How Californian car, surf and skate culture inspired Powers Electric’s revolutionary guitars
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For Andy Powers, “someday” had arrived.
For years the Taylor guitars CEO, President and Master Guitar Designer had been coming up with ideas that he thought would be interesting and innovative on an electric guitar design, but with his day job solely focused on being the creative fulcrum of the world’s most innovative guitar company, he admits that those ideas usually were put on the shelf, in the hope that “someday I’ll get to it”.
Then the pandemic hit, the world closed down and, as Powers recalls in the new Guitar.com original film, “Powers Electric: California Soul“, all of a sudden he had time to think about those ideas that he’d put on the shelf, and see if they could make something interesting.
The result, was Powers Electric – a new electric guitar sub-brand that arrived out of nowhere in 2023 with a radical and innovative approach to the electric guitar. The brand’s first instrument, the A-Type, was a remarkable feat of engineering and ingenuity, combining a host of new bespoke innovations in terms of pickups, hardware and body construction, all wrapped up in a shape that was completely new, but felt timeless and classic with it.
The A-Type instantly set Powers’ stall out as one of the most inventive and exciting new guitar makers on the planet, bringing something totally fresh to the table in a world of instruments that owe their lineage to a narrow group of classic designs.
But for Powers, the way the A-Type melds the classic, the innovative and the eccentric was a natural extension of what he’d always done as a builder. Growing up in Southern California surrounded by surf, skate and hot-rod culture, these other passions have always been deeply entwined with Powers’ musical life.
Powers Electric gave him a chance to explore this pool of influences more deeply than he ever had before: as the man explains, “the acoustic guitar should largely be a traditional form, and I love it for that. But in the world of electric guitar, anything goes.”
This gestalt of so many of his passions can be found across the A-type – his innovative woodworking heart is explored in the guitar’s unique ‘trussed’ construction, the metalworking skills he learned from Encinitas’ chop shops is found in the innovative Camshaft vibrato and the guitar’s unique Faraday pickups, while the guitar’s unique curves are inspired by the surfboards he builds and how they are designed to sit in the water.
It all feels like something that the guitar world has rarely seen before, but Powers believes he’s merely continuing a tradition that has powered the evolution of the instrument for over six decades. “I think of the electric guitar as being a Southern California invention,” he observes. “I mean, a lot of the kind of the forefathers of electric guitar, they lived within a few miles of each other here in Southern California. If I had been alive back then, what would I have made? What would I What would I do? What would it look like? What would it feel like? What would it sound like?”
The result is Powers Electric, and the A-Type – a guitar that has California Soul baked into every fibre of its being, created to carry on that proud tradition and inspire a whole new generation of artists.
Find out more at powerselectricguitars.com, watch the full film here.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
