At this point in human history it shouldn't be a surprise to find out that there are world classed guitars you haven't heard of.

Ruokangas Guitars, handmade in Finland, were absent in the United States but not in Europe. I now have 50 of these guitars in all models.

So the electric guitar is important to me. I'm miles ahead of classical guitarists on this. I've tapped into the musical infinite. Well, you could argue that last so called "tapping" thing but I feel I can make any sound without synthesis or artificial means except electricity and electric stuff.

I don't want to use a synthesizer because it is a technique of processing too much. I hate the interface.

With guitar synthesizers or any other interface for that matter, it is generally so cookie cutter that I don't consider the synthesizer a musical instrument but you can do useful things with it. I just don't like touching cold dead things.

There is really nothing to grab in the instrument sense. You have a plastic or metal interface but it just "triggers" a series of "canned events." It always does the same thing. It barks when its food bowl is empty; one trick pony.

The vibrating string or surface or the column of air manipulated by a real musician is it Baby!

I started playing electric guitar at 18 I think. Please refrain from accusing me of having a 2nd middle age crisis but I have never really given it up. I've spent 20 years studying solely classical music and using the classical guitar. In 1994 I re-addressed the electric guitar and processing.

In 1994, for my master's thesis I studied and wrote about the various intonational systems on the Yamaha SBG-1000. I had installed a transducer nut to amplify and I measured the note from the finger to the nut (logarithmic inverse to the fretting system) and labeled it a "backtone." I measured the pitch from the nut to the string post and from the bridge to the rigid bar.

With the harmonic you have 4 systems on this guitar and more on other guitars with a Bigsby and so forth. I had already talked to luthiers about fixing the headstock pitches on the classical guitar because I was using the "actual" pitches of them and seeing that it was almost standard. I was also using and notating the logarithmic inverse and composing with them. I'm not alone in this I'm sure.

I took the electric stereo instrument and processed the signals, which is sort of like a lot of people have done. I scored and free improvised with it and other folks that were equally not interested in playing anything we knew; a singer, backtone bass player, an electronic set drummer and the backtone guitar was The Vortexans in 1993 or 4. We rarely performed for people but when we did we caused a furor. You either loved us or were highly offended with the structural dissonance and beatnik surrealism.

I now address the electric guitar as a fairly mature composer/performer in the classical realm. The vibrating string is fascinating as a representation of chaos and processors are more powerful than ever. You might say that the early classical music electronic music studio has arrived with the string and the processor.

Going to NAMM 2005 was searching for two types of guitars and processors, steel string and electric guitars and looping devices and signal processors.

I don't want a boutique guitar. I want a guitar with serious character.

The idea of a boutique electric is generally cosmetic. Carved electric guitars with images of Jesus, American Eagles and etched flags, Harleys, beer and liquor brands and assorted images of the lowest cultural common denominators abound.

Exotic woods that might or might not have superior sonic properties also abound and after a while it becomes a blur and the mind gets numb with the plethora of bogus claims for this or that design or wood. In the halls of NAMM trying to listen to an electric guitar, not to mention an acoustic guitar becomes an exercise in futility.

Many of these boutique electric guitars have stock pickups that are on cheap production guitars from places you've never heard of (Americans are the poorest geographers on the planet) and if I had played all of the boutique ones I would probably just call these guitars, costing from five to twelve thousand dollar, beauties that are mere eye candy.

So with all of this in mind I began my search for the two most meaningful instrument makers. This I found amidst a roar of sound and brands.

I'll start first with the Ruokangas electric guitars of Finland.

Finland is the home of the Kalevala (Grandfather of The Lord of the Rings), Jean Sibelius, Aulis Sallinen, Einojuhani Rautavaara (three of my favorite classical music composers) and long-hard winters of white purity and, to this day, unrivaled pristine and natural lands of sparseness.

In Finland there is one of the world's highest percentages of enrolled music students. Music is a national "thing" in this country of five million people, perpetually neutral in world conflict and love of nature abounds in its people. 69% of the land is forest.

Finland, unlike its neighbors Sweden and Norway, didn't have courts that needed the opera and European musical pastimes. The music grew with great originality. Music and culture was more of less formed by the national epic the Kalevala (1853).

A pure and non-toxic kind of nationalism was evident in all of the NAMM Show Finns John and I met. A direct honesty and idealism drew me to Juha Ruokangas on the web where I met Eero Klipi through emails and we spoke of hooking up at NAMM.

Never been too much a fan of the Telecaster. I had one back when I was a kid. It was dead meat because I was a proto metal guitarist.

