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Wayne Charvel, the legendary luthier who kick-started the hot-rodded electric guitar movement, has died, aged 85.
He leaves behind a formidable legacy. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Charvel made guitars for Deep Purple, ZZ Top, the Who, Dave Murray of Iron Maiden, Warren De Martini of Ratt, and a young man by the name of Eddie Van Halen. It was Wayne Charvel who built EVH the original yellow-and-black Bumblebee guitar from the cover of 1979’s Van Halen II.
In a statement, Charvel Guitars described its founder as a “visionary whose creativity and craftsmanship helped shape the sound of modern guitar culture”. And that’s no understatement.
Charvel might have long left the company that bears his name but his design aesthetic is writ large across its contemporary catalogue. And his hot-rodding of the Fender Stratocaster – retooling it as a high-performance instrument spec’d for hard rock, heavy metal and the burgeoning shred scene – gave birth to the Superstrat.
Guitar was in the blood. Charvel started playing them when he was five years old. He got his start at the Fender factory in the mid ‘60s.
“After I got married, I quit playing in bands,” said Charvel, speaking to NAMM in 2010. “A couple of my good friends at Fender knew that I was painting guitars, so they hired me to do all the auto warranty repairs. They didn’t want to take guys off the line when a guitar came in, scratched up, and take them off and stop production to refinish and sand them down.”
This was the perfect grounding for Charvel, refretting guitars, repainting and refinishing them. There he got the idea that these production line Fender guitars could be improved upon. With their bolt-on construction, swapping out the neck would be easy.
Fender didn’t just use him for guitars. He could recover guitar amps, a skill that came in handy when a Rhodes piano came in “all scratched up” for repair.
“It was great for me,” said Charvel. “I was swamped, and I’d go down to Fender at least twice a week.” Back then, Charvel had been using nitrocellulose lacquer. The Fender plant was using “easy buff” poly from Dunn-Edwards. It was an education.
“They used overhead pin routers. Everything was made by hand. They didn’t have CNC machines in those days,” said Charvel. “And it was just great to see all those guitars. It was just so exciting, so motivating.”
By 1974, Charvel was ready to go into business, opening the doors to Charvel’s Guitar Repair in Azusa, California. The Valley was about to become the epicentre of a guitar revolution. The shop was set up to repair Fender guitars that were out of warranty but its brief soon evolved.
In those days, you couldn't buy a Fender guitar other than just completely stock
Modding, hot-rodding, custom appointments? Charvel was your man. He was making up custom builds using replacement bodies and necks made by his old friend Lynn Ellsworth up at Boogie Bodies, based out of Puyallup, Washington. And it wasn't just Strats. He's soup up your Telecaster, too. This would be the Charvel Type 2 body shape.
The word spread. The late Alan Rogan – legendary guitar tech for the Who – was a client. Deep Purple dropped by. They started sending their friends, too. Charvel was making these rock guys something that no one had ever seen before, putting humbuckers in a Strat-style body, flattening out the radius of the fingerboard and installing jumbo frets. “In those days, you couldn't buy a Fender guitar other than just completely stock,” said Charvel.
He learned how to make the bodies himself from working with David Schecter. Over the course of one weekend, the pair made a hundred bodies at Schecter’s shop in Reseda, California. Charvel was acquiring new skills every day.
He also had an eye for a good luthier. Charvel Guitar Repair was an incubator for talent. Hiring Grover Jackson was one of Charvel’s masterstrokes, introducing another maverick builder. Jackson took over the Charvel company after it went bust in 1978.
That didn’t stop Wayne Charvel. Some of his builds just got wilder, such as the custom electric and bass guitars he made for Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons for ZZ Top’s 1983 Eliminator Tour. They had onboard pyro.
“Billy turned us onto a lot of people, and we just got busy and busy and busier,” said Charvel. “It was a lot of fun work with a lot of nice people.”
He would go on to work with his friend Bernie Rico at B.C. Rich, working on artist relations, building guitars and helping them modernise production. “My job was to set up routers so they could just whiz around those guitars. And we did that,” he said.
He even designed a guitar for Gibson, the WRC, a mid ‘80s HSS S-style with a string-through double-locking vibrato and a configuration of switches. That kind of thing was pure Charvel, totally on-brand. The guitar he made for Michael Angelo-Batio? Not so much.
When Steve Vai appeared on the scene with his triple-necked Heart Guitar (made by Ibanez’s Ibanez Mace Bailey), MAB’s label was pushing him to duel Vai, like some live-action scene in Crossroads. He wasn’t into that but the thought of Vai with his triple-neck inspired him to ante up and get a four-necked guitar. He knew just the man to make it.
“As it happened, Wayne Charvel was building all my guitars,” Angelo-Batio told Guitar World. “I said to him, ‘Can you do this?’ I have a good engineering mind for guitar design, so I designed the Quad. I told him how I thought it should be four separate guitars, and that was that. It was the wildest thing. There was no limit to what we were trying to do.”
No limits was the spirit in which Wayne Charvel approached guitar design. A guitar could always play faster, play better. He later built them under his own name, Wayne Guitar. The history page on its site reads like a who’s who of guitar greats, all of whom have reached out to Charvel to make them a guitar over the years.
Charvel Guitars was right. Wayne Charvel was a visionary.
“Wayne’s ideas sparked a movement that influenced countless players and builders, and his passion for innovation set a foundation that still guides the industry today,” reads Charvel Guitars’ tribute. “Those who knew him remember his kindness, his curiosity, and the way he inspired others to push their craft further. His impact lives on in every guitar that carries his name, and his legacy will continue to resonate with musicians around the world. Our hearts are with his family, loved ones, and every player who keeps his influence alive.”
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