Joe Doe Unveils Wild New Punkaster Guitar
This eyebrow-raiser of a guitar merges Tele- and Strat-style body shapes.
Vintage's Joe Doe range is known for its oddball aesthetics and unusual designs, but the range's latest guitar, the Punkaster, might be its oddest, and most charming, offering yet.
At its heart, the Punkaster merges Tele- and Strat-style body shapes into a wholly unique design. The guitar is built with an alder body, hard rock maple neck with a vintage “soft-C” profile and a hard rock maple fingerboard with 22 medium frets.
Sonically, the axe features Joe Doe-designed single coil pickups, controlled by master volume and master tone knobs and a five-way selector switch.
Elsewhere, the guitar is built with a vintage Joe Doe Punkaster headstock, mismatched tuners, a half-and-half pickguard, a 43mm graphite nut and a Wilkinson WVC Vibrato bridge.
Even more uniquely, the Punkaster - like all Joe Doe by Vintage guitars - carries with it a fictional backstory, revolving around the guitar having been “owned, destroyed and hastily reconstructed” by its owner, Brandon Hicks, guitarist of the fake New York City punk band FistMeetsFace.
To fit with the story, the back of the guitar's neck is adorned with a series of signatures, including “contact details for emergency lawyers and phone numbers for old girlfriends.” The fingerboard, meanwhile, sports “custom mismatched position markers and Kate’s cell phone number."
The Joe Doe by Vintage Punkaster is available now - in a limited run of 100 instruments - for £599 (~$765).
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For more info on the guitar, stop on by jhs.co.uk.
Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com and GuitarPlayer.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.