The strap button is in the wrong place and the vibe is just too country or something. But when I pick up the Ruokangas I finger pick.

I had a Rickenbacker six string too. I had it for a week. I played one gig with it, performing funk music. It wasn't even a good funky guitar. I thought it would be.

The Telecaster as the Rickenbacker, have good uses and now that I am a musician I can use one. The hollow tele is a great fingerpicker's guitar, better than a Gibson 335 in my opinion because the single coils make for a greater wood definition.

But there was no question the Ruokangas Mojo Grande is the most useful and unique Tele type guitar with a sound that is superior in many ways to the stock version.

In all honesty it is a guitar that almost defies description. You can call it a Tele but it is hollow and has Ruokangas designed P-90 type neck pickup and bridge position pickup.

The soundboard is made of flamed artic birch and the back and sides are of Spanish cedar. I did say soundboard and the guitar does have acoustic characteristics that no other Tele type guitar I've played has.

Everyone at the Ruokangas booth was saying a lot about this particular Tele. Not being my kind of guitar I generally dismissed it until I played it and heard it being played. It had a sound both acoustic in nature and also a screaming Tele.

When you make a hollow body guitar you best take care of the woods you use and the Mojo Grande has maybe the perfect combination of woods for resonance and appearance.

The pickup matching is also perfection and this guitar can be finger picked with the most expression of any electric guitar I've ever played, much more of a wood sound than most production hollow bodies in the usual woods and designs.

The beauty and workmanship is of the very first order. Believe me, I have even seen more electric guitars than I've wanted to because who's got the time to play all of the atractive ones that are really nothing but empty beauty?

Now I arrive at the pinnacle of design and workmanship with Ruokangas.

As of 3/10/05 I now have a V.S.O.P. NAMM Special.

It is made of Spanish cedar with Arctic flamed birch and a Arctic flamed birch fretboard.

This guitar has 3 Ruokangas P-90 type pickups and has a sound that compares with a very old Fender but with a good deal more balls because of the large single coil pickups.

This could possibly be the most beautiful Strat type guitar I have ever seen Juha actually produced the very guitar for the NAMM 2005 Show and it is the only one in existence at this time. It sounds better than any strat type I've heard.

What this wood combination seems to do is draw more sustain. When you play any Ruokangas without amplification there is a resonant midrange sustain. It is louder acoustically than most electric guitars.

Using a Marshall JMP-1 the VSOP is what a Hummer is to a compact car. The compact car is a stock strat you could say but you can't drive a guitar or play a Hummer.

What I am saying is that the VSOP is a heavier guitar in sound. It drives a strat tone much better and does sound vintage at the same time. It's clear that old strats sound better than new ones and I'm sure that 80% of that sound is caused by aged and dried woods.

The VSOP has many beautiful touches such as the bound birch top and the Spanish cedar cavity cover. As with all Ruokangas guitars only the best quality materials are used.

The astonishing amount of flame is evident all over this guitar and it is almost impossible to take a bad picture of it in almost any light.

3/11/05 I am sitting with this guitar, a Duke in Sundance.

This is my kind of guitar in that it is the best sounding "les paul plus" guitar. The resonance of all of the "Ruokangi" (plural?) is very pronounced when unplugged. The humbucking pickups on the Duke are specially made to take advantage of the wood, Spanish cedar and secondly the Arctic birch.

The resonance is quite astonishing, both clean and distorted. The sustain distorted is unsurpassed because of the wood resonance and pickup coupling. When I say the Duke is my kind of guitar I would venture to say that now nothing else will do. I have NEVER played an electric guitar that sounded so good.

For contemporary fusion I would say that this guitar is wonderful. The sustain with my JMP-1 Marshall compliments the natural sustain of the wood/pickup combo and it sings effortlessly a clear and transparent distortion. The neck pickup is flute-like the bridge is heavy brass.

The clarity in a distorted mode is especially useful for cluster playing because the mud of distortion can make a flappy sound. The distortion is very tight. This guitar is a compositional aid because it fosters something different in me. Never had an electric guitar of this quality and never thought wood mattered so much to an electric guitar.

I know it matters some but everything uses the same woods; mahagony with a maple cap. I can certainly hear the difference when I play all of my different guitars. I have two Brian Moore guitars, one set neck one neck through, a Gibson US-1, Gibson Firebird VII, a custom Brian May type guitar with very old single coil pickups, a Yamaha SG-2000 and SA-2000 and the Duke has a better acoustic sound than the SA-2000 335 type Yamaha. Look for all of these guitars, except the Firebird, on eBay soon.

