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Hampton Guitars offers unique electric guitars designed and built by Reid Hampton.

Hampton Guitars is the Blues City’s newest brand…we’re a small-batch guitar maker, with focus on quality, playability, and retro styling. We build guitars of our own design, 100% hand-finished and assembled at our shop here in Memphis, TN USA.

Concept

I wanted to create a guitar that would be equally as comfortable to play either hanging on a strap or sitting on your knee. It is stable, balanced and feels as good against your body as any guitar I’ve ever picked up. I wanted a guitar that was distinctive and unique in its design, even quirky, but also felt familiar somehow. I wanted a guitar that just looked cool, and had that “in the right hands this could be dangerous” look.

Out came the Bel-Air, my take on the single cutaway solid-body electric guitar. I liked almost everything about how it came out, the sound, the overall look, the playability, but there were a couple of things I felt I needed to address before going into commercial production.

The Bel-Air prototype was interesting, but I found that the control plate was too evocative of a Tele, and this guitar is no Tele wanna-be. It gave the wrong impression, and so I reworked that design, replacing the plate with pick guard mounted controls. I also determined during that process that I prefer a 3 + 3 headstock, even if I do incorporate a longer ‘Fender scale' on future models.

Once the design was finalized with these minor mods, I decided to go ahead with ‘limited commercial production’… in other words, make a few and see if anyone buys them!

The Bel-Air

The Bel-Air has a retro sensibility, the body is certainly a stylized design, but still practical and comfortable to play, and very well-balanced. I was thinking 50s car designs and colors when it came together, so there’ll be lots of chrome, white/pastel combinations in finish and trim, or bold primary colors.

These guitars are literally homemade, the only thing I don’t do at the house is the woodwork. I have my bodies and necks cut to my specs by someone who cuts lots of guitars, they do it lots better than I could.I cannot foresee a time when I could ever make or sell enough guitars to make 200, or even 2, of the same exact guitar. I think everyone likes to have something that is unique to them. It’s even more interesting to me to make them all different, see how this or that looks with this, how everything works together.Any small production run I do will have some common parts, like the bridge, on all of the guitars, and maybe a couple will have the same pickups or tuners. Then I’ll see how that looks in some different colors. So there might be a guitar in another color with the same basic guts as yours, there might not. It’s sure likely that colors will never be exactly the same in the future considering I mix them (!), so if you see one you like, buy it! I can also build one just for you, and can get close to any color you might have seen on the site here, or you can send me a sample image.

Pickups & Electronics

With that retro sensibility in mind, I wanted this guitar to sound like a hot rod, a 50s beast with 21st century electronics. I felt like the choice of pickups, the heart of the guitar, will help define this guitar even more so than the unique body style.

Of course, I want the guitars to sound hot, but versatile. Lots of different ‘hots’. You’ll notice I use plenty of big single coils…the Dynasonic type pickups and the P90s. I love single coils…especially thebig ones, they are so articulate and have tons better tonal and dynamic range than humbuckers IMO. To me, the definitive rock guitar sound is a P90. Think about it… The Who Live at Leeds- Townsend’sSG with P90s, how ‘bout Woodstock- Santana KILLING on an SG with P90s, or Humble Pie “I Don’t NeedNo Doctor”- Steve Marriot’s LP Junior w/ a P90. Heck, even on “Love is Strange”, Mickey’s hot little licks are on a Paul with P90s. The only reason they disappeared for so long was that the guitar companiescouldn’t figure out how to get rid of the hum and microphonics of the old P90s, which could be bad,a session-killer. Well, between wax-potting to insulate all that wire and figuring out a creative wiring solution like I have, it’s not an issue. I use a balance knob instead of a pickup selector switch. Thatway, both pickups are wired together at all times, which gives the hum-cancelling only availablebefore in the middle position, both pickups selected.

