Story by -Ben Pegg

I went to visit David Schmidt, who has a small collection of custom built guitars and 3 of Kevin’s earliest, and perhaps, most important historical builds– The Brazilian Rosewood Wooden Roundback, the Calico Balmoral, and the first Quilted Maple A-wedge®. All the guitars were built in the 90’s while Kevin was inventing some of the processes and ideas that he uses today. I visited Mr. Schmidt, in response to a modification that he wanted.

First David Pulled out the Wooden Round-Back. This was the first acoustic guitar that Kevin built while he was the lead repair man for Ovation Guitars. Ovation wasn’t interested in the concept of a fully wooden bowl, and he began to produce his own prototype models that incorporated some of the building and design concepts and techniques that he learned while building this guitar. Combined with what he had learned about the structure and durability of all the product lines that Kamen Music Corp. Sold, Kevin sought to create a guitar that would take advantage of the integrity of all of his improvements on traditional guitar building and incorporated them into his very first [deep] Wedge®, which was the precursor to the A-Wedge®.

David Brought a small practice amp to fire up the on board  EMG electronics with a graphic-EQ that Kevin originally installed to control 6 individual bone piezo pickups.

Next Dave Drug out his other early A-Wedges, the Calico Balmoral®, and a Quilted Maple A-Wedge®.

Calico Balmoral:

Quilted Maple: