Step Sister

You get to pick your preferred, individual maple top, and the finish that best suits it, plus every other aspect of the guitar. Since the number of custom options can be overwhelming, B&G will gladly support you in choosing the right building specifications.

B&G Private Build guitars are hand-built using the traditional techniques from the ‘Golden Era' of electric lutherie, delivering a vintage feel, look, and sound, straight out of the case.

Glue is one of the critical elements in the building of a guitar. Traditional hide glue for the neck joint, fish glue for the frets, and urea formaldehyde for the top, all crystalize like glass when dry, creating a substantially thinner layer between the different parts, which allows for optimal string energy transfer -- significantly better than modern synthetic glues.

Single, one-way truss rods are lighter, and require a smaller channel in the neck. This building technique also demands neck woods that are perfectly aged, plus accurate installation of the truss rod. Private Build B&G Guitars only use this specific truss rod design, for improved tone transfer and sustain.

The vintage recipe for creating the best looking, thinnest and most resonant finish, remains the best. Nothing compares to a perfectly sprayed and buffed traditional nitrocellulose lacquer. It is the only finish that ages together with the wood, becoming thinner with time, merging into the wood molecules, and allowing them to vibrate freely.

Private Build pickups are developed and hand-wound in-house, to ensure that specific nuance of vintage tone we wanted for our guitars. P90s, Kikbuckers, or Humbuckers, either potted or unpotted, based on AlNiCo magnets and 42AWG Lacquered enamel copper wire, are voiced to perfection. The brass cover is also integral to the tone equation, resulting in the unparalleled, airy, warm and organic tone of a B&G Guitar.

Brass is a beautiful metal for guitar hardware. It brilliantly transfers the entire frequency spectrum, without sounding too ‘metallic'. This is the reason why B&G manufactures the bridge by milling a solid block of brass -- yet another B&G exclusive feature.

The B&G solid brass tailpiece, either nickel-plated or lacquered, is built to resonate, delivering a world of overtones and harmonics, like natural reverb. Importantly, each tailpiece is individually hand cast. A piece of jewelry conceived to look just as good as it sounds.

The vintage-sized frets are precisely installed on the fingerboard, using the historic "Rule of 18" (24 ¾" scale), to ensure the comfortable playability that only a vintage instrument can deliver.

The Step Sister is all about playability. While keeping the classic 24 ¾" scale length, the neck joins the body at the 16th fret, and the fingerboard grows to 22 frets. Available in the Cutaway version only, it enables easy and comfortable access to the upper frets for the most advanced rock, jazz, fusion and blues playing styles.

The neck joint significantly impacts upon access to the upper registers. The Step Sister sports a neck heel that affords, at the same time, the maximum transfer function of string vibration, plus the virtual disappearance of those vibrations under the hands of the player. This allows for the most comfortable reach up to the 22nd fret