Joseph Cotten is a website developer and one of our main graphic design consultants.
Fast-forward to 1998, and I’m a gangly college freshman moving into the dorms at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG). I joined Living Way Church [insert link to http://www.livingwaygreensboro.org/ here] and was soon playing on the worship team. Somehow I didn’t find out until 2002 that two former members of Living Way (then called Maranatha) were involved in building Guitars. They were none other than Ken Hoover, who’s carpet I had cleaned several times while working for a carpet cleaning company, and John Mark Hampton, who would occasionally play bass on our youth group worship team.
You can get the details of the next part of this story in John Mark’s post on Keneniah, but this is where you’ll get my side of the story. Sometime in 2002, before I graduated from UNCG, my parents approached me to let me know that they were going to give me a graduation gift that required my input. They had spent a weekend with John Mark Hampton and his family, and during the course of the stay, found out that he had been formerly a guitar builder, and though he was now building houses, he wanted to one day go back into the luthier craft. So, knowing my eleven-year longing to own one of these guitars, they commissioned John Mark to build a custom electric guitar for me. I was awestruck! Talk about the perfect gift.
By this point, I knew John Mark fairly well, and would even have called him a friend. He and I, along with my carpet cleaning boss had been having weekly prayer meetings at our rug cleaning shop where we would just sit in a circle drinking coffee, worshipping with an acoustic guitar and praying for each other’s churches and for our city. So, I now began the long but fun task of creating the best electric guitar EVER from the ground-up. John Mark and I spent lots of time in his kitchen and in his wood shop drawing, hunting through catalogs, carving wood and more until we had the specifications done. The shape of the body is a cross between the Joe Satriani model Ibanez, and a double cutaway Paul Reed Smith, but we quite literally drew everything out by hand. There’s an inlay that covers the 11th, 12th and 13th frets of a dove that I drew which is really more like an eagle than a dove. We like to call it the “Dove of Prey”. It’s abalone and mother of pearl. The fretboard radius is compound, and is straight from my Yairi acoustic guitar – the most comfortable fretboard I’ve ever seen. The neck shape is contoured to my left hand, thicker at the low end, flatter at the high end. I knew I wanted Seymour Duncan vintage overwound pickups that would be direct-mounted to the body wood. I’ve been playing a 1989 GIbson Les Paul Standard for years now, and those spring-mounted pickups lose so much tone. I felt that since we were going to have such incredible tonewoods, we needed to use them! So, now as the wood vibrates, it will travel directly into the pickup. It proudly wears the Moriah name, with a mother of pearl and abalone design on the headstock that John Mark and I designed. It’s gonna have a tiger eye finish on a quilted maple top and burled mahogany back. The details of this guitar excite me just as much as the playability and overall beauty of it. One last thing, the name Keneniah comes from two sources: first, it’s the name of one of the Levitical priests in the old testament who’s job it was to teach songs to the people and lead them into battle. Second, it’s the name of one of my favorite Petra songs from the album I mentioned earlier. Maybe one day I’ll get Bob Hartman to sign the inside of one of the access plates.
So, that’s the background of how I got involved with Moriah. I’m also a designer, so I help out with the technical side of the website. Laura and Robbie handle the front-end of the site.
