Sushi monster
寿司モンスター

Sushi Monster was a side project during my first year at ESP GCA. A friend of mine, guitarist Tim, sent me a PM with a video of an artist who made a resin guitar with LEGO. I was instantly hooked, but thought that “the insides” had to be way cooler than little plastic building blocks...

I showed the video to my teacher. I had only been at school for about two and a half months, and he said: “muzukashii desu yo” — pretty much “forget about that, way too difficult.”

…Well, he didn’t know my Ishiatama yet. Hehehe.

Living in Japan, I was always fascinated by the craft of making hyper-realistic fake food samples, so I went shopping at Kappabashi in Tokyo. Next step: creating a silicone mold. I had never worked with that material before and bought “Mr. Silicone,” a large high-edged plastic tray, as well as a Telecaster kit, since I needed a body to make the mold.

It didn’t fit the plastic tray, so I had no choice but to sand it down until it did. In the end, that was a good move for another reason — resin is heavy. I had read about it, but when I took the body out of the mold, I was shocked at HOW HEAVY it was. 6 kg, ladies and gentlemen! Wham!

So what to do? At school we had one big sanding machine. Everybody wanted to use it — we were about 20 students. I asked my teacher if I could use it during our one-hour lunch break, so that became sanding time for several weeks. I took off a lot of material to slim the body down. It worked well. It is very round and has a lovely feel to it.

Since this is resin, I definitely wanted to use pickups fat enough to give it a proper sound. Seymour Duncan Hot Rails it was! Why the Strat neck? Well, why not? When going crazy, you might as well fully lose it! XD

I have several other resin bodies in the making — I just haven’t had time to finish them yet, but I will. Stay tuned!

This is a proper instrument, but at over 5 kg it is a tad bit heavy. I consider it art, and I would love to see it in the office of one of the big sushi chains here in Japan, or maybe at the Sushi Museum.