About Rock Monkey Guitars

How I got into this business

Hello, my name is Chris Robertson but most people in the clubs and online know me as CorduroyEW or simply Cord.  I've been playing musical instruments all my life and can't really remember how early I started.  My first instrument was drums and my first show was as  the drummer in my elementary school band.  Even then I was obsessed with tone and tuning.  I tuned my drums on a daily basis and I even made sure my cymbals were in perfect 5ths when buying them.  When I couldn't find the cymbals I was looking for, I decided I needed to make them myself.  I never did make the cymbals I wanted but I was young and didn't understand the finer points of instrument making, but it didn't change the fact that  by age 14 I knew that I wanted to make musical instruments as a career.

As I grew up I moved from drums to guitars.  When I started building guitars I was obsessed with folk music and with a new breed of punk folk pioneered by musician Stuart Davis.  My fascination with acoustic genres kept me fully immersed in acoustic guitar building for years.  

My goal as a luthier was to build something that retained all the classic elements of an acoustic guitar but could also produce the tones I had in my head.  This meant I had to create something new.  I made a lot of strange looking guitars with sound holes all over the place.  Inside the guitars I threw traditional bracing to the wind and eventually settled on sound holes in the upper treble bout and an asymmetrical bracing pattern for the top with a floating X brace on the back.  After I felt satisfied with my acoustic guitar designs, I made the switch to electric guitars.

Electric guitars were very frustrating for me because no matter how well the guitar was built, I was limited by the pickups.  If I made a strat-style guitar with an alder body and a good set of pickups it would be a good guitar.  The problem was that if I put that same set of pickups into a cheap 'made in Mexico' strat, then the MIM strat would sound very similar to my guitar.  After a pro setup, the cheap strat could feel and play like an expensive luthier-built guitar as well, and I could do it for less than the cost of raw lumber.  Although my electric guitars were very nice, I didn't feel that making expensive electric guitars added value for the average person.

All this lead me to conclude that it would have been foolish for me to continue making electric guitars.  The electric guitar itself was only a small part of the tone I was looking for and other companies could make what I wanted for less money.  Instead I focused on the guitar pickups.  I spent my first couple years of pickup making just doing vintage style recreations based on the numerous online resources.  Although I love the sound from the 1959 formvar pickups, I found myself again wanting something more.  I wanted to make pickups that really drive my amp.  I wanted those super high output face-melting pickups that all the metal guys wanted.  So I went to work to create them.  I quickly learned that it was much more difficult than just getting more wraps of wire on the bobbins. I also learned that DC resistance is very misleading and although I always keep my DC meter on hand, my LCR meter gets a lot more use.   Different alloys and different magnets change tone so I played with that a lot.   I also changed the length, shape, and height of the pickups to better suit my needs.  It was a game of guess and check until I found just the right combinations for the tones I was after.  The more I did this the better I was at anticipating what my changes would do and I started taking on more challenges.  The biggest challenge was making a good sounding 7 string pickup.  Tone always came first and for a long time I just couldn't find the secret to the 7 string.  Nobody else had either, which is why there are very few good sounding 7 string guitar pickups out there.