One of my personal highlights of the NAMM show back in January was the Chapman Guitars stand. Rob Chapman is very well known in the UK as a guitarist for two reasons: his involvement in various bands – currently the excellent Dorje – and his superb gear demonstrations and reviews on YouTube.
Chapman Guitars started in 2009 almost by accident when Rob was offered the chance to put his name on the headstock of a signature guitar. Rob asked his audience what they’d like to see in a guitar, and the concept of “collaborative design” was born. Since then, Chapman Guitars has created several models, each one designed with input from the community.

The Chapman ML-1 in Antique Sunburst

The killer revelation for me was the price – fully half what I had guessed! It seemed strange that I had to travel from London to California to meet Rob, when he lived an hour away from my house by train. So we organised to meet up once we were both back in the UK for a chat. A few months later I took a train to the seaside town of Brighton, for beers on the beach and a chat about guitars, the universe and everything. The first thing I wanted to know was how the idea of making guitars based on public voting occurred to Rob.
“It didn’t really happen like that,” says Rob. “I thought, ‘If I’m going to have a signature guitar, then I’d better ask other people what they want – after all, they’re the ones that are going to be buying most of them.’ And then once it was done, I branded it as ‘collaborative design’, to make it sound like I’d been really clever.”
The concept of putting everything to a public vote makes me wonder if Rob might ever find himself making a guitar he doesn’t want to. Perhaps in this situation, I suggest, he might veto the result of a poll? “No,” he replies, before qualifying that somewhat: “Well, the only way I can see that happening is if it was going to make the guitar much more expensive than it was meant to be. But then we probably just wouldn’t make that one of the options in the first place.” All seems very sensible, and indeed, the guitars I saw at NAMM – before I even knew about the collaborative design angle – seemed to me to have been the result of a series of very good design decisions.

The ML3-RC is Rob’s signature guitar, featuring a Hot Rails in the neck and a Little 59 in the bridge.

An interesting idea in the early days of Chapman was to accept the fact that the pickups in lower-priced guitars often end up as trash within a few hours of the guitar being bought. The pickups in these earlier guitars cost “literally pennies.” However, this is no longer the strategy. Rob likens the Chapman-branded pickups in many of the newer guitars to the kit lens supplied with a digital SLR: “The kit lens isn’t a bad lens. It’s a good lens for a lot of different things, but it doesn’t really specialize in any type of photography. The pickups we use now give you a good sound right out of the box, but they’re still not super-expensive and we know that a lot of guys will replace them with something that’s more specialized to the stuff they play.”
Some of the guitars, though, come with Seymour Duncan pickups. Three of these are signature guitars: Rob’s own ML-3 has a Little 59 and a Hot Rails; The CAP-10 (named after Lee Anderton’s nickname “The Captain”) has a classic JB/SSL-1/Jazz setup, and the ML-1 BEA, signature guitar of bandmate Rabea Massaad, has a Custom/59 combo. On top of that, there is the ML-2 Classic, inspired by goldtops of the 50s and fitted with a pair of 59s. And finally there’s the ML-1 Hot Rod, a stripped-down rock machine with a Floyd Rose and a single humbucker. For that guitar, Rob tested the 35th Anniversary JB, and liked it so much he ordered all of them. You can still find them around on the web, and of course the Custom Shop will make you one, but our entire remaining production stock went into those guitars.

The ML-1 Hot Rod features the 35th Anniversary JB humbucker – and very little else.

“When we do a signature guitar, obviously we use the same pickups that the artist uses,” Rob explains. “And we all use Seymour Duncans, because Seymour Duncans are awesome. And then, the other times we use better pickups are when the guitar is already a bit special. The Classic is obviously modelled after old goldtops, and a pair of 59s is the right pickup to use for people who are looking for that sound. And the ML-10 Hot Rod, you’re not going to get jazz players or whatever buying that, it’s for rock. And the pickup that’s in it is an awesome rock pickup.”
Awesome indeed, as this video demonstrates:

There are new guitars coming, though details are not yet finalised. The voting page on the Chapman Guitars website will show you any polls that are currently open, as well as the results of past votes.
And there is new music coming from Dorje too. The band are now in a position where they have “no constraints – as much time as we want, as much gear as we want, free studio space,” says Rob. He plays me a rough recording taken from a recent session where they’ve been jamming out song ideas. Earlier, Rob said to me “I love riffs. All music should be based on riffs,” and this attitude is obvious on the tape. There are riffs everywhere. The album is going to be fantastic.

Rob playing with his band Dorje.

Of course, all of this will be played on Chapman guitars, and with Rob now having his own signature amp – the Victory Silverback – he’s one of the lucky few to have sculpted every part of his tone to his own exact requirements.
For reasons of space, I can’t go into many of the other things that we discussed, but I did discover that Rob started in the field of optics, has a secret double life as a martial arts expert, and is scared of that thing where two mirrors are facing each other and your reflection has a reflection and it goes on for ever and which one of them is the real you and oh my god now I’m scared of it too.
So, best get back to guitars. Are there options you wish you could vote for on the guitars you buy? What feature is it that nobody seems to offer, but that you wish you could have?