Dave Wendler playing his Trad model.

While amplification for acoustic guitars has improved over the past couple of decades, with internal pickups now stock on many instruments, it often remains an uneasy compromise between volume and tone. Making your guitar louder sometimes comes as a package deal with unnatural tone, feedback at higher volumes, and other detrimental changes to the unamplified sound of the instrument. For Kansas City–based luthier Dave Wendler, the solution was to create his line of electroCoustic guitars, innovative instruments that fuse the look, feel, and construction of a solid-body electric guitar with the ability to dial in natural-sounding acoustic tones at high volume levels.

Searching for An Acoustic-Sounding Electric Guitar

A guitarist since childhood, Wendler was doing setups and repair work by the time he was in high school. After graduation, he went to work for a local luthier, continuing to learn more about guitars and pickup design and eventually becoming chief quality control engineer at Peavey from 1996 to 1999. For much of this time, he also played acoustic and electric guitar in a country band. Wendler says these years of roadhouse gigs made him yearn to combine his acoustic guitar’s rich tone with the fatter-sounding high-end of a typical electric guitar.

Wendler worked on the problem for many years, finally developing his proprietary MagPi pickup system—which combines a magnetic and a piezo pickup—in 1999 and building the first electroCoustics a year later. The dual pickup system allows the player to blend the sounds of the two very different-sounding units to achieve a wide range of acoustic and electric tones and textures. Wendler says, “The idea is to let the tone be what it is, a hybrid sound that has the responsiveness of a good acoustic guitar but blends that with the tonal advantages of the electric: louder, more penetrating, but still with the acoustic quality.”

Resonant Construction

The solid bodies of Wendler’s instruments are router-carved from lightweight, highly resonant Western red cedar. Surprisingly, the bodies are only about ⁵/₈ inches in thickness under the bridge. Wendler likens them to the carved top of a jazz guitar without the back and sides. “Red cedar really helps to mellow the piezo sizzle,” he says. “I tried the other tonewoods and was convinced that red cedar had the sweeter, mellower tone, better attack transient, and richer harmonics.”

Wendler uses pau ferro for fretboards, tailpieces, and peghead inlays and hand carves each neck from rock maple or, on request, mahogany to the player’s exact specification, offering a choice of scale length, nut width, and neck depth. “I’ve carved about 150 necks and have probably recarved only two, so I can get pretty close to what the customer wants,” he says.

Dual Pickups

Electronically, one of the unique aspects of the electroCoustic is the way Wendler has designed the bridge-mounted pickup. The guitars have a one-inch-tall archtop-style bridge made from quarter-sawn maple (combined with a tailpiece to hold the strings), into which he sandwiches a piezo disc. The reasoning behind the bridge design is twofold, he says. “First, being sandwiched into the maple bridge allows the piezo to have the same resonant characteristics of the bridge itself. Second, it allows as much signal generation from the body as directly from the strings.” He adds, “Piezos have a huge dynamic range that you have to damp down a little bit to get an even response during the attack transient. When you hit the string, the piezo wants to let all the high frequencies come through before it lets the bass frequencies come through. So the magnetic pickup in combination with the piezo slows that down so you get a nice even attack transient. That gives you a natural feel and response very similar to the way an acoustic guitar responds under your hand.”

For the magnetic portion of his guitar’s electronics, Wendler typically installs a Kent Armstrong HJGS6 humbucker in the neck position, but he can substitute a wide range of single-coil or humbucking pickups, depending on the player’s requirements. He describes the electroCoustic as suitable for many kinds of music, from jazz to singer-songwriter material, and feels the instruments are equally versatile for fingerpicking or flatpicking. “You can get a very nice acoustic archtop tone out of the guitar but also real bright, stringy tones if you lean more to swing or Gypsy jazz, and you can do it at ungodly gain levels.”

A Wendler electroCoustic Trad model.

Models

Wendler offers four versions of the electroCoustic guitar, as well as a bass and a mandolin. The Trad electroCoustic is a 14-inch-wide single-cutaway guitar, somewhat similar in size to a Martin 00. The KW adds a second single-coil magnetic pickup in the bridge position to the humbucker and piezo pickups that come with the Trad design. Designed to be played comfortably while seated, the CJ has an 11-inch-wide double-cutaway body that looks a bit like a cross between a Fender Strat and a “cats-eye” Rickenbacker 12-string. The ElectroBro is intended for lap-style slide playing.

The base price for each model (guitar, bass, or mandolin) is $999. Additional options include an ebony fretboard, pearl position markers, lightweight Sperzel tuners, and a black or tortoiseshell pickguard. Wendler also offers custom finishes, including sunbursts or transparent colors like “Bakersfield Blonde,” which Wendler describes as “similar to the ‘limed’ bodies of the Fenders and Gibsons of the middle ’50s; a yellow transparent coat over a white, translucent base coat.”

Pickups for Flattop Guitars

For players who aren’t ready to give up their acoustic guitars, Wendler also offers the MagPi system as a retrofit on flattop and archtop guitars, installed by him or any knowledgeable luthier, with prices starting at $150. For installation in an acoustic flattop guitar, surprisingly, Wendler recommends using a mid-price guitar rather than a high-end instrument. “You can get more overall gain and still keep a nice acoustic feel with the less-resonant, mid-price instruments,” he says.

Asked to sum up his design philosophy, Wendler says, “The most import aspect is that what’s going on under the player’s hand is reproduced. You just move your hand and turn it up. It’s not going to feed back or do a bunch of weird response things. I like things simple.”

Wendler Instruments
101 W. Minor Dr.
Kansas City, MO 64114
(785) 331-6893
electrocoustic.com