Meet My Beautiful Guitar

This page was created in homage to "Galatea", my beautiful Quicksilver guitar.

In Greek mythology, specifically Ovid's "Metamorphesis", Pygmalion was a sculptor who was working on a statue of a woman. He named it "Galatea" (pronounced GAL-uh-TAY-uh). After a while, he started to think of the statue as a real person. He began talking to it, and eventually fell in love with it. The gods took pity on him and made Galatea into a mortal human woman, and presumably they lived happily ever after.

I chose the name "Galatea" because of the Pygmalion legend. My instrument is custom-made, I specified everything about her, and she took nine months to create. It was a tense and nervous time for me; I suppose birth is always painful. So in my own way I was just as much of a control freak as Pygmalion.

Galatea is an amazingly versatile guitar. I can make her sound like a single-coil Strat, a single-humbucker "brown sound" guitar, or nearly anything else. I can play anything from heavy metal to smooth jazz, and all I have to do is flip a couple switches. There are no dead spots on the neck, and there's not a lot of mud in the low end when I crank up the distortion. For fingerstyle I love to play it clean, but for serious speed or a good solo the sound can get as heavy as I need it to get.

Galatea is a Quicksilver guitar, made by Ed Roman Guitars which is based out of Las Vegas, NV.

For a long time, Ed operated the largest guitar store in the world. As a result of an ill-advised partnership that was supposed to expand the company but had the opposite effect, Ed had to downsize his operation in 1997. The downsizing happened around the time Galatea was ready (mid-2007). As a result, Ed no longer has the largest guitar store in the world, but he held onto the custom shop and many of his signature brands. He still specializes in high-end guitars, and in the repair and maintenance of one-of-a-kind instruments.

Galatea's Specs

This is why the guitar took so long to build. The neck and fretboard had to be made from scratch and it wasn't possible to use a blank for reasons that will be obvious as you read.

Body:

• White korina body (korina is an excellent tone wood)
• Archtop for extra resonance (the front is slightly curved like a PRS, Dillion, or Les Paul guitar, and underneath it part of the guitar is hollow)
• AAAAA Quilt maple top (quilt maple has that watery look)
• Green translucent stain and finish
• Bolt-on neck design with All Access Neck ("All Access Neck" is trademarked by Ed Roman)
• Hardtail design (no tremolo bar) with TonePros bridge
• Rear cutaway for improved access to the top frets

Quilted green Quicksilver guitar. Photo by Ed Roman

Another Quicksilver with lightning bolt inlays. Photo by Ed Roman

Quicksilver headstocks. Diagram from www.edroman.com used with permission.

Neck:

• 24-fret scale
• Quarter-sawn maple meck with 10GS modification, which is basically a sanded finish, custom proportioned and ground to fit my hand
• Custom green fret markers that light up
• Ebony headstock
• Graphite nut
• Rosewood fretboard
• Medium jumbo frets
• Lightning bolt mother-of-pearl inlays
• 2006 headstock (leftmost design in diagram to the left; note the lightning bolt inlays also)

Electronics (designed partially by me; that electrical engineering degree came in handy):

• Seymour Duncan BlackBack pickups
• Custom LED enabling circuit designed for minimum noise: has on/off switch in the back and uses the input jack as an enable instead of using the signal to power the LEDs. Digital grounds are extremely noisy and would degrade the signal
• The green "LED" neck lights aren't really LEDs, which burn out and are hard to replace. They are actually the ends of fiber optic cables that travel up the neck, turn at less than 90 degrees, and split out at the various fret markers. They are actually driven by a single LED that shines into the fiber optic cable; this is located in the body of the guitar for easy access.

Hardware

• Center-tapped pickups to convert to single coil and inverted coil design. The neck pickup is actually anchored to the neck of the guitar, and the bridge pickup is embedded in the body.
• Push-pull potentiometers to selectively enable and disable parts of the pickups
• All gold hardware
• Buzz Feiten tuning system
• Sperzel locking tuners
• Strap pegs custom placed to make the guitar hang at about 45 degrees (and I'm not exactly shaped like a guy, so most guitars don't fit me quite the way they're intended to fit)