the Wishlist

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With a client list that includes Jackson Browne, Lindsey Buckingham, Waddy Wachtel, Marc Ford and Zac Brown, to name a few, Bill Asher’s lap steels and solidbodies have a solid reputation earned over 35 years of guitar making in Venice, California. Our featured Mozo guitar, a design collaboration between Bill and Jason Mozersky (Austin artist and currently Ben Harper’s guitarist), is “inspired by the early 1960s stack knob Jazz Bass, Strat and Telecaster”, states Asher.

It has a very light weight (2.59kg/5.7lb), deep vintage-style body contours and a nitro Light Relic 2-Tone 50s Burst finish on a roasted one-piece ash body. Then there’s the dark roasted maple neck and classily aged hardware – a Glendale Telestyle bridge and Kluson tuners. So it not only looks old and gigged, but sounds and feels it, too. Unplugged, there’s a resonant, woody acoustic voice. The neck is a meaty, beautifully shaped ’59 ‘Soft V’ neck profile, and thanks to an airy setup, it’s a very positive-feeling player with its Gibson-like 305mm (12-inch) camber and Dunlop 6155 frets. Even the dark abalone dots look cool – note how they get smaller past the 12th fret, which has two small diameter dots flanking the larger centre dot.

“The Mozo pickups are crafted at the Duncan Custom Shop by Derek Duncan,” says Asher, but there’s no pickup switch: each pickup has its own volume/tone stacked knob. If you remove the control plate, inside you’ll see some very antique-looking clothcovered wire and a pair of .022microfarad paper-in-oil Emerson tone capacitors.

Sound-wise, it’s almost as antique as it looks with spike and bite from the bridge contrasted by an almost humbucking sounding neck voice that’s slippery smooth and devilishly touch-sensitive for a choppier, Strat-y attack when you dig in. With both pickups controlled by their volumes only, as you blend the two it’s deliciously wide and full of subtle shades, underpinned by an almost acoustic-like character and resonance. Roots heaven.

Like many a top-end build, it’s far from the cheapest kid on the block, but there’s nothing remotely cut-price about this Mozo in terms of feel, playability, sounds and vibe. Aspirational? Not half!

2. The other part of this Mozo pickup set is the Charlie Christian Swingster single coil in neck position (3.67k), which screws directly to the body 2

3. On the original P-Bassstyle control plate, the two stacked controls offer volume and tone for each pickup. There’s no pickup switch and the output jack is Tele-style on the roasted swamp ash body’s edge 3

1 1. This aged Glendale bridge has three compensated brass saddles and houses the Duncan Custom Shop single coil – “a punchy flat-pole 50s wind” with DC resistance of 6.58kohms

4. “The headstock shape is from one of Ben Harper’s 1920’s Knutsen Hawaiian guitars,” says Asher. Not surprisingly, Ben Harper also plays one of these! 4

5. A small piece of modernism is this tapered heel block without a standard neck plate – each of the neck screws sit in its own recessed hole. Truss rod adjustment, meanwhile, is old-school at the base of the 21-fret neck 5

6. Not only is it roasted, but the quarter-sawn maple neck/fingerboard is fabulously flamed. The nitro lacquer is rubbed away on the soft V profile neck back – it looks ancient and feels it, too 6