William Jeffrey Jones Guitars (Something wicked this way comes...)

William Jeffrey Jones has been hard at it building one of the most incredible guitars I have ever seen. (and I have seen some incredible guitars in my day...) I made a special humbucking P-90 for it. Ummm... that's about all I'm gonna say right now. More later this week.

The Searcy Mandolin Pickup ( listen to the mandolin wind...)

Some time ago I rebuilt a Gibson Mandolin pickup for Amy Hopkins who was rebuilding a Gibson electric mandolin that had been damaged in the floods after Katrina in NOLA. Check out the project here.

Ever since then I have wanted to try to make a copy of that pickup. Well, I finally got around to doing it. This is not an exact copy of the Gibson but it's close. It's basically a P-90 that has been cut down. It uses a pair of Alnico 5 magnets just like the original and has about the same output.

It's been said before. Searcy String Works can make a pickup for damn near anything.

This one will be headed out to Ellie guitars soon. I can't wait to see what she does with it.

Song of the week .... Adrian Legg

If you thought I was all metal all the time.... well... I'm not.

I love Adrian Legg!

Mail Call!

Ok Folks, the old ATT email address is dead now. If you are trying to reach me at that address I will not get it. If your spam blockers does not have the new address I can't write you to tell you the old one is gone... Please make sure you have This new email address.

Got some 8 string guitar pickups on the way. More about those later.

In the mean time I thought you might like this old picture of my first pickup winder that was set up in the spare bed room way back when.

The Vampire of Vaudeville ( meet J.A. Allen)

Alright, There are a lot of pickups coming out of the Searcy String Works shop this week. One was a set of prototypes to the Vampire of Vaudeville , J.A. Allen. J.A. is a great guitar player and owner of the Ten Ten recording studio. Check out this video of him playing live.

He was looking for a pickup maker who can adjust the design to fit his needs. The pickups I'm making for him have two rows of adjustable pole to allow for fine tuning of the volume. J.A. likes a controllable over drive distortion so these pickups aren't super hot . The are in the 13K range. Because his live shows are loud and sometimes in small club type venues we wax potted the pickups. They are made with 4 wire leads. Even though J.A. Allen doesn't need any fancy switching on these pickups I like to keep my humbuckers standard.

Hopefully J.A. will love these prototypes. If not I will rework them till he does.

Check out J.A.Allens interview with Searcy String Works conducted by my wife Alicia. Also be sure to check out these links to J.A. allen projects.

The offical VOV My Space page is a great place to hear some of J.A.s playing.
Ten Ten studios home page Runs a list of show dates where you can catch VOV live.

If your into high energy full on rock guitar you owe it to your self to check out J.A. Allen "The Vampire of Vaudeville" .

Masters of Metal ( where I come from...)

Alright, I thought I would let you know a little more about me on this blog. So every once in a while I'm gonna toss in some music that has shaped my life in some way.

Let's start with this classic oldie. Way back in the early 80's I was growing my musical roots and raging against the world by becoming a proper metal head! This was no easy trick because metal was underground and NewWave rules the air waves. Before the internet or MTV us little music fans had to dig around in crusty old record stores for back issues of Kerrang! magazine or buy underground compilation records to learn about new bands. One of those compilation records I got hooked on was a K-Tel record called Master of Metal. This was a fantastic record that ended up being one of the more important record I have ever owned. Check out this killer bit of classic 80's goodness! I have taken the time to rebuild the record via YouTube (ain't the interweb grand?!) . I never knew some of these songs even had videos. After seeing them I wish some of them didn't have videos... but they do and they are huge monuments to early 80's cheese. Check out the great tunes and laugh at the stupid videos with me.

Here is a great song from the short time Ian Gillian was with Black Sabbath. It's all about just saying no to drinking and driving kid.


Here is a classic from Y&T(Yesterday and Today). Front man Dave Meniketti's guitar riffs and monster vocals ate top notch. It's one of the cheesiest videos ever but a great song. Dave is still out there pushing Y&T.






Rainbow was Ritchie Blackmores solo project after he left Deep Purple. He helped guys like Dio, Graham Bonnet and Joe Lyn Turner make a their names as top level singers. This video let's us play detective. Does he save the girl in time?


Now we move on to the heavy weights of the time. Iron Maiden! These boys have a better sense of how to use the new video format to show off their live performance. Steve Harris is still a god!


These days it's hard to think that Rush was ever considered Heavy Metal but back in the day they fit the bill just fine. "The space invader gets by on you.."


It goes without saying that no 80's compilation would be complete without the budget breaking "Breakin the Chains" Video from Dokken. I used to sing this tune with my first band back when... Check out George sportin' the skunk mullet! Great guitar player.



It also goes without saying.... Zebra! In the future this is what things will look like....right?


On this record Dio is not singing for Rainbow or Black Sabbath. He's singing for Dio. That's a 6 year old Vivian playing guitar too. How can you not love Dio?



Here is a fine Zepplinish epic tale of love, death, battle and revenge! What could be more Metal!!??


I can't show you that the next song is "Lick It Up" from Kiss. There's money to be made you know. This video had everyone wanting to know why Kiss took the makeup off. More post apocalyptic shot... All early 80's metal videos were lifted from The Road Warrior.

I also couldn't find a pro video of this classic but this live version is great. Still young, wild and free!


Not many know that before Twisted Sister put on the dresses and makeup they were a biker band. Don't believe me? Check this rocker out!





And .. there never was a video for Van Halens Dancing in the Streets but this will do! Everybody dance!!

My baby wrote me a letter... (change of Email address)

Well, after a million years Searcy String Works is finally changing over to GMail from ATT. In the next week we will be killing off the old ATT email address. The new Searcy String Works E-Mail address is HERE