The Fusion Guitars Story

Hey what’s up! This is Dave from Fusion Guitars.

We get a lot of questions about how the Fusion Guitar came about, so we thought we’d tell the story of our journey from Frankenstein‘s Monster to Fusion!

 

I love traveling but whenever I traveled I really missed playing electric guitar. I’d be in all of these awesome places and felt inspired to play electric and to join in on local jams, but it was too hard to take any sort of electric rig with me. I’m a product design engineer and so I decided to make a portable electric guitar. 

The first guitar was a crazy thing I called Frankenstein‘s Monster. It had a little Marshall battery powered combo amp, and on top a Korg Pandora’s box effect unit, so I could get different amp tones and effects. It was great fun to play, but not quite loud enough...

"Frankenstein's Monster" - the first guitar I built to allow me to play electric anywhere, anytime.. 

The Korg Pandora on top was great for different tones and it also had a few basic backing tracks.

 

When I went traveling with Frankenstein, guitarists would come up to me to have a go, I realized I was onto something..

Here’s me and Frankie on Koh Pi Pi island in Thailand around 2000.

 

A few years later I made the next version of the guitar, which again had an internal amp and speaker, but also basic on-board effects. I added a built-in MP3 player for playing backing tracks and for recording what you play. There was also a solar panel on the front to recharge the batteries!

 

The guitar had delay, reverb, chorus, flange, phase and tremolo, plus different amp sounds from clean to high gain.  

 

About 4 years ago I discovered the power and versatility of iOS guitar and music creation apps, such as Jamup Pro, AmpliTube and Garageband. These apps give you hyper-accurate simulation of famous amplifiers and stomp box effects.

 The apps also offer multi-track recording, looping and jam backing tracks.

 

There are also great apps which make learning easy and fun, such as Ultimate Guitar Pro and Yousician. Plus there are excellent instructional videos from world class teachers on YouTube. 

 

When I discovered all this amazing stuff you can do using your iPhone I decided to develop the next version of the guitar which would have iPhone digital integration, this became the Fusion Guitar.