Jeremy Spencer - Mona (2020)

Here is another collection featuring Mona, my favourite guitar beauty! Her creator, Jan Ingar Kvisler, is an excellent Norwegian luthier who specialises in wood and tone, and custom-made her for me in 2007. He, being a man of God, told me that he prayed before each session of working on her creation, that he would make no mistakes.

However, to his dismay, he made three significant blunders. The first was that he had miscalculated the length of her distinctive ebony fretboard, resulting in a shorter scale. The second was that when he was carving out the pick-up shapes on her flamed maple topped body, the router gouged out more than was required, necessitating his replacing the customary P90 plastic covers with custom-sized ones of the same maple wood. The third and crowning mistake, which resulted in me christening her ‘Mona’, is due to the varnish machine malfunctioning, resulting in a tiny pattern of cracks resembling the Mona Lisa painting.

Now you see, all the ‘mistakes’ give her character!

Ah! An encouraging ‘life-lesson’, no? For better or worse, the seeming ‘mistakes’ in our personality or physical make-up can serve to enhance our individuality!