New Direction
There is more than a whiff of change in the UK’s guitar-making landscape. Seth Baccus is riding the wave… but it’s been quite a journey
Three years ago – virtually to the day – we were chatting to Seth Baccus for our review on a superb £4k Nautilus Classic. To say we were impressed with his craft is an understatement. To be fair, Seth had shipped his first custom-order guitar a decade earlier after 12 years in retail at Mansons Guitar Shop, with eight as the manager, and had built his first guitar in 2004. He’d also been an on-the-road tech for the likes of John Paul Jones, Led Zeppelin’s reunion and local megastars Muse. Back then he was making around 20 instruments a year with an approximate build-time of nine months.
Shortly after that, like many sole customguitar makers, he reached a crossroads. “I was turning away so much work,” Seth recalls. “[From] dealers that would have been wonderful to deal with but clearly don’t just need one guitar now and then. Likewise, I was turning away artists who’d want a guitar way quicker than I could make it for them.”
Meanwhile, Leigh Dovey, who’d founded PJD Guitars back in 2010, always had the production guitar in mind. “The way I see it is that the electric guitar was always intended to be a factory-made instrument right back from the days of Leo Fender – a production-line guitar,” he told us. By 2019, PJD was exclusively supplying Guitar Galleries, and the following year, with a team of three, was building 12 to 16 guitars a month. In 2021, PJD branched out to produce guitars for another brand, the newly formed Cream T Guitars, with its production rising to around 40 guitars a month by the autumn of that year.
Shortly after Sounds Affects’ Tim Lobley had approached Leigh to build Cream T guitars, Seth got in touch. “I’d spoken to Seth over the years, asking him for tips and advice along the way,” said Leigh. “He loved the guitars we were building, especially at the price we could do them at. He was looking for a ‘team build’ guitar for a reasonable price.”
With more space and staff, UKGB now has the capacity to build around 1,500 guitars a year
Soon enough, Leigh had grander plans for PJD. “[My colleague] Mike Dunn and I thought, ‘Why don’t we change from being just the makers of PJD to being a manufacturing facility for other brands?’,” he said. And the idea of a guitar-making hub – what was soon to become UK Guitar Builders (UKGB) – was conceived. “So rather than PJD building Cream T and Seth Baccus guitars, which might seem a bit odd, we have UKGB building guitars for ourselves and other brands.”
With new investment, and more space and staff, UKGB now has the initial capacity to build around 1,500 guitars a year and is already working with two other brands… the names of whom we’ll let you know as soon as we can.
Brand Definition
While Cream T’s Aurora and Crossfire models have only ever been built by UKGB, Seth faced a bit of a dilemma in how he should present these new UKGB‑made guitars. Initially, ‘team built’ and ‘standard’ were terms used to differentiate the new wave of guitars. “How it’s branded or what it’s called were decisions I had to make much earlier than the point where the guitars were where I wanted them to be,” Seth tells us. “So the concept of ‘team built’ or ‘standard’ were names I had to put on them. But now having had 15 or 20 of the guitars through my hands I’m like, I don’t know, those terms are a little demeaning for the actual quality that we’re hitting with these new Shorelines.
“Perhaps I initially confused the issue by trying too hard to specifically label what I’m doing here, other than just expanding my business to be able to offer more guitars to more people,” he offers, considering his thought process. “I was particularly conscious of not wanting to mislead people in any way that I was hand‑building every single guitar myself.
“For example, if you buy a Nik Huber guitar, Nik hasn’t solely made that guitar from start to finish – his team has made that guitar. Nik’s signed it at the end and signed it off, of course,” Seth adds. “Essentially, what I’m doing is exactly the same, except you can also order a guitar built by me if you want to and have the patience to wait in the queue. So I’m starting to think it’s not necessary to separate the two.”
Good Wood
As part of the UKGB team Seth has not only brought his skills to the table but has had influence on material choice, too, in the form of the lightweight body wood, obeche. “I had a customer in the States who wanted a Nautilus Hollowbody and he had a long-term shoulder injury,” Seth says. “His primary concern was how light could we get a guitar that would still balance on a strap and function okay. This was about five years ago, I guess.
“Obeche is a beautiful hybrid, as if alder and mahogany had a baby…” SethBaccus
“I went to my local wood yard just on the off-chance and I asked the guys there what the lightest timber they had was. They suggested I had a rummage through a pile of obeche, a West African timber. I ended up buying a plank.
“The first few guitars I made using obeche were set-necks,” he says. “A Nautilus Hollowbody and a couple of Nautilus Juniors – basically obeche bodies with mahogany necks. I started to realise that this wood is a beautiful hybrid, as if alder and mahogany had a baby – somewhere in that ballpark. It has the qualities of light ash and alder in that it’s very responsive and naturally resonant. That’s personally what I like about a nice piece of swamp ash or light alder, that response: the note doesn’t have to bloom, it’s just there. But then it also shares qualities with really lightweight mahogany as well. So it definitely has more midrange than swamp ash.
“I then started to build some Shorelines with it, bolt-on necks with a variety of pickup combinations – T-style, double humbuckers, P-90s, and thought, ‘This just sounds great whatever you throw at it.’ It’s such a balanced sound. I really fell in love with it.”
Obeche isn’t a new wood to guitar makers: as Seth discovered, Burns used it back in the day, as did Hayman and Shergold. PRS has used it, too, not only in Private Stock builds but on the shortlived Mira X and Starla X, although they actually called it African basswood. “It’s not regular basswood,” said Paul Reed Smith at the time. “Look, korina is not really korina – it’s African limba wood. But because no-one liked that name they renamed it korina. This stuff is called obeche, but it’s like African basswood. See, basswood is kinda dead, I don’t like the sound of it at all. This stuff [obeche] rings… so it’s kind of like an African basswood in its feel, but it’s not the same genus.”
Other Brit makers have taken it up, too, including Atkin for its new electric range, plus Fidelity and Trent Guitars, not to mention both Cream T and PJD Guitars. Is it a time of change for the UK-made electric guitar? Definitely. www.ukguitarbuilders.co.uk