Designing the Made-In-California Eastman D'Ambrosio Series

It’s not often that a well known and established guitar brand starts a completely new venture. But that’s exactly where Otto D’Ambrosio and Pepijn ’t Hart find themselves with the Eastman D’Ambrosio series, launched at NAMM earlier this year.

Otto (head of design at Eastman HQ in California) and Pepijn (Eastman’s director of fretted instruments, based in The Netherlands) tell us in this interview about the design process for these stylish new instruments—from concave pockets to fiery pine, from recessed pickguards to sandblasted bodies.

Tony Bacon: Pepijn, are your new D’Ambrosio models the first Eastman-brand guitars made in the USA and not in Beijing, China like all the others?

Pepijn ’t Hart with a guitar on his lap
Pepijn ’t Hart

Pepijn ’t Hart: Yes, they are. This has been a wish of Qian Ni, our founder and CEO at the Eastman Music Company. Over the years, many leading companies joined the Eastman family of brands—Haynes flutes, Shires trumpets, Bourgeois guitars, and so on—each in Qian’s opinion the best in their field. And his wish also was to have an American boutique custom shop where we can build electrics.

I would say OK… but how can we do it? We didn’t have the space. But now it’s a reality as it’s evolved into the workshop in California that Otto heads. Qian’s happy, and he really wants this to be a custom shop where we can do whatever people would like us to do. So if someone wants something in a strange color with 15 volume knobs… eventually, that will be possible. The D’Ambrosio project is where we start.

How did your design process start, Otto?

Otto D’Ambrosio: The D’Ambrosio series really started with our set-neck solidbody Juliet model, which we launched at NAMM in 2022, and that in turn was an organic evolution of our thinline Romeo model, introduced in 2019. From the Juliet, there was this side project to push the Juliet line into a bolt-on guitar—and that’s where I pushed things into some very advanced, futuristic kind of concepts [laughs].

I always start with sketching, with pen and paper: I’ll sketch shapes and profiles and headstock ideas and configurations. The thing is, though, that when you start that way, it’s pretty much limitless what you can design. But Pepijn’s really good at honing in on what the concept really should be.

Otto D’Ambrosio at the workbench
Otto D’Ambrosio at the workbench.

Was it always in your mind to make a stylistic similarity leading from the Juliet to the D’Ambrosio?

Otto: Not initially, but it certainly sent us down that path in the course of a year or two. We focused on doing our own bolt-on electric guitar pretty quickly. The Romeo had hesitated a little bit at first, but once it took hold of the market, it was really exciting to see our first original design captivating some musicians out there.

How much does Eastman HQ get involved?

Otto D’Ambrosio in the workshop
Otto D’Ambrosio in the workshop.

Pepijn: It’s just Otto and me—there’s no interference and no expectations. We just have to come up with the goods and the turnover. Sometimes there are requests, of course. For instance, we need different guitars for our Chinese domestic sales. But Otto and I have a clean sheet, and as long as it’s successful, nobody interferes.

It was April 2023, in the boardroom in Pomona, California, when we asked for the green light on this project, and they said OK—and you guys are going to do this all by yourself? We said oh yes, the rest of the workflow is not going to be interrupted. Piece of cake. And, well, you live and you learn [laughs].

I must say that Otto has been at the top of his game in these last few years. His shapes for the Romeo and for the Juliet were instantly there. The first styrofoam test Juliet shapes that he cut in the workshop on the CNC were just perfect. And that’s the same shape you see now on the D’Ambrosio SC and Offset, and slightly modified for the DC.

The neck fitting on the D’Ambrosio guitars is really unusual. Is that where you started with this design?

Otto: Actually it wasn’t. Those futuristic ideas I had when I started, when I was trying to push the boundaries during the pandemic, I was working with a lot of carbon fiber for an idea I had to build a neck completely differently. So I was focused in on how to cradle the neck into the body. And that opened the door to it being a curved neck pocket.

