Origins of the Universe
(The guitar that is..)
By Rich Lasner

The actual John Love 8-String
(click to enlarge)

Larry Mitchell's Doubleneck

One thing I remembered the other evening when my son mentioned that he discovered 7-string Gretsch guitars from the 50s— There has been a lot of speculation about the origin of the Universe 7-string guitar. Here’s a little background:

Steve was at my apartment in Philadelphia, waiting to do a photo shoot for an Ibanez ad. We were just hanging out. He asked me what was in the huge brown guitar case in the living room. I took out my John Love (a Phila. guitar builder who I apprenticed with) 8-string cutaway acoustic guitar and handed it to him. The guitar was strung with the 6 regular strings in the middle, with an extra high and low string on either side. He was able to play it almost immediately (no big surprise). He said he was looking for a darker, deeper sound for the next Roth album. After a while, he decided that the extra strings were tough to get used to. He came up with the idea that extending the neck so that it had two extra frets below the normal open notes (nearly a 27 inch scale, if I remember) would be cool. Then, the guitar would have 6 strings, but tune down to open D. Japan made two of these extra-long 26-fret necks. We put one a guitar and sent it to Steve. He called and said that the guitar was great, but it made it impossible to play the current Roth tunes as they all had open chords that didn’t exist on the lower-tuned neck! We had the other neck lying around and eventually used it on a double-neck guitar custom built for NYC (now in San Diego) guitarist Larry Mitchell. It appeared on the cover of one of his solo albums. Check out the photo from Larry’s site attached. Notice the other neck is a 12-string.

So Steve decided that he’d try a 7-string to get the low notes. We had Japan make us a couple of necks; we made the bodies and cut up some Edge tremolos and Top Locks to make 7-string parts. DiMarzio did the same with the pickup bobbins- cutting them up to glue together 7-string coils.

Rich Lasner

{Home}{History}