Chapin Guitars Fatline Custom

This is a Tele-shaped chambered mahogany body, about the standard Tele thickness, with a quarter inch cedar top, so overall, it's fatter than a Tele. Bolt-on flamed maple neck with a mesquite(!) fingerboard - it's like a flamy piece of rosewood to look at, but it has the same kind of sonic pop you get with maple, and it's huge like a baseball bat, which I like. Oil finish on the body and neck - feels smooth as silk, and it plays great.
2 Harmonic Designs Z90 pickups - humbucker sized P90s, basically, but more on these later - and a Duncan Strat middle pickup. Master volume and tone with a 3-way toggle for the Z90s, plus a volume and tone control with a pull-up pot to activate the Strat middle p/u. A bizarre Schaller fixed bridge. Locking Kluson tuners - I needed instructions on how to use them. A case.
It's hard to think of electric guitars having features beyond a pickup selector and a couple of knobs, but this one does.

Wow! This is the BIGGEST sounding guitar I've ever heard. Not just loud, but tons of information in every note. The Z90 pickups have as big an output as humbuckers, but they are much less muffled sounding, quite a bit clearer. Single coil, but not too noisy. The bridge pickup is not as bright as a Tele or a Strat, but much bigger and crunchier. The neck p/u alone is worth the price of the guitar - somehow both clean but very fat sounding at low volume, but it really pushes the amp at high volume. Both together work well. Then the secret weapon is adding the Strat middle. Sounds almost like a caricature of a Strat with any of the Z90 pickup combinations - it has that nasal Strat position 2 or 4 sound, but with more of everything passing through the cable. Bill Chapin calls it the 500 pound Strat.
I play it thru a Dr. Z KT45 that I was on the verge of selling because my '56 Reissue Les Paul (my former main guitar) sounded better thru my Dr. Z Mazerati. Then I heard this guitar thru the KT45 and I took the amp back off consignment! The crunch the guitar gets from that amp is like The Who Live at Leeds. It's the sound you buy pedals to get.
Speakers are Vox Blue Reissues. Pedals include a Solatone Tonebender, a Menatone Foxy Brown and a Workingman's Blue, and a Fulltone Clyde Wah and a ChoralFlange.

When I asked Bill Chapin to make the guitar, I knew I wanted an oil finish, and I'm totally happy with it. The wood grain is so deep with the oil that it feels like you can almost swim in it. This guitar is totally over the top in terms of looks. It has tortoise shell body binding, tortoise shell covered pickups, even tortoise shell on the gold knobs. He stained a piece of quilted maple a tortoise shell color for the pickguard. Everything that isn't wood or tortoise is gold. It ought to look like a christmas tree or something, but it's just breathtaking. There's a picture of it up on my band's website, in case you're curious.
(http://www.fabulousjammies.com.cnchost.com/ChapinBFatTour.jpg)
I asked him to make me a neck at least as big as my Les Paul's, and he really went to town on it. The setup is tremendous, because I sat in his workshop while he adjusted everything til it felt perfect.

I've only had the guitar for a month or so, only 1 gig's worth, but I can't see any reason why it shouldn't last forever. Excellent hardware. The finish will mellow with age and human contact - that's part of what's cool about oil finishes.
I always carry a backup, if only because changing a string in mid-song is a pain in the ass, or maybe for special tunings occasionally, but I have no reason to think I'll ever need one beyond that. Not for fear of catastrophic guitar failure, anyway.

Bill is as eccentric as you'd expect any sole-proprietor instrument builder to be. He is obsessed with tone - guitar, amp, pedals, cables. He won't let it go out if it isn't right. He took a lot of time with me to work out what I wanted or needed. This guitar was a nightmare for him to build - two truss rods failed, the bridge we wanted to use was found not to be appropriate, yadda yadda. But he plugged on, always checked when I needed to be involved, ignored me when he knew what was really needed. A great experience, given the amount of time it takes to get a custom guitar made. Cause I'll tell you, waiting for it in the last few weeks before I got it made me nuts!

This is the guitar I've been waiting for over the course of 30 years of playing. It feels great, looks great, sounds great. There is every sound I can imagine I'll ever need inside of it. I play roots rock, mostly rhythm, with another tone-freak guitar player in the band, and I'm just totally blown away by what this guitar can do. I've played a lot of good stuff and bad stuff over the years, but was only randomly able to get a good tone for a lot of that time. I'm finally narrowing down what I really need to use to sound good (aside from talent, which unfortunately I can't get from a guitar or amp). This guitar, that amp, and I'm pretty much where I want to be, tone-wise.
That's not to say I'll never get another guitar - Bill told me he's working on a Gretsch concept guitar, and I'm already lusting after it because, while I love my Gretsch, the neck is too thin for me to play it comfortably. But the difference now is that I'll probably never really NEED another guitar. I know everyone hates straight 10 ratings because the implication is that you'd better love it if you spent the cash on it, but come on, this guitar was made just for me, exactly to my spec. I was in the shop every five minutes while it was being built, so it could only be a 10, as far as I'm concerned. And if you could hear this guitar cranked thru the KT45, you'd be asking me where you could get one.