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Powers Electric Guitars — The A-Type, Built for Tomorrow's Player
Andy Powers made his first guitar at seven years old. It exploded when he tried to string it up. He has spent the decades since getting considerably better at the craft, including a long tenure as Chief Guitar Designer at Taylor Guitars where Bob Taylor described him as able to solve problems with musical instruments in the most fundamental way, looking at the problem through a new lens to create simple, elegant solutions. George Gruhn, whose judgment on instrument quality is beyond question, called him one of the most knowledgeable people he has ever encountered in the musical instrument business. John Foreman of Switchfoot noted that Andy consistently surprises him, whether it's guitar playing, guitar building, or general knowledge about the ocean, physics, or pretty much anything.
Growing up in North County San Diego in the collision of surf, skateboard, hot rod, music, and design cultures, Andy absorbed a visual and sonic sensibility that runs through every detail of the Powers Electric A-Type. History is full of amazing electric guitars, he says. He didn't see a need to recreate them. He wanted something that shared in the inspirations of past makers but was created for tomorrow's player. It meant creating a fresh design from the ground up based on decades of work and study.
The A-Type
The A-Type is a fully enclosed slim hollowbody with a trussed internal structure and two solid-wood soundposts fitted into a braced solid-wood top, allowing the top and back to move in tandem to maximize resonance, suppress feedback, and create a lyrical sustain that neither a solid-body nor a conventional hollow-body can approach in quite the same way. The body is inspired by the lines of classic cars, hot rods, and surfboard design, asymmetrical without sacrificing visual balance, timeless in its styling and unmistakable from every angle.
The fretboard uses a split radius geometry, asymmetrical from the bass side to the treble side, with the treble side running slightly flatter all the way from the first fret to the last. The result is maximum playability across all fretting positions and choke-free string bending at the upper register, two things that no end-to-end compound radius can deliver simultaneously.
Two proprietary pickup designs give players distinct tonal options within a single instrument. The FF42, a full Faraday cage pickup wound with 42-gauge wire, emphasizes clarity and warmth, with an engine-turned top that is as visually refined as the instrument it sits in. The PF42, a partial Faraday cage design using the pickguard material as its top, produces a firmer, brighter response with strong note definition and cut. Two variations of the same modern magnetic structure philosophy, each one designed to allow the strings to vibrate more naturally and produce both fidelity and colorful warmth, qualities that tend to be at odds with each other in conventional pickup design.
Two tailpiece options complete the specification. The Camtail is Andy's proprietary camshaft-style vibrato with string ramps compensated for tension and gauge so that all strings move in pitch relative to each other, addressing the most persistent problem with vibrato systems since they were first introduced. The Toploader hardtail is the fixed-pitch alternative, locking in sustain and making string changes effortless.
The Colors
If some of the A-Type's finishes look like hot rod paint, it is because they are. Andy designed two finish styles, one featuring solid classic auto-inspired colors and the other with select figured maple and transparent bursts, across a palette that now exceeds one hundred individual options spanning every color family from Glacier Burst and Lava Burst to Hemi Orange, Guards Red, and the color-shifting Chroma series in Algae, Borealis, Chameleon, Cosmos, Silver Cranberry, Stratus, and Watermelon. No two players need to show up to the same gig in the same guitar.
Browse our full selection of Powers Electric A-Type guitars, and reach out if you'd like guidance on pickup or tailpiece configuration.