The Anderson Touch

By Cliff Suttle
cliffnotes@harmony-central.com

August 28, 1998

Again and again I heard the name of Tom Anderson. According to the press and other musicians, the Anderson label on a guitar seemed to mean something important. When I started writing this article, however, I not only hadn't played a Tom Anderson guitar, I had never even seen one. How could a music store rat like myself have missed an instrument that so many hold in such high esteem? The reason for this is lack of numbers. The Tom Anderson company only makes about 800 high-end guitars a year. That volume is only one tenth the size of Paul Reed Smith and is totally dwarfed by Fender. However, when your guitars are being played by the likes of Greg Lake, Keith Richards, Neal Schon, Kirk Hammett, and Melissa Ethridge, you get noticed.

Tom Anderson

Well, I needed to get informed. How could I do an interview with a man whose guitars I've never played. Checking around I found that the only Anderson guitar dealer in the state of Michigan was Pontiac Music & Sound. So I hightailed myself over there in order to check these babies out. The store's staff was very helpful and showed me five examples of Anderson guitars which I got a chance to play and study. Jerry Zubal, the manager of the store, owns an Anderson himself. Mr. Zubal had this to say about Anderson guitars: "If I was mountain climbing, and could only take one guitar, it would be my Anderson." Chad Goklani, a sales associate at the store, added: "[Anderson Guitars] rule! I never played a guitar that felt or sounded better. Their combination of craftsmanship, materials, and knowledge of the instrument is unsurpassed."

Now please keep in mind that Pontiac Music & Sound carries many fine guitars from multiple vendors. What could cause this type of zealousness?

Let's take one off the shelf and have a look. It has a Fender Strat-like body. It has a bolt-on neck, rather surprising in the $2,500-$3,000 price range. The body work is very nice, but nothing you wouldn't expect from an instrument in this price range. The fret marks are inlayed with plastic? (Actually I found out later that they are a linen laminate.) The instrument has two strap buttons on the tail. If two strap buttons sounds weird, it isn't. The two strap buttons allow the guitar to be set down on the floor against a wall and not fall over. I tried this out - it works.

OK, now lets plug it in and try it. It plays nice. Very smooth, fast, and responsive. It has very nice tone [I was playing through a Mesa-Boogie amp]. Hey . . . what's this switch do . . . wow. Let's try this switch . . . cool. How about this switch, and this one, and this button over here . . . oh my goodness, I'm in tone heaven. What kind of tone you ask? All kinds of tone. Thick, thin, smooth, fat, full, airy, rocky, jazzy; I could play it all with easy to understand controls. You see this guitar has an Anderson exclusive called (are you ready for this?) a switcheroo. This basically allows all three body pickups to act as either a single coil or humbucking pickup in series, parallel or split. The electronic setups are simply great. The model I was playing (and liked best of the models I tried) also had a fourth acoustic style pickup mounted in the bridge, which is called the X-Bridge. This acoustic pickup could be added to any pickup configuration in some very interesting and exciting ways. The acoustic pickup signal can also be sent to a different amp via a stereo output and allows you to sound like you're playing two guitars at once. The acoustic pickup can also be joined to the electric pickups in one mono signal which gives some very interesting timbres. The X-Bridge gave a whole new sonic perspective to the guitar every time I turned the acoustic pickup on.

I would give this instrument an A in playability and an A+ in tone. After talking to Tom I realized that everything he does to a guitar is in the pursuit of tone, Tone, TONE! Anderson builds all their guitars to order using a wide array of different woods, body shapes (Strat and Tele, both solid or hollow), scale lengths, and pickup configurations, to give you the tone you're looking for. They make over 60 pickup types. That is an awful lot of choices. Overall, I liked them.

Tom Anderson designs and manufactures everything on the instrument except for the tuning pegs and bridges. The Anderson company used to supply its components to other companies so you may have played Anderson equipment before and not even know it. In business since 1984, Anderson first became known for their pickups, but as you can see they have come a long way since then.

