Guitars Made by Guitar Players for (Still Other) Guitar Players.
Broncos Electric Company is a small, 3-person guitar studio located in Louisville, Kentucky. We started out building guitars for ourselves, the kind we wanted to take to shows or sessions: versatile, good looking, and reliable with comfortable easy-handling necks, sturdy hardware, high-quality electronics, and hand polished, vintage finishes.
And we’ve kept on making guitars like that. We cut, assemble, finish, and string each one with the care we’d take if we were going to play it ourselves on a stage or in a studio.
Hand Wired Using the Best Stuff
We put the hardest working, longest-wearing components we can find into our guitars: CTS pots, Switchcraft toggle switches, vintage-style cloth wire, Orange Drop capacitors, and Electrosocket jacks. We also cover every inch of cavity space (and the backs of all our pick guards and cavity covers) with real copper shielding to ensure an absolute minimum of hum and buzz.
Hand Carved Necks
There’s nothing quite like the feel of a guitar neck carved by a human. We shape all our necks by hand, often from mahogany, but also from walnut, cherry, or maple.
Hand carving means we can make neck shapes that are virtually extinct in the present day. For example, if you’re a rhythm player who loves the way a 50’s-era V-shaped neck cradles in your hand, you don’t have to mortgage your house to get one, we can make it. If you’re a lead player that likes a modern, shallow C-shaped neck, we do those too. A baseball bat-thick D-shaped neck? If that’s your thing, we won’t judge.
Most Any Look You can think of
Vintage nitrocellulose is all we use for our solid colors and clear coats. We use it because nitro looks great new, but looks even better old, wearing and checking and chipping like the classic guitars of the 50’s and 60’s. It’s something modern guitars with their thick coatings of polyurethane can never do.
We offer the Broncos body shape in most any color, which we can complement with a range of pick guard plastics and edge bindings (we’ll even paint a headstock if you like). We also do grain-revealing stain finishes and sunbursts.
Glossy, satin, natural, new, relic…we can do just about anything.
Choose Your Wood
Some people are heavily into guitar body tone wood. Others are more concerned with weight. Still others just want a great-looking grain. To all of those breeds of guitar players we say: yes! If you like the easy heft of Paulownia, cherry, or mahogany, we got it. If you’re chasing classic tone, then alder may be what you need. For dramatic grain, swamp ash or limba. Don’t really know? Also cool (go poplar).
What About Hardware?
Our stock pickups are mid-priced P-90s and humbuckers that we think sound better than what you get in even some of the most expensive production guitars. But if you have a favorite boutique pickup type or brand you like, odds are we can put them in (and coil split them too if you want).
We use sturdy hardtail bridges with thick, block saddles (at least most of the time). Tuners? Locking. Frets? Stainless. Nuts are hand-shaped and filed from blanks made of real bone.
So what does all this awesomeness cost?
Probably quite a bit less than you think. We're musicians too. We know how life is. Get in touch.