The story of this guitar starts at Tommy's Guitar Shop in Everett Washington. Around the time I bought my 66' Fender Mustang, another student offset showed up hanging on the wall of his store - this strange looking jade green-ish colored 70's Fender Musicmaster that looked like it'd been run hard since the days of Grunge Rock. It had extra holes in the pickguard, a shady Jade paintjob with sticker-scars all over it, some vintage-white color showing through the breaks in the finish, on down to red in some spots (which I think was the original color.

Later on that year Tommy - the owner - said he could sell me the body and neck from this guitar for $250.00. Having the opportunity to snag up the good bones of a Vintage Fender offset was not something single-me in 2009 would be likely to pass up - so I bought it on the spot (after some finance checking).

Some initial notes about the body and neck (right). The body is likely one of the poplar ones (could be alder, but it feels a little soft to be such). It appears this body has been modified quite a bit.

I assume this guitar looked like the picture on the left of the red 1971 Fender Musicmaster. These were single pickup guitars, with a top-loader 3-saddle bridge, pearloid Mustang-style pickguard, Jaguar style knobs, 1 volume, 1 tone, 1 pickup in black, and in Dakota Red (that's what I think the original color was based on my analysis). It would have originally come with Fender "F" key tuners with white or pearl buttons, and would have likely also had a silver or black tolex hardshell case. When I first saw this guitar hanging on the wall at Tommy's, it had a brass bridge on it, probably gotoh or Wilkinson, through body stringing, a late 1970's pickguard (B/W/B 1975 era pickguard), a bridge pickup, extra hole drilled for a pickup selector, and has had many tuner changes in it's lifetime with different holes.

The neck, however, turned out to be one of my FAVORITE necks (apparently, Kurt Cobain and I had the same taste in necks, lol, and apparently also, Paul Dean does not fall far from the tree). The Neck is a "B" Width 24" scale 22 fret neck, and it feels almost 99.8% dead-on to my 1995 Fender Jag-Stang - the beloved "Nikki" guitar - apparently Fender Japan/Fujigen NAILED it when they recreated a late sixties 24" scale student neck. It has a very thin nut width, a tiny bit of chunk on the X axis, and the taper is very gradual. The heavily worn down frets will make it a fast, screaming player with very low action. The frets were absolutley level with just a little recrowning needed.

This revealed that the Musicmaster had multiple paintjobs in it's life. The topmost layer was sort of a weird Jade Green, then Vintage White, then Red, then Gray Primer, then another red, then wood. Which meant, this guitar was originally EXACTLY like the picture of the 1971 Fender Musicmaster above.

With the body completley stripped, I started painting it, like my Jag-Stang was, no primer, just straight up robins egg blue krylon from Wal-Mart down the street. I used about 2-3 cans of it, and painted the guitar on my patio.

So the finished guitar, I tried to cobble it together with whatever I had on hand. I had a bit of a shortage of parts at the time, as I was not building much, so I took some notes from Edward Van-Halen's book of guitar building and assembled it as you see to the left. Basically, I found a single coil pickup I had laying around - which was missing the magnet. No problem, I know where I have magnets. It just so happened that week I'd been destroying HDDs for data security at work with a 18LB Sledgehammer, and had snatched the neodymium magnets from them and took them home. So I stuck those to the bottom of the pickup and screwed the pickup intot he wood in the EVH approved method - wired up a 250K Pot, a old black knob from a First Act guitar, using a output jack plate to mount it (again, EVH approved) - and then wired in a Stratocaster Input jack - and what came out of the amp could only be described as f***ing amazing! Here I had a 6.4K strat single coil with 2 Neodymium magnets, and the sound was thick, fat, full, and LOUD as hell.

So then I needed to make this a more complete instrument. Also at the time, I was getting a lot of push from various "Pot Advocates" - you know - the smae ones I've ranted about in my various opinions pages I delete - to make it themed for Hempfest. Basically put, I was to go on stage wearing a Pro-Pot shirt, wearing a lei made out of fake flower leaves, and featuring a guitar covered in thematic stickers - it seemed like a good idea at the time. LOL. So I went to Tap Plastics in Lynnwood and for about $9 I bought a huge sheet of 1/8" thick orange acrylic, and made a new pickguard for the guitar using that. THe pickguard was kind of inspired by Kurt Cobain's Ferrington guitar in a way, being all one piece. I also had a project guitar from another future band I'd have some involvement in to jam in the neck - a single coil from a Washburn MG-45 strat I put a B.C. Rich Warlock pickup in the bridge of. The result is seen to the right.

