Vlahopol Custom Guitars -are better than sex!!!…
Well, yeah, this is me… My name is, my name is, my name is… (No is not Eminem)… :))
My name is Mike Vlahopol and I started with drums when I was 14 years old back in 1984. I could not afford a set of drums as in that period in Romania a very bad set of new drums was like 5 salaries or more so on my 14th birthday i got as a present a cheap acoustic guitar… That’s it.. 🙂 The rest is history..
It was a 7 string Russian guitar (that’s right Russians were the first who made a 7 string guitar) and not Steve Vai… 🙂 so… only after few month like everybody i wanted to play in a band after all I had a guitar, right? … but I needed and electric and they were freaking expansive. A decent copy of a Stratocaster was the price of half a car in those times.
So if I wanted to play in a band I had to make my own guitar. As I was studding industrial design I made it one of my school projects and I started to HUNT big Romanian guitar players and ask permission to measure their guitars. After a while I made my first guitar…and… I joined a band…
here it is… I am happy I found this relic pictures… since 1996… I was in my second band already.
Because of my design skills i made some quick notes and wanted to build a guitar but it was impossible to find ANYTHING…. wood, accesoriess, pickups.. IMPOSSIBLE…
So, a solution came to my mind.
I started to started to buy cheap second hand no name electric guitars from the local market, take them apart piece by piece and rebuild the most important parts like modifying that shovel neck by making it thinner, build a new body from scratch and so on, give it paint job and so on.
With a brand new body and much better neck I realized I need better pickups. So I started to make a pickup manually. Don’t worry I only made one… not having a winding machine I improvised so much I ended up winding 8.000 turns on one coil by hand… that was freaking intense because I wanted a humbucker and I still have that pickup today.
There was no business just committing daily suicide.. :))
This was the first hand made guitar with the back body of an Explorer and the top body of an SG finished in 1995 – picture taken in 23rd of August 1986!
After many years of trying different shapes and styles for bodies I became aware of many technical aspects and my guitars started to improve over the years, refurnishing electric guitars mostly and as time went on he also played in bigger and bigger bands. Most of the times I played with handmade guitars that I built for himself and only in 1996 I actually got an original guitar as a gift – My limited edition Red Head!
After few years I realized I need want to play guitar for the rest of my life and and me and guitar playing “got married” and all my girl friends left…
Than after a while all of a sudden GUITAR BECAME BETTER THAN SEX.. :))
Vlahopol Custom Guitars – Better than SEX? – IF you are a rock ‘n roller you know what I mean.
Hey are you nuts, how can you say such thing?… most of my friends asked…
Well, here we go… here is my theory and story:
Why do I believe such thing? I believe it is very logic and if you don’t believe that’s too bad for you…
– In his first years of getting to know his guitar (or any other instrument) a musician has to spend a LOT of time with it, hundred of hours and more.
– A serious musician will not get out and have fun with the other guys playing football, soccer, baseball, having beers or whatever.
– A serious musician has to forget for a while about girls, he has co concentrate 100% on the guitar in order to become a better player.
– Since a guitar player will spend more time with his guitar than he spends with his girl, it means that studding is better than his girl and therefore better than sex… are you following me? 😉
– After a long and hard period of studding, a guitar player will start to play in a band, eventually. Than he will be in the center of his universe, he will have all the cool girls.. So the all the hard time spent on studying will pay off in the end.
That sounds familiar to you? That’s why guitars are better than SEX – at least for a while for me it was 🙂