The single coil pickups in the Bel-Air have great vintage tone, but are wound hotter than the originals,so they push an amp nicely and you can find that point where you can go from clean to breakupjust by picking harder or hitting that double stop. The Dream 90s capture the classic P90 tone, and the Surf 90s have a sweeter tone, less honking in the mids, overall a very nice balanced tone, with a slightly lower output (7.8k ohms S90 vs. 8.4 D90). They both sound SO sweet on a tube amp, it is ridiculous. For rock, blues, funk, alternative, Americana, R & B, soul, classic rock, whatever. And the double coils, the Dream 180s, can produce anything from a jangly rhythm to a searing lead. I like to use one at thebridge with a neck Dream 90, and they have a consistent vintage tone and feel to them. I have also used a hotter humbucker, the Vintage Extra Hot, and am really pleased with the results. Great tone and veryarticulate and touch-responsive for a double coil. They overdrive nicely at 11.2k for the bridge, 9.4k for the neck. These also have killer split-coil tones, with the neck pickup giving a super sweet bluesy tone.

By using pickups that all mount in a standard humbucker rout, I can put any combination of single & dbl coil pickups together on any guitar. I don’t have anything against a Fender type single coil pickup, but there are already tons of folks out there making high-end Fender clones. If you want that tone from a Bel-Air with single coils, simply roll off most of the tone and a little volume to get that leaner, glassier sound. On a Bel-Air with a humbucker, set the mode switch to the coil-split setting to get a very usable single coil tone.

Another functional concern was to make guitars with electronics that would allow the player to access all of the tones possible. I’ve done this a number of ways - by using a balance knob (vs. pickup selector switch), so right there you have an infinite range of tones vs. 3 (neck, bridge, both). On single coil models, I incorporate a ‘boost’ switch to put the two single coils in series, like a big humbucker. This gives a rounder, but less articulate, tone that drives effects nicely, a sound you would normally never hear out of your single coil guitar. I don’t know of anyone else doing this, but it gives you a very usable range of soundsjust slightly unlike anything else. It was an experiment that I think works nicely.

For humbucker models, I use a 3 way switch to give players access to all of the different voices available from the pickups – series, parallel and single coil (split coil). So you can go from a glassy single coil tone to a PAF-type vintage double coil sound to a searing humbucker sound with the flick of a switch.

We take pride in knowing we finish and hand assemble each guitar ourselves. And we do our own wiring, using the best electronic components-

• GFS pickups. These are hot, sweet and sassy, offering several very cool retro stylesand tones. I prefer the single coils personally, but they have really nice HBs, too!
• Bourns potentiometers. These people are serious about making guitar pots. I useTheir mini pots for Vol, Tone, Blend, & switching (push-pull vol or tone pots). They also have high-end and vintage pot lines that I intend to explore.
• Vishay-Sprague Orange Drop capacitors. I like the big orange poly caps LOTS better than the cheap little ceramic ones most folks use...

More on Mode switches…

Bel-Airs with 2 single coil pickups have a mode switch that toggles between normal parallel operation, where the blend knob is active, and boost or series mode, where the two single coils are wired together like a big humbucker. This switch is usually a push-pull incorporated in the volume control, or may be a separate mini-toggle switch. When this is selected, it defeats the blend knob. Think about it, you can’t select one or the other in different proportions when the two pickups are running through each other in series. Also, in this mode, if you roll the blend to either extreme, it kills the volume. If one pickup is totally off, the series wiring doesn’t work because one side is dead and the signal is sent to ground. Until you get used to this, it will surprise you every now and then…(what happened?)

Bel-Airs with humbuckers will have either a 3 way mini-toggle mode switch for each humbucker to allow access to different wiring schemes – series (normal modern HB sound), parallel (more like a vintage PAF tone), and coil-split for a single coil tone, OR have a single 2 way switch that splits both pickups. This will give you so many tones to work with that you’ll only need one guitar at your
next gig…a Bel-Air!

Manufacturing

I could have my guitars made in China for considerably less than I am able to in the US. Yes, even considering the fact that I do it all myself at home! But I don’t want to and never will make mass-produced, ‘factory’ guitars. I want to make guitars that have personality and individuality. That’s not tosay there won’t be 2 Bel-Airs that are similar in terms of color, hardware and electronics, but there will NOT be 2000 of them coming off a production line that are exactly the same. That would defeat the purpose of why I build them in the first place…to create unique, hot, playable guitars that are made by hand with the care that goes into custom guitars. My guitars are handmade, and homemade!