At first this was almost like a hollow neck, if you can imagine that, and so the only way to cradle the neck would be to have a concave neck pocket, and then a step-down tenon. But Pepijn was like: "No, no, we can’t do it!" We came to the conclusion that carbon fiber would be a totally different business—we don’t work in aerospace, we don’t work with these resins and everything. So we went back to wood, which was the right thing to do. Wood is in our wheelhouse.

Eastman D’Ambrosio neckset showing concave body pocket
Eastman D’Ambrosio neckset showing concave body pocket.

Even as far back as our El Rey electric archtops, it’s always been about the union between the neck and the body. These are two parts individually that don’t make a guitar. But once they’re joined together, they become a musical instrument. The crucial point is the union of the two parts.

There’s a direct connection to my experience with joinery and the dovetail fitting of an archtop neck, and all of the angles that go into that—gluing it into a mechanical joint, where there’s machine screws, and this type of heel that connects to the body in this certain way—and now the D’Ambrosio has 75 percent more surface area that connects this neck compared to a traditional Fender neck.

Let’s look some more at that union. The body has a concave pocket to match exactly the shape of the neck, and the neck has a stepped-down tenon that goes right into the body—is that correct?

Pepijn: We always ask ourselves the "why" question first. So in this instance, thinking about a bolt-on design, there should be something that we’re bringing to the table that’s not already there. If we can’t come up with anything, then we shouldn’t do it. I think the uniqueness of the FullerTone neck, as we called it, is the fact that it’s a long-tenon two-bolt body-to-neck construction. And when Otto showed me that, I said OK, we really do have something new.

Eastman D’Ambrosio neckset showing concave body pocket and long stepped tenon
Eastman D’Ambrosio neckset showing concave body pocket and long stepped tenon.

Otto: If you look at the rear of a FullerTone neck, it looks like the heel of an acoustic full-body guitar—but the heel is submerged into the body of the guitar. It’s like a hidden heel, with a flat portion in the bottom, so that it has a hard stop there. It’s all mostly hidden inside. You don’t see any of the joints, you just see the curved pocket and the neck—so you really don’t know what’s going on in there.

FullerTone—that’s a pretty obvious reference to an important locale in guitar history, isn’t it?

Otto: Yeah [laughs], our Pomona workshop is less than 20 miles from the original Fender workshop in Fullerton. So yes, there’s a little pun in there.

Pepijn: We felt that the difference in sound between Otto’s neck and the Fender neck is that it has a fuller tone. I said well, if we’re looking for a name for it, then we’re going to pay tribute. We’re honoring Californian guitar making. Nobody will deny how unbelievable Leo Fender’s achievements were, and they will never be repeated in all their brilliance. It’s big shoulders to stand on, but it’s the best shoulders to stand on.

I can’t think of another neck fitting quite like this, with a concave pocket in the body and the long stepped tenon. Have you come across anything similar?

Otto: Not concave. There might be some sort of fitting pocket that goes in there, but nothing that’s the full shape of the neck going into the body.

I’m guessing this neck-body union is a tricky thing to make, because it has to be very accurate—which presumably is where CNC comes into the picture.

Pepijn: Four years ago, Otto decided to do a CNC course and buy a CNC machine. He had never worked with CNC before. That opened up many possibilities. And it came at exactly the right moment, because then he could start work on prototyping in the workshop here in California.

Eastman D’Ambrosio bolt-on neck plate
Eastman D’Ambrosio bolt-on neck plate.

Otto: The union has to be extremely accurate, yes, but there’s still a lot of hand fitting that goes into making sure that the parts fit. If the wood shrinks and expands, if it doesn’t bind, if when you finish the guitar there’s extra paint material that sometimes gets in the way, since we do recessed pickguards on these models—all these things, just a lot of fitting to do. Which, when they’re finished, makes for really special instruments. But working through the process makes for a lot of detailed handwork. Which is why I build instruments! So it’s fine.