The guitar was then adorned with 2 blue PVC tape stripes on the upper horn, to dress up the "bare spots" on the body a bit, and then a "Super Barrio Bros." sticker on the bottom of the body to fit in with the theme. I liked how it played and sounded and prior to the show it did get used to record some demos including one that we might be revisiting soon on BandLab called "Combat". I was so enthralled with the tone of this miniscule shortscale beast that I actually really regret replacing the neodymium pickup that was in it, it had a very unique and mean sound. The guitar, at the time, was thought that this would be it's final form, but ya' know.....that just was not going to happen. That said, I had it very well dialed in.

The Musicmaster appeared at Hempfest that July and was the only guitar I played live at the show. This would be the only show the guitar would appear at in this condition, as I mostly still gigged the Jag-Stang and Jaguar during that time.

Anyway, here's that video I promised...crazy how powerful this thing was...

This was a tremendously hard decision to make because I would be permanantly altering the original body. But the truth was, the original integrity had already been altered by one if not several previous owners because of all the screw holes I had to fill, and the through-body stringing holes I had retained. There was a cutout for the previous pickup selector even. So I routed it out for a Humbucker with some Daiso begotten Japanese dollar store chisels, and put the P12 in there, and it sounded awesome, very Nirvana-like. Later I found out why - the pickup has roughly the same output as a Seymour Duncan J.B. - Kurt's pickup of choice in his Skystangs.

I bought a new Chinese reproduction Mustang pickguard in Orange/White/Black/White, then cut it up to put the P-12 humbucker in it. I also bought a Japanese Mustang control plate to go with it. A Import Vibrato for a Squier VM Mustang was also purchased along with an import Japan bridge, and a hybrid Dynamic Fender Vibrato was built out of that aseembly. This meant routing the body a bit more to retrofit a Mustang vibrato unit to the guitar. Mikey NEEDED the Vibrato bar, and I was not going to take Nikki into a show where fake blood and plastic body parts were prone to being thrown around by both patrons and the band alike. I wanted something gruesome I could get fake blood on, beer spilled on.

The first lot of shows the guitar showed up pretty much in this format, without the blood on it. and just an increasing lot of strange stickers. Wherever I got stickers, I slapped em' on there - monster truck stickers, horror stickers, dispensary stickers, car company stickers - whatever I was given, or could find, I plastered that Music Master in stickers en-masse, probably more than it ever had in a Seattle Grunge Band. One sticker that was key - as the "Caution Keep Hands and Feet Away" sticker under the picking path of my picking hand - this was deliberate and had a purpose. It was supposed to imply that Mikey had some kind of ultra-violent picking attack and probably used some kind of cutting device as a pick. It also was supposed to imply the raw speed of my picking - about that of a Lawn Mower blade spinning. The Dynamic Trem was designed to stay a little noisy and janky so that randomly, the guitar would emit eery noises contributing to the scary, unstable, this whole thing is about to have a catastrophic disaster feel to the music.

Toward the middle of 2019 the guitar got some bloody additions to it, after the pickup switches were broken. So I took out the neck pickup, wired the P12 into a 3-way toggle, and wired that into a single volume knob. It was used like this for quite a few shows after that point. I also splattered it in fake blood and used it like this for awhile while I waited for funding/time to replace/repair everything.

Anyway, here's some video of the Music Master as Murdermaster used at the last show I played with Murderock on Halloween 2019. THis would be the last time this guitar would appear in public as this (along with the Jagmaster which I switched to later that night) - before it would undergo drastic changes yet again. I was not aware this was the last show ever for me with them, but I was not invited back in 2021 when they did their true last show. There's a lot of odd fogginess around that so I'm a bit weary of talking about it.

The Music Master then got a fresh coat of paint, all the stickers and blood were removed, and the wiring repaired. Also the tuners were replaced with Kluson Revolution H-Mount Staggered machine heads - so no more string trees. Bonnie from FNaF was removed from the headstock (old keychain I put there for horror effect) and everything was cleaned up. The guitar WAS to be my wife's guitar. We've had a bit of an uphill struggle finding guitars she likes (She wants something light, easy to play, that sounds good, looks cool, but not like a "Dark boys guitar", and for sure NOT AN ACOUSTIC). What I was shooting for was a lighter weight, easier to play version of my #1 basically - which was not far from the original intent after putting a vibrato on it (a backup or surrogate for Murderock). She found it too heavy, and found the colors were too much like what I like, so the guitar kinda' went back to being mine in 2022.

Since then, I've moved to a new place and it spends most of it's time in the shop these days getting played in there, mostly noodled around on between working on projects and watching YouTube videos. I do plan to do some filming in there so we might see it again being played - maybe even telling the video version of this story on YouTube.

That said, I plan to reinstall the coil split on the P12 Humbucker again, replace the nut (it cracked, now the action isn't right on the Low E), and maybe later put a Sustainer System in it. This one and my old red Kramer guitar are the ones I plan to put sustainers in that I intend to keep.