In fact, you’d be surprised to know what brands masquerading as high-end small-batch builders actually have their guitars (or a significant number of them) made in China, just like the big boys. And while there are certainly benefits to this in terms of cost savings and finish consistency, there are some huge drawbacks, primarily on the electronics side, with second rate pickups, pots and other components, and inconsistent wiring and QC. Not to mention the risk and likelihood of the Chinese factories taking your guitar and churning out counterfeits for nothing. They care nothing for copyrights or intellectual property, and the large guitar makers are seeing a flood of copies and counterfeit guitars hitting the market that look just like theirs, probably made in the exact same factories.

Plus, if I had my guitars made in China, what would I do all day?

Finishes

After an attempt to finish a guitar with the traditional high-end finish, nitrocellulose lacquer, I knew I did not want to deal with toxic chemicals on a daily basis. I don’t want to lose any more brain cells, and I sure do not want to release toxic gases and waste into the environment, or into my home. I thought there has to be a non-toxic alternative out there, and after lots of research, I found it… water-based lacquers. They’re really ‘acrylic urethanes’, but they have the qualities you need for a good guitar finish: clarity, hardness, and durability. I have to say I’m still learning on my finishes; they might not be as consistent as factory finishes, but hey, they didn’t kill anybody. Every guitar finished with nitrocellulose releases a stupid amount of benzene, toluene, and other lovely toxic, cancerous solvents. When my finishes are drying, all that is out-gassed is water. I like that! A number of custom and boutique guitar makers are now using this type finish with excellent results, and even experienced luthiers can’t tell the difference when they examine the finish.

While I’m proud of my finishes, they are not ‘factory’ finishes... there might be an imperfection or two, maybe a tiny sand through somewhere, and since I’m doing this at home, I can guarantee every finish has at least one cat hair in the finish.

Bodies & Necks

The Hampton Bel-Air is a solid-body electric with a bolt-on neck. My bodies and necks are cut to my specifications. An alder body is standard for the Bel-Air. It gives a very balanced tonal response with good attack and sustain.

Most Bel-Airs have a maple neck with standard thin neck contour and rosewood fretboard. If you prefer a different contour, medium C or whatever, or a fret size other than the medium jumbos, just ask. We’ll also have some maple fretboards as well for extra crisp attack and extra spank. All my necks feature a Graph Tech Black Tusq XL nut for excellent sustain and crisp tone, and since the Black Tusq is impregnated with Teflon, the strings don’t bind in the nut when you bend, so bends are smoother and the strings stay in tune better.

I plan to occasionally make some mahogany guitars with a fatter neck like a medium C.

Hardware

For the first few Bel-Airs, I found a nice wraparound bridge/tailpiece combo that I really like, based on the old Badass style bridge. The wrap bar has real heft to it for great sustain, it looks good and is fully intonable with adjustable individual saddles and screws on the posts to adjust the entire unit’s position on the studs, unlike the cheesy ‘intonated’ wraparounds some folks use. The most recent Bel-Airs have a GraphTech ResoMax Wrap bridge. This bridge is absolutely the best I have found, and I will use these exclusively on future builds. It sets up and intonates super-easily, gives excellent tone and sustain, looks great and is really good and comfortable for palm-muting.

I have used several different types of tuning machines. Depending on the guitar I may use some retro-looking Grovers or a more modern design with pearloid buttons to match the pickguard and/or pickups. The Super-Rotomatics with the Deco buttons really look good on the Bel-Air, and nobody makes better tuners than Grover, at least in my humble opinion. Again, I intentionally do not have any exact hardware profile for the Bel-Air, I will use good parts that work well and also add some style points.

I tend to use the knurled chrome knobs on the controls, sometimes a very retro ivoroid knob. When I have a push-pull mode switch on the volume control, it’s important to have knobs with tightening screws, so I avoid push-on knobs that like to come off when you pull them!