The Anderson pickups and electronics are what I think make these instruments special. Anderson also uses the Buzz Feiten tuning system. This new type of tuning system allows the guitars to be in tune better from fret to fret than standard guitar systems. This feature is very difficult to detect unless you compare an Anderson guitar to another guitar side by side or you are using a strobe tuner. For those of you with perfect pitch, the Feiten tuning system could be quite interesting. Perhaps "Close enough for Rock 'N' Roll" just got closer.

If you would like to reach the Tom Anderson Guitar company, they can be contacted at 805-498-1747 or emailed at aguitars@earthlink.net. Anderson also has a web page that recently re-opened after some construction. The address is www.andersonguitars.com.

Well enough of me yakking. Let's hear from Tom:

Harmony Central (HC):How did you get into the business of building guitars?

Anderson: I have been a guitar player since I was eight years old. I made a living playing guitar after I got out of high school. I played around LA for four or five years after high school. During that time I did a lot of guitar tinkering, working on guitars, and altering guitars. In '77, when disco hit really strong, there became less work for bands, at least rock bands. I had been friends with Dave Schecter and he had started a company. He asked me to work with him. I did that in '77 and stayed with Schecter until '84. Then the company changed hands and they [the new owners] weren't doing the kind of stuff that I thought was right to do. So I went off and started my own company.

HC: What do you consider some of your early big breaks?

Anderson: My very first summer when I left in '84. I didn't even have much of a plan other than I wanted to make necks and pick ups. I really didn't even want to make guitars; that wasn't even in the plan. There I was with a two year old child and another one had just been born and no real financial security. I got a call from Schecter Japan. They needed American pickups, because in Japan they believe that we [Americans] make better pickups than anything they make. So he needed American pickups for his guitars. He gave me a standing order for 300 Strat pickups a month. That was enough to live on. That covered us and gave me time to establish myself in order to make bodies and necks.

After that there was a local dealer in town [Herschel Blankenship] that really believed in me and he said "Tom if you start making some guitars out of these bodies and necks you're building I could sell them". So I started doing that and he started selling them out of his store. It sort of snowballed from there. By 1990 it was way more fun to make guitars than it was to build bodies and necks, so we shut down that type of production.

The Classic in Trans Amber finish (Swamp Ash)

HC: Who was the first big star to play a Anderson guitar?

Anderson: The first guy, we didn't even know had one of our guitars until we saw him playing it in a magazine. That was Kirk Hammett of Metallica. Mick Jagger was also an early one. Pierre de Beauport [the Stone's guitar technician] called us up one day and said they were looking for a guitar and did we want to send one. He liked it and we sent a couple more that he played on one tour. Then the next tour came around and Mick didn't bring his guitars with him, so they asked for another one. We sent a guitar meant for Mick and Keith Richards saw it first and he said "I'll have that." So, Pierre said you have to decide whether you want Mick to play them or Keith to play them because they won't play the same thing. I said, I like Keith.

HC: What types of milling and/or hand work are used in your guitars?

Anderson: We love technology around here, because technology can make parts better. We definitely blend old and new. We have a CNC [computer controlled milling machine] that we got in '88, so it's not a new thing for us. We do all our routing, drilling . . . it's stuff that if you do it with other methods I would call tedious dog work. If we want precision, we do it on the CNC machine. Then that part goes to hands that do all the fine detail work on it. The stuff you feel, the smooth shaping and sanding [is done by hand]. My core body for instance spends about fifteen minutes on a CNC machine and then two and a half hours worth of hand work is done to it. I hear a lot of "hand made is better than machine made," and I don't really know what hand made is. No matter how you make something you use tools. I think if Leo Fender had a CNC machine back in 1954 he would have used it. This CNC machine that we bought has become the standard. Since we bought it, Taylor came up and looked at it and now they have eleven of them at their place. PRS has four of them. It's the machine that you use to make guitars now.