I am not a collector of anything I don't play within 48 hours. I have now decided to only own one Duke and investigate other Ruokangas' for personal instruments. I like things easy.

The Duke solid will get as clean as you need with coil-tap but frankly the humbucker sound is so good that I prefer that clean. These are not super-duper power metal pickups and therefore the single coil is just clean and not especially punchy but in all settings you hear wood. Overall the single coil is very useful for chicken-pickin but I prefer the VSOP Custom NAMM 2005 and the Mojo Grande.

I mean no disrespect to American guitar builders but you all pretty much use the same pickups and wood. I believe that it is like string brands, there are 100 brands in the US but only three or so factories. In consequence there is not enough difference between one Duncan affixed guitar and another. I protest most American guitars for their lack of originality and lazy pickup investigations.

The more I play the Duke I come to the fact that this is not a cookie cutter guitar in any way. Everything about all three I have played more extensively is that they are completely individual in sound. Nothing sounds like a Ruokangas!

There is not one American electric guitar that I have owned, that has been produced after the 1980s or so, that has this quality that every Ruokangas has.

These are not radical guitars in design but instead there is an individual take on the classic shapes (Fender-Gibson) but so finely developed as to culminate the old idea of wood and pickup in another unique configuration of great beauty and class. How did you do it in the old days? The above and Spanish cedar is a FIND for electric guitar!

Arctic birch, I'm not so sure that it is sonically any different than maple but the figure alone is justification. Hard to figure how much the wood costs to maple. Afterall it is a non-American guitar and the dollar is about a buck thirty-four to a Euro.

Hopefully you can afford one and if you had one you'd couldn't see how you did without it. HarmonyCentral.com has a number of reviews that are beaming happiness with the Ruokangas.

I spoke with Juha Ruokangas by email and he had these answers to my questions:

NM- So what started you building guitars?

Juha: When I picked up a guitar for the first time in my life. I didn't know how to play it, but I did want to rip it apart to see what's inside. Couldn't do that for a friend's guitar. I persuaded my mom to buy me an electric guitar - which I eventually got as a birthday present, 10-year I think, a yard sale special, one of the worst guitars I had ever seen. Tore it apart and couldn't actually fit all the parts in anymore. That's the beginning of my career - mom being angry to me for breaking up my first guitar...

Seriously. After high school I worked as an assistant in ground school (is that the correct term?) helping out handicapped children. I really didn't know what to do with my life - guitar playing was my heart and soul, but for some reason I didn't ever seriously thought of that as a career. I had repaired guitars a lot by then (succeeded in it too!) but in Finland the tradition of guitar making is not commonly known thing. There have been many good luthiers around, one-man companies building and repairing. Anyway, I heard by accident that there actually is a small school in Finland teaching guitar making. I tried to get in, failed (1st time). Then I decided to start building my first strat copy more or less on my own - with a little help from a luthier I got to know a bit, Timo Mustonen is the name. By the time I applied to the school 2nd time I had finished the mahogany bodied strat - quite ok guitar still (have it on my library wall...) - AND I GOT IN!! That was it for me. No turning back - I had fallen in love with the art of luthiery.

I'll tell you more about the history here, even though your question wasn't actually this broad. I studied three years guitar building, got to know one of the teachers very well. This guy was one of Finland's best-known builders and I helped him internationally because I spoke English well.

I started my own company in 1995. I got it working fulltime by summer 1996, at first, mainly repairing - AND designing my own models. My goal was very high from the beginning. I didn't have the courage to even talk about how high I aimed to my friends - only my wife basically, who was there for me 100% and more.

NM- What was your first model?

Juha: I'm this perfectionist guy you know. I tried several kinds of things, realized quite early what works and what doesn't. I started experimenting with various wood species. Now we get the interesting part that must have to do something with the fact how much YOU like these guitars. I worked as a trainee (as a student) for Liikanen Musical instruments (you know them, Eero told me). I fell in love with Spanish cedar there. The odor is wonderful - and the tap tone of this wood is so alive and open. It looks like mahogany - and I thought to myself, why isn't anyone building electric guitars from this stuff. I must try! And I did - about 2 years later that was (1996-97) when I built the first prototypes of the Duke model, the first own model I dare to call a model. I built a few pieces - one with alder body and maple neck, other with mahogany body/neck, and the third one of Spanish Cedar. I've used cedar ever since. It was so much better in every aspect - well, to work with it is a pain sometimes, since it wears out router bits and saw blades more than mahogany - and the odor is very strong when working with the wood. One of the good sides is that the big boys can't use Spanish cedar - you can't buy a truckload of it! So on top of working so well, it's a specialty thing that only smaller builders can use.

