Located deeply in Geneva, the MB&F M.A.D. Gallery is an inventors’ and gadgets enthusiasts dream. One of the latest pieces to have made it there is this staggering Rhodium Birdfish guitar.
This is in fact a fantastically nice device, gorgeously put together from modules – a two piece aluminium body, headless maple neck, sliding pickups which can be facilely interchanged in seconds and interchangeable wooden tone bars. The one off-design gadget boasts with a shape that I’ve sincerely never seen till today, Ulrich Teuffel’s pure creative expression.
Most of the guitar parts manufactured by Ulrich Teuffel are made by hand, from absolutely classic materials. Most of his parts are provided with shape and size inside his own workshop in Bavaria, in an extremely precise manner, across many hours of painstaking work. Each year just 10 of these babies are crafted – nice exclusivity factor there!
The completely unruly shape provides the guitar with the two-word name. Both the fish and the bird were particularly carved from solid blocks of acoustically optimum aluminium, while the pickups, the neck and the tone bars are all mounted on the bird. As for the control unit, it sports a five-way switch designed according to the rules of the ’50s guitars, shaping up the bird’s head.
Moreover, the cylindrical tone bars are aligned sideways starting from the middle of the guitar in order to be able to provide a twangy, percussive attack. The particular Rhodium Prodigy Birdfish model exhibited at MB&F’s M.A.D. Gallery features an aged bird’s eye maple neck, quilted maple-wood tone bars and a price tag of CHF 18,500 including the Swiss VAT – the equivalent of around $20,000.
[MB&F]