OK, so the construction is unusual and different, but what does it do for the sound and tone of these guitars?

Pepijn: If you take one of the D’Ambrosios and put it on your lap, without plugging it in, you’ll immediately say: "Uh, what’s going on here?" Everybody does that. It takes one second to realize that this is different from a regular bolt-on. I’ve compared it to my Custom Shop ’51 Tele, which is a brilliant instrument, but when you A/B them, immediately I hear that there is something else to the sound of our guitar. You have the best of the sound of a bolt-on neck—that magical, chimey sound—and at the same time you have the substance and the tonal transfer of a long neck-tenon, like a dovetail joint.

Eastman D'Ambrosio Single Cut ’52 butterscotch.
Eastman D'Ambrosio Single Cut ’52 butterscotch.

Moving on to the Juliet-derived body for the D’Ambrosio series, that comes in the shape of the single-cut SC and the Offset style, and the double-cut DC, each with various hardware options. Tell me about that part of the design process.

Pepijn: Every guitar starts with the best woods. Otto has a great relationship with Hans Brede from Tempered Tonewoods in Sonoma, and Hans sent over this crazy guy Alan Ollivant to us.

Many wood guys are a little crazy, aren’t they?

Otto: They spend say nine months out of the year just in the forest cutting wood, and when they get out—well, they just run free [laughs].

Pepijn: Alan came over with some fire pine from Oregon, where there’d been a devastating fire a couple of years ago, and all these trees had to be cut. This is what we bought. They called it phoenix pine for obvious reasons; it rises from the ashes.

Otto: I think it’s the most wonderful use of the wood that was in this big fire, to actually celebrate it as a musical instrument.

Eastman D’Ambrosio Offset ’64 vintage white.
Eastman D’Ambrosio Offset ’64 vintage white.

Pepijn: But pine is soft, and Otto said if we’re going to do nitrocellulose, this is going to be a nightmare. To get a clean, even, beautiful mirror surface is just impossible. We decided early on we didn’t want to age the guitar, because that’s already being done by people, and we’re definitely not specialists—Otto has never aged a guitar in his life. He tries to build the most beautiful instruments.

So he came up with this weird thing of sandblasting the bodies, and that brings out all kinds of texture in the wood. In a way it’s like an old piece of a table that’s been used for over a hundred years—and then we can apply a special nitro that does not have to be as super-smooth.

But obviously there’s always people who like a beautiful shiny body with a nice nitro finish on, so we’ve tried to find lightweight swamp ash. That’s very hard to locate, because there’s a bug eating up and infecting many swamp ash trees. But we’re quite a big wood purchaser globally, and that helped us to find something really good and very lightweight.

Otto: Another reason why we don’t age them is that they will naturally age over time with the player. We’ve always thought the player should kind of take responsibility [laughs] for their own chips and dings and scratches and everything, so it’ll age with the player. That seems a more honest way.

How about wood choice for the necks of the D’Ambrosio models?

Pepijn: American maple. We’ve always admired the most beautiful maple necks in the industry on Music Man guitars, so we managed to get the same source. Then Bourgeois [the boutique flattop brand that joined the Eastman family in 2019] found this huge pile of Madagascar rosewood fingerboards.

Otto: Bourgeois has always sourced and used absolutely stunning Madagascar rosewood boards for some of their guitars, and in the electric market currently that wood doesn’t exist at all, due to the fact that there is only a limited amount of Madagascar rosewood available. It’s wonderful to pair the hard rock figured maple with the Madagascar, and then we put on a really nice super thin oil finish as well.

 Eastman D’Ambrosio headstock.
Eastman D’Ambrosio headstock.

And hardware?

Pepijn: Otto did all his design work, and then it fell to me to source the parts. We knew we wanted this to be a California-made instrument, and so I wanted if possible to get as much as possible from California. And there are many, many small parts builders there… and they never read their emails and they never return phone calls! [Laughter all round] And when you finally speak to someone and they send you a couple of sample parts, they send the wrong parts with the wrong invoice. You have to have reliable partners! So we had to widen our net.

