How did you get into the business of guitar-making?

I’ve played guitar since I was a little kid. I made a living playing in bands in Los Angeles after high school. And I was always a tinkerer. Always liked changing pick-ups. I was as much into the gear as I was into the music, I would say. In the late 70s, disco happened. And the band situation got more dismal. It was pretty easy to make a living, a meager living but a living, playing in the 70s in Los Angeles. You actually got paid to play. And then when disco happened, DJs started and the live music scene changed radically. I wasn’t into disco music at all, and this was also around the time I was considering getting married, so I thought, “You know, I probably ought to get a job.” a guy who I had known as a pretty highly respected local repair guy, Dave Schecter of Schecter Guitars, he started a company and asked me if I wanted a job. So I went to work with him and we kind of together figured out how to make guitars. Neither of us, I would say, was real widely knowledged in how to make guitars on any kind of a scale, making them by hand.

You’re essentially self-taught then?

I would say so. (Dave’s) a real analytical kind of guy, and he really looks at stuff and kind of has the ability to see what should have been done differently that would have made it better. When you work on guitars, you see what things are consistently breaking or that don’t function as well. So you hone in on those things. And you think, “You know, if we made it different from the beginning, this wouldn’t be a problem later.”

Tell us a little bit about Tom Anderson Guitarworks?

We’re in Newbury Park, California.
I started in 1984 in my garage by myself. When Dave left Schecter
he encouraged me to start my own thing and actually gave me a couple
of pieces of equipment that were
really important at the time. I worked in my garage for a year. Then got a little industrial building a year later. And then a couple of years after that
I got a little bit bigger industrial building, and that’s still the building we’re in now.

For the first few years I was just going to make bodies, necks, and pick-ups to sell to other people. That was my intention. I didn’t want to get into making complete guitars. I would assemble guitars occasionally for people that I knew, but not as my business goal or anything. I had a local dealer, who said, “ Man if you could assemble some of these, I know I could sell them.” And then as time went on in the business, it was clear that no matter how great the body or neck part you make is, if it’s not assembled correctly, it won’t be a great guitar. We saw lots of things not assembled that well. It was frustrating to think that here we’re really trying our best to make a really great neck or a really great body or both, and then see it turned into a mediocre guitar by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing. So making the whole guitar became more rewarding. We expanded on that and then in 1990 we stopped selling parts and just focused on complete guitars.

How many people work with you?

13. And we’ve been this size for quite some time. We’ve been doing around 800 guitars a year. It goes up and down by 50 or so. It’s a really small number, but it’s a comfortable size. It’s allowed us to have the equipment that we need to do what we want at the quality level we want to keep. Because the guitars are obviously expensive guitars, it creates enough income that we can both have the things we need to make our job easier and more consistent, and enough to pay people so that people stay.

You have 24 different models. Do you have a personal favorite?

The new guitar, the Atom. It’s the guitar that I’ve always wanted to build. When you’re starting out, you pretty much have to look real familiar for people to want to check you out. If you think about it, not many new shapes have been successful in the last 20 years. Paul Reed Smith is about the only one I can think of that’s actually gotten accepted that’s not a Strat/Tele shape. Growing up, I played Teles and Les Pauls. I’ve always wanted this guitar that was a little bit of both of those but also that functioned differently. That covered more ground. So this guitar was something that’s been floating around in my head for a long time. But it was missing a few key ingredients to finish it, and those things finally came together this last year. Also we’re in a place now where we’re certainly not a household name, but we’re known enough so that people will maybe take a chance on something (from us) that doesn’t look like a Strat or a Tele.

What is unique about the Atom? In what ways does it fulfill that dream
you had of the ultimate guitar?

Ah! Well, the way a guitar hangs and feels is really, really important. I would say it’s as least as important to me as the way it sounds. Because if a guitar doesn’t feel good, you’re not inspired to play it. If you have to fight it too much then you don’t get to the good sound part of it. There’s good things about the way a Tele hangs on your body and there’s some, but not too many, good things about the way a Les Paul hangs on your body. And this one doesn’t do any of the negative things that either of those guitars do ergonomically. It remains a light enough weight but still has a big sound.

The whole neck attachment method is different than anything that’s ever been done. I’m a very big proponent of removable necks. A glued in neck to me is not a better guitar. So we came up with a neck joint that is absolutely unmovable but is easily removable. So not only does it transfer vibration really well, it makes it serviceable. And coming from a guitar repair background initially, serviceability is important to me. You know, if you have a car that you have to pull the engine out to change the spark plugs, that’s not a good thing. Same thing with guitars. Guitars that get played a lot need service. Parts wear. Frets wear. All that kind of stuff. They need to be easily serviceable back into their original condition.

