Workshop: Gray Guitars
We take a trip to a leafy London suburb to meet one of the UK’s most talked-about new luthiers, Thomas Gray, whose guitar-making began as a serious hobby but is now championed by Blur hero Graham Coxon among many others…
The phrase ‘fairytale success story’ might be a cliché, but for Thomas Gray his journey into guitarmaking definitely qualifies. After time spent languishing as a schoolteacher, Thomas was asked to teach his music students how to maintain guitars – it was this simple beginning that set him on the path to a dream career as a high-end luthier.
“I was teaching GCSE and A-Level music and was asked to teach a BTEC in Music Technology,” Thomas recalls. “One of the modules was backline technical management and part of that was looking after guitars, amplifiers and fuses and stuff.
“I looked down the list of things I had to teach, and with the basics, such as tuning and changing strings, and setting pickup height and stuff like that, I thought, ‘Fine, I can do that’. But when it came to intonation, checking the action and wiring and stuff, I realised I’d have to bone up a bit. So I did the research and before long I was teaching 16 year olds how to do all that, which was really good fun.”
Thomas explains he soon acquired the bug for modding guitars and his curiosity led him to tackle ever more complex jobs, until he decided to have a go at shaping the body wood itself.
“I was playing Telecasters a lot at that time, so I decided to see how hard it would be to cut a forearm contour on a Telecaster body. I went to YouTube and a video came up of this guy showing you how to do it.
“I strapped my old Telecaster to a picnic table and just went to Wickes and bought some tools – it worked really well. A week later I went back to YouTube and typed ‘How do you cut a belly contour into a Telecaster?’ The same video channel came up, and so I tried the tutorial on it, too.”
Thomas went on to devour scores of instruction videos on guitar-making by Australian YouTuber David Fletcher, which gave him the confidence to make his first guitar completely from scratch.
“I watched how he carved a neck, what measurements to take, and I just tried it. I went and bought some wood that was vaguely neck shaped, about the right thickness and the right width. By then I had some basic Fender templates, which I’d got on eBay or somewhere, so I had some outlines that allowed me to rout round things. Again, it kind of worked well.”
As Thomas became first proficient and then highly skilled in hand-building guitars, he invested in building a proper workshop and acquiring professional tools. Soon, beautifully crafted, original guitars started emerging from the workshop – and to Thomas’s surprise, people wanted to buy them, including highly influential early adopters, such as Blur’s much-feted guitarist Graham Coxon, and Daniel Steinhardt, founder of TheGigRig and co-presenter of That Pedal Show.
“It went so well and I loved it,” Thomas recalls. “I didn’t like being a schoolteacher at all, I really hated it. So when the school I was teaching at eventually said, ‘Look, we don’t need you after this holiday. Thanks very much’, I was like, ‘Okay, all right’. But I did walk back thinking, ‘Fuck, what do I do? Maybe this is the right time to go into making guitars full time?’
“I’d made Graham Coxon’s guitar by then. I’d also made Daniel Steinhardt’s guitar by then, so I knew it could work. The Graham thing had kicked off a little bit and we became friends. So I thought, ‘Well, this could really happen’. Then a couple of people bought guitars so I thought, ‘Great, well that’s like three months of money just sat there, three months of teaching money right there’, and I thought, ‘I’ll just see what happens, I just won’t go back to school on Monday and see what happens’.”
“I strapped my old Telecaster to a picnic table and just went to Wickes and bought some tools – it worked really well”
into the future
Thomas stated that this was his leap-of-faith moment. It was flattering and
encouraging that two well-known figures in the music industry had started playing his guitars but, back in the real world, it still had to add up to a regular livelihood that paid as well as his teaching gig.
Once again Daniel Steinhardt was to play a supportive role, setting up an introduction to award-winning retailer Andertons that helped put Gray Guitars on the map.
“I met Lee Anderton last year through Dan Steinhardt,” Thomas explains. “I went to see Lee with a couple of guitars that I liked, and Danish Pete [Anderton’s Peter Honoré] was there as well, and we went up and sat in the video studio behind the shop and I gave him two guitars to try.
“I thought I would be there for half an hour, but when I eventually left we’d been talking the whole day. In that meeting I went from being a guitar builder making one-off commissions to taking orders for guitars that would be stocked in Andertons.
“These instruments are now hung up in the boutique room next to private stock PRS and all the top-of-the-line Custom Shop Fender stuff that they’re selling, which is amazing for a new brand. Before that point, I just made guitars in my workshop and sold them to people, that was it! So it was a steep learning curve…”
As befits a small-scale luthier who is now supplying a major league retailer, Thomas rationalised his output into a core range of models that takes inspiration from an insect known for its powers of transformation.