How about pickups? Your single-cut two-pickup SC is loosely Tele inspired, the double-cut three-pickup DC more Strat-leaning, and the single-cut two-pickup Offset has a Jazz/Jag vibe.

Pepijn: All the pickups on the D’Ambrosios are by Lollar, in various combinations. I especially like the Lollar Charlie Christian pickup at the neck of the SC, which does wonders on that guitar—not too dark, and really adding a lot of depth to the sound. With the Offset, it was easier to come up with some more unusual pickup configurations, because there are fewer rules. So for instance we do an option with Lollartrons, another with Staples, and one with Gold Foil Soap Bars.

Eastman D’Ambrosio Offset ’63 inca silver
Eastman D’Ambrosio Offset ’63 inca silver.

On the DCs, we have a MannMade tremolo—John Mann designed and made trems for PRS and now has his own firm—and that’s unbelievable, with a massive brass block. For the Offsets, the bridge and vibrato come from Halon, in Greece. And we always try to improve something, so on the DC, one of the tones only works on the bridge pickup, something that’s not standard on a Strat. And the SC has two tone knobs, one for neck, one for bridge, so if it’s too bright, say, you can roll it off. We have custom features, too, like the optional Kingstone Classic tone control on the SC and DC that further opens up the sounds.

How do you decide on list price for a new model? I suppose if it’s too high you put off some potential buyers, too low and you risk jeopardizing your cashflow.

Pepijn: The D’Ambrosio guitars are Master Built instruments, all made by Otto, so surely they should be sold at Master Built pricing? But we shied away from that, as I thought OK, if I’m a consumer, I would want this D’Ambrosio to be no more expensive than a Novo guitar and to be available just under the price of a Fender Custom shop guitar. So they list from $3,599 to $3,999. This is definitely not a project where we make any money! But it has become the exact thing we wanted it to be: It’s our custom shop. Now, Otto’s workshop has gone from being a prototyping shop to a shop that creates things.

 Eastman D’Ambrosio Double Cut ’74 amber natural.
Eastman D’Ambrosio Double Cut ’74 amber natural.

Where do you think your new California-made project might lead you?

Pepijn: We asked ourselves right at the beginning if we were going to do this in our workshops in Beijing, or are we going to be crazy and try to pull off this American-made boutique shop. We’re all learning so much during this process, building and organizing and purchasing and everything.

We’re working with the Beijing workshop right now on prototyping versions we want to make there. As I’ve said, the D’Ambrosios have exclusively Lollar pickups.

So we’re not going to use Lollar pickups on the ones we’ll make in Beijing. I’m working with Tim Mills from Bare Knuckle—he just sent me some prototypes of beautiful looking pickups with different visuals than regular pickups. Everything always evolves! And obviously, we’d be able to build FullerTone-neck guitars in higher numbers in our Beijing workshops.

How many have you built of the Made In California ones?

Otto: We hope to make 200 by the end of this year. I made ten original prototypes, and I just finished number 27 yesterday, so that means so far about 37 final pieces [speaking in mid May].

Eastman D’Ambrosio workshop.
Eastman D’Ambrosio workshop.

What do you remember about your first finished D’Ambrosio prototype?

Otto: It was a great moment. The first ones are always very special—they change so much. The first one of anything always shows you all of the things you want to do better on an instrument. Once we know all of that, it’s pretty easy to move forward.

This sort of guitar designing and making is craft coupled with engineering, isn’t it? Or maybe science coupled with art.

Otto: Science and art! During college I studied mechanical engineering and philosophy [laughs]. It should have been art.


About the author: Tony Bacon writes about musical instruments, musicians, and music. His books include Electric Guitars: Design & Invention and Legendary Guitars. Tony lives in Bristol, England. More info at tonybacon.co.uk.

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