I developed the pickups about a year before the guitar. I was thinking about these pickups ultimately for this guitar but we liked them so much that we started offering them in our other guitars before this guitar ever existed. It’s a mini-humbucker. It’s a smaller-than-full-size humbucking pickup. The way we make our normal H-series humbuckers is not traditional. In other words, they’re not short wide coils with a horizontal magnet underneath. They’re tall thin coils, more like a single-coil style construction with a magnet running parallel to the string plane. What it gets you is really low string pull but a very saturated coil. So it gets you a wider frequency response. It turned these mini-humbuckers into sounding very much like big single coils, but they’re quiet. They don’t hum at all. So it’s almost like a single coil on steroids kind of sound. That put into the Atom, with its mahogany body and shorter scale length, makes for a clearer sound than you’d expect to come out of that style of guitar. We also do them with double humbuckers for people who are used to playing a Les Paul, and that’s what they’re after.

Tell us about the process. How does a guitar move from the drawing board to a physical instrument you can purchase and play?

This one (took) about a year, and it started with the body shape being different. I knew I wanted a different neck joint. I knew I wanted a different bridge. I knew I wanted different pick-ups, and I knew I wanted this different body shape. But I actually started by taking our existing 24 and ¾ inch scale guitar, which is the Cobra, and once I was comfortable with this new body shape, I just built a Cobra with this different body shape. So it still had the same bridge that the Cobra had on it. It still had the same pickups. I play every other weekend, so I took that guitar out and used it for awhile and got used to it. I was looking for what I liked and didn’t like about it. Then the next step was migrating to the new bridge that I wanted to have on this guitar. So then I built another duplicate guitar but everything else was still the same. Still the old-style neck but with this new bridge. When you change something you really need to change one thing at a time to really see what it does. And then the next step was the same guitar with the new pickups, with the new bridge, and the new neck joint. And I has saved pieces of wood that were consecutive cuttings off of a board so that I wasn’t dealing with a significantly different piece of body wood.

So you build a prototype. You play it. You tweak it. And you gradually refine it.

Yes. This went through four major levels until I got to the final version.

What do you think are the most important “ingredients” that go into
a guitar?

A guitar really is the sum of all its parts. Anyone that says, “The body is the thing.” No it’s not! Part of what we do is offer a zillion options on our regular stuff. We build a lot of guitars that are very similar except one little thing is different. Everything is the same except it has a different fingerboard wood. Or everything is the same except it has a different bridge. So we really get to hear that all the parts really (result in) a perceivable difference. It’s not like you go, “Well, I think that one sounds a little different.” No. This sounds different. And we’ve built enough of them. We’ve built over 11,000 guitars now, I think, total. So we got to hear a lot of the same things done over and over and over. So when we say a Madagascar rosewood fingerboard sounds different than an Indian rosewood fingerboard, it does. It’s not because we think it does or it might. It does. We’ve heard a lot of them. You’ve got the neck wood, the fingerboard wood, the body wood, the bridge style and the materials the bridge is made out of, and the pickups. Those are your key components. And they all matter.

The Atom is available a more limited scope of options. In other words, I was after a particular thing with this guitar. Our other guitars have just kind of run rampant. We put limits on which woods we use and stuff, but there’s lots of choices so you can really go crazy with options. This guitar I’m really after a particular thing, and I’m not willing at this point in time to say, “Yeah, any way you want it, we’ll do it.” This is Tom’s guitar. We offer several different pickup variations in it. We offer it solid and also hollow. We offer it with a solid rosewood neck or a mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard. But we don’t offer five fingerboard choices. We don’t offer four body wood choices.

You’ve mentioned woods several times. Are there particular woods that
you prefer for particular parts?

You have to say your favorite woods for a particular style of guitar. For the Atom, the body is mahogany and the neck is mahogany. Most of these, 90% of these, will probably be a mahogany body with a maple top. Mahogany neck with an Indian rosewood fingerboard. That’s the one. But if you were building a Telecaster-style guitar, if you’re really after a Tele sound then mahogany would not be the choice for that guitar. You’d either be an alder or an ash guy depending on what you’re after. On an electric guitar the wood dictates the character of the guitar. Pickups can alter that. They can accentuate or cover a little bit of particular things, but the character of the guitar is determined by the wood. So if you really like the sound of an ash guitar and you build an alder guitar instead, you’ll never be happy. They just respond differently. They have different attack properties. They just have a different character.

Do you have a personal favorite wood?

