2026 Easley High School "Spring Fling" Marching Band Fundraiser Donation

 

For the last couple years, my wife has been active in the school marching band (her son plays trumpet). She donates baked goods regularly for events, and she asked me beginning in Spring of 2025 if I could consider donating a build for fundraising. Since then, for the Spring and Fall events, I have donated a build to be part of a drawing, and am proud to have helped earn the school a little money for the band programs. 

 

Full transparency, most of my donations are instruments that are purely one-offs, experiments and/or made from components I might not normally put in my regular offerings. Nothing "wrong" with the parts, they're just not what I'd normally use. However, the end results will be just as playable and toneful as my production models, and so far they've been a hit.

This cheeky fellow features my favorite style Oliva 135th Anniversary box, and is loaded up with a hardtail toploader Strat-style bridge (just like the majority of other builds, because they just work well overall) and a pair of medium-output pickups which are pull-offs from a couple of First Act guitars, which frankly are REALLY decent-sounding pickups---FA pickups are basically standard-ish humbuckers but with a proprietary plate on top of the bobbins (and proprietary rounded-off mounting rings), and longer-than-usual polepiece slugs and screws. The longer slugs/screws mean the main bobbins and magnets are a bit farther away from the strings, lowering the magnetic field a little, but then the slugs/screws are still at normal distance, adding back in some focus and making for a humbucker that has a remarkable clarity, especially for a "cheap pickup". The First Act guitars got a bad reputation as "cheap department store guitars", but over the years, people have learned that just like with many bigger companies, quality control on some might've been iffy, but on others, it was quite good, and those guitars are perfectly serviceable, giggable and decent. I don't hesitate to use their components, if I run across a beat-up old FA that could be upcycled for a build.(or even to use as-is). Okay, First Act rant over...

Each pickup has a volume control (plus a volume control for the passive piezo under the lid), and a master tone control. I like a 3-way switch, but there's something to be said about just blending volumes at-will instead, which is why I don't put switches on most of my builds. It makes you play a little different, and sometimes more interactively.

Not too shabby for a neck I didn't want to use on a regular build, to turn it into a great-playing, awesome-sounding one-of-a-kind instrument someone got to take home for the price of a couple of entries into a drawing!