Jason Caddell of The Dismemberment Plan came to us a ways back asking our advice and availability to help with a custom dream guitar of his and of course we jumped at the opportunity. We started out with who should do the build. Good question! With as many builders out there its hard to choose the right outfit for the job. Luckily we’ve had the pleasure of seeing and playing a plethora of instruments through the years so, we suggested USA Custom Guitars to do the initial build; a mahogany body and a maple neck with rosewood fingerboard. Next up, the finish. We are lucky enough to have a finish master right down the street from us. Chris Bavaria does excellent work at his shop in downtown Baltimore, Md. Though he doesn’t have a website some of his work can seen at Fano Guitars and also Froggy Bottom Guitars. Jason decided on a reddish clear for the body and clear satin finish on the neck. OK, so what about the bridge!? Well, in our opinion there is only one option for jazz master bridges, the mighty Mastery Bridge! Mastery has engineered a bridge that solves all if the issues found in stock jazz master and jaguar bridges, the strings stay in the same spot and the posts sit snuggly in the body. Jason also decided to use the Mastery vibrato system as well. With super smooth and reliable movement it was a great choice! You gotta get some sound out this axe too! Jason has got a great ear for tone and took his time choosing pickups. Finally settling on Lollar Pickups, we installed a set of their P-90 style jazz pickups with 250k volume and tone controls and a pair of Sozo capacitors to reach a final verdict of “sounds good my man”. Last but not least Tony of Pickguardian made a custom tort guard to really tie the whole guitar together. Here are a few pics of the process that we were involved in: 