Well, for the Atom, its mahogany. I love mahogany. I love it for its sonic properties. I love the weight. I love even the cosmetics of it. I love everything about it for this guitar. From a building only standpoint, it’s also a really wonderful wood to work with. It’s very what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It doesn’t have hidden defects like a lot of woods do. There are woods that are more difficult to work with. Basswood in particular is a difficult wood to work with because it’s considerably softer so it doesn’t cut as cleanly. There’s a lot more sanding to be done. It tends to have hidden defects in it so you’ll get half way through making something and throw it away because there’s a weird booger on the inside so you can’t use it. But if I was making a Telecaster style guitar for myself, it would be made of alder and it would have a maple neck because that’s my favorite Telecaster style. That combination. You know, it’s different things. Many people buy guitars based on what they look like. That’s just the way it is. But guitars have different flavors. A Strat and a Tele are different flavored guitars and so is a Les Paul. A lot of guitar players have a signature thing, but a lot of people don’t. When I used to play different guitars, it was because they made me play differently and gave me more variety to the way I sounded and the way I filled in the music I was playing.

Have you ever had an idea for a guitar that just didn’t work out?

Well some combinations just don’t work for me. There are things we don’t offer that other people offer. And people say, “Well, why don’t you use ebony fingerboards?” Because they just don’t sound good on our guitars. There was a bridge that was really, really popular with lots of builders, and we’ve never offered it because I built one for myself and thought I was going to love this bridge. I loved the way it felt. I loved the way it looked. The guy that was making it I really liked and respected, and I built a guitar with it, and it sounded awful. It sounded broken to me. It was like, “What did I do wrong?” And I changed it out to the bridge we normally use, and everything was fine. So it was so disappointing. That stuff happens where you step out and try something. You know, we’ve been at it a pretty long time now, so we’ve tried lots of stuff. I’d like to think that our educated guesses are more educated than they used to be. So we’re seldom shocked by what we hear. Usually we have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to sound like.

I don’t think there’s a major artist who isn’t playing at least one Anderson guitar. Who are some of the artists that you’re most honored to have chosen your instruments?

For me personally, my favorite band is the David Crowder Band, and they’re all three playing our guitars now and that just thrills me to no end. The list is pretty big. What we tend to attract are lots of guys who play with famous guys. You know, the guitar player in this guy’s band. The guitar player in that guy’s band. Because a lot of the Eric Claptons, and those kind of guys, they all are endorsed by big company’s, and they get big paychecks to play the guitars that they play. I’m not complaining about that. That’s the way sports endorsements are. So I don’t even try to approach those guys. For me, I look for the people whose music I really like and see if there’s a way that we can work together.

What’s been your finest moment as a guitar maker?

It probably just happened. The Crowder Band just released their new record, and they had this record release concert in Waco, Texas. And I went. Two of them had Atoms and the leader had a Crowdster, which is our electric acoustic. And it was super touching for me that they would play these guitars and really enjoy them and call me a friend. It was great. It wasn’t like we make them some guitars and some guy is going, “Hey these are cool. I’ll play that.” They gave input along the way. When they came to town, they would let me know they were coming, and I’d go down and show them stuff. So it really felt like more a partnership thing than just sending a guitar out to Keith Richards and he goes, “Okay, I’ll have that.” While it’s really cool to see him play the guitar, it’s not the same.

What prompted your decision to ship with Elixir Strings?

The bane of guitar builders is that you build the best guitar you know how to build and you string it up, and you’re really happy with it. You think it’s wonderful. You send it out to a store, and then you go to the store to do a clinic or something, and the guitar has totally dead strings on it. It sounds no better than a $150 Chinese guitar hanging on the wall. This guitar is $3,000. That one is $150 yet they don’t really sound any (different) because the strings are dead on all of them. A manufacturer cannot expect dealers to keep the strings changed all the time. So that was the first incentive. They had sent me some strings and I was like, “Hey, they sound good. And they keep sounding good.” So I’d say that was the initial incentive. We could have guitars sitting in stores that sound good all the time. You don’t have to apologize for them having dead strings. And then I started using them myself as well and realized that I wasn’t changing my strings. They sound this week just like they did last week and two weeks from now they still sound just like they did. So I grew to appreciate not just the long life, but the consistent sound. I put them on and they sound this way. And a month later they still sound this way. That’s really important if you’re concerned about the sound of your guitar. Consistency is really important to me. I really like things that are equally good all the time. It’s frustrating when it’s really great one time, and it’s not really great the next time. The other thing that I have come to really appreciate Elixirs over the long haul is the way they feel. Every once in awhile someone will send us their personal favorite brand of strings to build their guitar with, and if it’s not Elixir, when I’m playing the guitar, I always feel like “Ew. What’s wrong with this?” The strings feel dirty and gritty. In an instant, once you have played Elixirs for a period of time, any other string feels bad. It feels dirty and old and what’s wrong with this guitar. I don’t want to play this guitar.

What are you working on for the future? What can we expect from
Tom Anderson down the road?

Well, we’re just for the last few months delivering Atoms. So that’s kind of still getting off the ground as far as building them all the time. We’re working on another mutation of our acoustic electric, and after that I’m not exactly sure where we’ll go. But there’s always more to do than there is time to do it. So I’m not too worried about running out of things to do!