Going For 'Gold

Designing a new guitar is one thing. Getting it made in a factory across the world is another matter entirely, even for the likes of Patrick James Eggle and the Shergold team…

- Dave Burrluck

You might think that once you’ve created a new guitar design, the work is done. You hit the send button to your factory of choice and a few months later a shipment of shiny guitars arrives ready for sale. If only. Shergold’s new Provocateur is a typical example of the often convoluted process involved.

“I think we started about 18 months ago,” remembers Patrick James Eggle, one of the UK’s most celebrated guitars makers and also the brains behind both the Shergold and Faith acoustic guitar designs (both brands are owned by Barnes & Mullins here in the UK). “I put the design down on paper and one of the guys I work with put it into a CAD drawing programme. Then we made basic prototypes and sent them to our workshop in Indonesia.

“But when we got the samples back, they just weren’t right. We went through this process a few times and, to cut a long story short, in the end, the guitars were really good – but they were still missing something. It was all the little things, you know? The feel of the neck, the way the fret ends were finished, how the fingerboard edges were rolled or not. Annoying little things like the two percent at the end that can make a guitar or kill it.