guitar an insane tonal matrix - 15 different sounds in tonal - from a TWO pickup guitar. Up is parallel, middle is series, down is split.

MadRite prototype Tonal Matrix

As we can see, the general rule of thumb is that the split modes give a more "Stratocaster-like" delivery, while the split positions make it more like a "Mosrite", and the hubucker positions still sound very Mosrite-like but fattened up. Just from this particular set of controls alone we have a Strat, Tele, Tele Deluxe, Tele Custom, Mosrite, Jaguar, and a bit of STeinberger thrown in. That's a pretty wild variety of guitar-ish tones to have in one instrument.

The rest of the circuit though is pretty standard - Gibson 3-way switch, 500K logarithmic pots with a Treble Bypass on the master volume and a standard tone control.

In the video above, around 0:38, you see the first show of the MadRite guitar. Honestly, I think I hit this one out of the park because it sounds mean as f***! We were playing 90's covers and at that show the video does not do the tone justice. later in the video you see it post-the-refinish below (this guitar has had 2 since then).

I'd gotten some cheap as crap powder acrylic paints in a four pack from Michael's and decided to try the blue one as a stain o the guitar. I really like the color (it's one of the colors in the running on the Paul Dean Style Build. It also would bring the guitar closer to Ricky's Mark V in color.

I had found out about a UV cure resin called "Solarez" to try out as a clearcoat. So we bought some on Amazon, and the madrite was refinished in this color. So the body was sanded, and then refinished in Solarez. The problem with Solarez though, especially living in a sunny place, is that it cures too damn fast, I mean, even UV rays leaking into the storage behind my apartment were causing it to cure too fast for me to finish it well. So it kinda' looked crappy up close. But it did have a pretty nice look onstage.

Toward the end of my time in Murderock as Mikey Ferox, the guitar was used with the Animatronic Head version of that character towards the end. I was planning to later build a more tattered one using wood found in the abandoned field near my apartment, but I built the Van-Halen II Tribute instead because by the time that opportunity came, the pandemic was in full swing, and Mikey Ferox was no longer a *thing* anymore.

I have tried some Ernie Ball Paradigms on it, but Ernie Ball Super Slinky Strings, in and of themselves, don't really have the same tightness of other strings required to allow the jowls of the Wonderbar to be calibrated properly. I got it real close, doing strings in groups of two, but it's still not that good. There's just soo much of a variance in the core-wires of the wrapped strings, and so much variance between the unwound in their stretchiness that I think this guitar will need to go back to Dunlop strings at some point....probably after I finish rebuilding the Dean ML-X.