There is a new species of stringed instrument, invented by master luthier Neal Moser. It looks somewhat like a large twelve-stringed mandolin with an odd shape. Ever heard of an Interlooud?

Not many people have. At the moment there is only one on the planet. Neal Moser makes customized guitars and basses by hand in his workshop in Arizona, where he also teaches small classes on building guitars.  He took a traditional Spanish instrument, did some Dr. Frankenstein tinkering, and engineered a whole new creation. Here is his description of how the Interlooud came to be:

“A friend of mine named Mike Amatin who lives in Kagel Canyon, where I live, came to me with what he called a LaOud that he purchased in Spain. Many of the acoustic instruments from that part of the world are very cool but not built very well and leave a lot to be desired in the playability department. His was no exception.

So I pulled the frets, planed a slight back bow into the fingerboard and then pounded in new frets. This was definitely an educated guess operation. There’s no way of knowing exactly how much tension 12 strings will put on a short little neck. It also started with a forward bow. I got lucky, when the strings were put back on and it was tuned up, the neck was straight as an arrow.

Mike took the instrument home and played it for a while. Then one day he called me and said he liked it so much that he wondered if it could be made into an electric. I thought about it for a while and then decided to build one.

This is what I got myself into: I decided to modify the tear drop body shape by adding a cut for your leg so you could play it sitting down. That wasn’t a problem. The problem was that no one makes a LaOud fingerboard or truss rod. In fact the original doesn’t even have a truss rod. So, I had to take a regular dual action StewMac truss rod and cut it, rethread it and braze it back together. Next, I took a 25 ½ inch scale fingerboard and lined it up against the original LaOud’s finger board. I slid it back and forth until the frets lined up as close as possible, then cut it off at the proper points. Now I had a truss rod and finger board. The rest of the building process was pretty basic for a set neck guitar. Everything was just shorter.

This instrument records well and makes for some interesting lead sounds. It will also draw a crowd.”