“We sell three of my models in the shop. All my guitars are named after butterflies and my logo is a butterfly. There are the ‘Emperors’, which are the Strat types, the ‘Admirals’, which are Telecaster types, and the ‘Grayling’ is like a 335-meetsTelecaster mashup.
“The Grayling is the one I made for Graham that became a model in its own right. It’s like a Telecaster outline. It’s about 5mm thicker than a Tele. Like a 335, it’s solid down the middle with a mahogany back and the flame maple top, with P90s in. It’s got a 25-inch scale length, which is in-between a Fender and Gibson so gives it a spongier feel, plus a 12-inch radius.
“There’s also the guitar that I used for the photoshoot today, which is called a ‘Brimstone’. It’s like a korina guitar in the style of a Gibson. Not in the outline, because it has a Telecaster kind of outline, but in the fact it’s made of korina, with a korina neck and ebony fingerboard with one Bare Knuckle Nailbomb in the bridge. It’s like a hotrod Gibson Les Paul Junior kind of idea.”
pickup prowess
Thomas prefers to use Bare Knuckle for all his guitars – a choice typical of his thoughtful approach to wringing as much tone as possible from his instruments through careful selection of top-spec hardware and tonewoods.
“I grew up in Cornwall and I was always very interested in this guy who made pickups across the water from where I lived,” he explains. “When I first heard Bare Knuckle’s P90s that was it – I thought, ‘This is for me.’ Then I got more familiar with their humbuckers and the Tele and the Strat stuff, and now Bare Knuckle is my go-to, they’re incredible, I love their stuff.
“The bridges are also important. A lot of people like the vintage-style Tele bridges but struggle with the intonation issue. The Mastery bridges have solved that problem well I think. I’m not sure how aware you are of those. The saddle design on those means that when the six strings go over the
“My instruments are now in Andertons next to private stock PRS and top-ofthe-line Custom Shop Fenders”
fixed saddle, there’s nowhere to go [that isn’t the correct position]. If you string up a ’52 reissue Telecaster with big brass saddles, though, the string can be anywhere – it just moves left to right. You have to make sure as you tighten the string up it’s still in exactly the right spot it was in last time. The Mastery bridges solve that and sound great.”
quality woods
Gray guitars are also admired for their necks, which are typically built from stunningly figured maple-family tonewoods sourced from Canada. Tom is a devotee of bolt-on electrics and says that such guitars stand or fall on the quality of the tonewoods and the integrity of the fit between neck and body.
“If you have a lovely piece of quartersawn, roasted flame maple, and you’ve got a nice piece of alder and the neck and the body meet beautifully, that’s the start of it for me. I’ve got a ’76 Strat where if you take the neck screws off that bad boy…”
He trails off, at a loss when it comes to describing how poorly the neck fits into the neck pocket on that guitar.
“Forget it,” he finally says. “It would never have left my workshop like that!”
Although Fender’s classic designs are clearly a touchstone for Thomas’ designs, you can find plenty of evidence of an independent spirit in his guitars, which often take the form of tweaks that enhance the playability and organic feel of each one.
“I put belly cuts in all my Telecaster-style guitars because I think why would you not have that? I like quite deep ones, too, so you haven’t got that whole ribcage-battering thing. I tend to put a Strat-size body radius on the top as well. So, it has a half-inch radius on the top rather than an eighth- or a quarter-inch radius on the top.”
Thomas also champions the use of non-traditional tonewoods alongside the old standards. “My guitars in stock at Andertons are made from horse chestnut or poplar for the bodies and the necks are sycamore. They have laburnum fingerboards, or bog oak fingerboards, or plum fingerboards. Lee’s one has a plum fingerboard, Bare Knuckle pickups and a Wudtone bridge. I handspray the finishes here, with nitrocellulose.”
It’s clearly been a dizzying ride from backyard to boutique. What, we ask, has been the hardest thing about the journey?
“I think the most challenging part was the self-doubt. When I first said I was going to make guitars a lot of people I knew (especially older people including older guitarists) said, ‘You’re mad, how is that going to work? People can buy guitars from China for £200. How can you compete with that?’ Well, I always knew I was only going to make top-end stuff, I was never going to try to compete with the entry-level stuff.
“I’m now at the stage where it’s almost time to start looking for some new premises and find an assistant,” says Thomas. “I’ve got a lot of commissioned builds in the book, so it’s kind of getting to that stage. I can just about cope with it but if I get a couple more… Let’s just say I don’t really want to have a year-long waiting list. Nice for your ego or whatever, but it’s not best for your customers. But that’s another thing I have to balance out, you know? Charlie Chandler [of Guitar Experience fame] said to me: ‘If people want what you’re selling then they may have to wait – don’t hurry, just make sure the guitars are absolutely the best they can be’.”
“I don’t really want to have a year-long waiting list. Nice for your ego or whatever, but it’s not best for your customers”