NM- What are you most looking for in a pickup?

Juha: An electric guitar is an acoustic instrument. A pickup should be able to literally pick up the tone of that acoustic instrument in the most natural way possible. (Without knowing the specifics, this must be one of the reasons why you want piezos at nut etc. in your own guitars).

Sure, a pickup can do many things - if you play heavy metal, it's not the same thing. In that case you want power and more power - yet still it's essential that the string-to-string definition is good - in other words, the pickup should "listen" to what the guitar and strings do when you play the instrument.

We have many types of pickups, but they all share this same idea of picking up the natural tone in a beautiful, harmonic way. The pickups of the Mojo Grande are single coils, the bridge unit designed to offer in some way the traditional tele-style thing, when the pickup is fitted into a vintage style sheet metal bridge (that alters the magnetic field and makes the pickup sound like a "tele pickup"). We've used Alnico III magnets in the bridge-up to sweeten up the highs a bit, making the tone "easier to access" so to speak. Basically it's a traditional broadcaster style pickup fitted into one of the most alive resonating and open sounding electric guitars on the planet. The neck pickup then again is a P90 style unit fitted in our special housing - vulcanized fiber base plate doesn't interfere with the magnetic field, on top of that a special maple ring on which the Alnico V bar magnets and coil bobbins are mounted on. This pickup captures nicely the wide string vibration on the neck position - it is capable of producing the familiar tele neck-pu tones yet it is more versatile, offering a wide range of tones that tele can't do.

NM- Is there point of departure or existing guitar that fostered the Duke?

Juha: Les Paul was my first love in electric guitars. But, there were a couple of things I wasn't too fond of. The physical balance of Les Paul is not right especially the newer heavyweight guitars are very bottom heavy - if you play LP sitting down, it feels constantly dropping backwards. The Duke doesn't feel like that - I designed the shape so, that the playing ergonomics is the priority #1. I experimented with shapes to make the balance perfect. Still, I don't like modernistic shapes, you know like strange curving. I want my guitars to be beautiful inn a traditional, feminine way. So, back to the question - the roots of the Duke are in Les Paul. In an old, 50s Les Paul, to be exact, is a lighter weight guitar, with resonant body tone. Not like the new ones, where only the strings vibrate and body is dead.

Juha: As you can see from all I say, I am after all quite a conservative guy when it comes to sound issues. I have played and heard many beautiful sounding old electric guitars - and kept thinking a lot the reasons why some of them sound superior to the others. My conclusion is, that it's a very complicated sum of factors that to some extent cannot be reproduced by the modern mass production lines. Sure, big factory can produce a fine musical instrument from time to time (by accident), but to build guitars with consistent tone quality and build quality, that's something else.

I noticed I may write a bit aside of the subject above, but there you go anyway... I've been personally inspired by many guitar players - and as we know the circle closes at some point too - and these players use certain kind of instruments for their art. Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin, Steve Howe, Jimmy Page, so many others.

As you know, the most talented player sounds like himself basically with any instrument, good or bad. But - this is my theory - I believe that when masters of these two arts - guitar making and guitar playing - collide, it may lift both up one step. When the best player can express his art with the best guitar, it's more than the sum of these elements.

NM- How many guitars have you made?

Juha: I have personally (from scratch, alone) built about 95 guitars. We (me and the boys, 5 guys all together) have built about 200 more.

NM- Could you describe your process in research? I mean, what causes you to feel that a new model could be made?

Juha: Inspiration may come from many directions. I like many kinds of music, and everything goes in phases for me. Sometimes I listen to lot of progressive rock and feel I must build something to fit that. Then it may be blues-era and again I want to express that with my profession. Then again, a customer may want to order something we don't actually offer, and if he's persistent enough, I may end up digging that customers' approach to the point that I want to add something of his vision to our regular line.

All together, I'm not VERY productive with new models. The process of creating just one model is so laborious to me that I consider very carefully before jumping into a new challenge of creating more. I mean, when I decided to offer something for "tele-people", that was a decision that lead me into months and months just to studying and figuring out what the hell is that tele about anyway... And how an earth could I ever offer anything fresh to that concept, done a zillion times before me. Still, after digging quite deep into that world, I believe I found something, both tone-wise and aesthetical appearance. Especially Mojo Grande is something I've never exactly seen or heard, even though it's near enough the tradition not to scare the conservative players away.

NM- New Millennium is offering 50 Roukangas guitars for the United States. Please inquire about the availability and for special orders.

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