Today, John Suhr is best known for the electric guitars that bear his name on the headstock – instruments that are favored by Mateus Asato, Pete Thorn and beyond. But his route into guitar building was forced upon him after a traumatic run-in with a less-than-ideal luthier job.
Suhr founded his namesake axe and amp-making firm in 1997, with Michael Jackson's virtuosic foil Jennifer Batten an early adopter of his instruments. He was still a teenager when he was hit by the luthiery bug, which started as a knee-jerk reaction to a heartbreaking experience.
“I found this jazz-box maker called Bob Benedetto. I was just this 18-year-old kid who wanted a new neck – I wasn’t aware how famous he was,” he remembers in the new issued Guitar World. “I wanted to apprentice for him. He said no, explaining that it’s a terrible business with a lot of work for little reward. He did, however, let me watch him make a guitar.”
Denied a proper education by Benedetto – who built for Chuck Wayne, Andy Summers, and more jazz guitarists than there are standards – he took matters into his own hands.
“In the end, he moved away, so I made a body and glued it together,” Suhr continues. “I took the guitar to someone for the inlays, and when I got it back, I almost cried. The guy had butchered my guitar. It looked like a child had done it with a screwdriver. That was the day I decided, ‘Fuck this – nobody is touching my stuff again.’”
Later, another luthier, Rudy Pensa of Rudy’s Music, New York City, took a chance on him.
“I started off doing repairs in a little boiler room,” he says. “That quickly expanded onto the other floors.”
Suhr and Asato began work on his first Suhr signature guitar in 2018, and his pink electric has since sold like hot cakes.
“You know what’s crazy? My pink Suhr is their best-selling signature,” Asato told GW earlier this year as anticipation for his debut album builds. “The first Suhr I owned – the prototype for my signature – had been hanging on their wall for years because of a quality control issue before I ended up getting it.”
“People would be like, ‘Hey, do you know Mateus Asato?’ and nobody would know. Then they’d say, ‘The guy with the pink guitar on Instagram!’ and people would be like, ‘Oh yeah!’ It went from being a reject to their best-selling signature.”
Decades after that fatefully botch job, Suhr continues to innovate. His latest creation, the OSO, marries a Gibson-like scale length with a Telecaster-type body. Meanwhile, in the tube amp business, the SL68 MKII head has been giving Marshall Plexis some stiff competition.
Suhr’s full interview appears in the latest issue of Guitar World, which also features an in-depth Guns N’ Roses cover story.
Head to Magazines Direct to pick up a copy.
