Written By: Dan O'Donnell
Bryan Jeppson has been playing guitar most of his life and,
for the three decades or so he’s played in bands, he’s always been stumped
in his search for a left-handed guitar that provided the tone and playability
that he wanted. So the lanky, longhaired lefty decided that if he couldn’t find
his dream guitar, he would build it.
“I was always frustrated by the scarcity of quality
left-handed guitars,” Jeppson said. “By the mid-nineties I started to relieve
my frustrations by making them for myself.” He said he had an epiphany while
shopping at a music store in Maryland.
“I was in a store in Gaithersburg, MD, and they had a
bargain bin of parts in the back, and there was a left handed guitar body for
ten bucks,” Jeppson said, sounding like a Local Music Gear reader. “And I said,
‘Yeah, I could do something like that.’”
So Bryan put out the ten bucks, started making kit guitars
and moved onward to necks and pickups. Now he finishes his artworks at his
workshop, for appreciative artists. Each guitar is custom made, generally with
his signature hand-wound pickups, and many feature intricate carvings and
inlays on them all done by Bryan Jeppson.
