“You get emails saying they’d like to try a guitar and you think, ‘It’s not going to be THAT Audley Freed, is it?… Then the penny drops”: How Ivison Guitars became Britain’s hottest high-end brand

We last caught up with UK guitar builder Neil Ivison just over 18 months ago – and quite a lot has changed and evolved since then. Fundamentally, Ivison is now making its own pickups in-house – quite an undertaking for such a small operation.

Neil explains: “Basically, I took on Paul Cross to help me build the guitars and he wound his own pickups, so it made sense – if we now had someone on staff who can wind pickups – to make our own.

“For most guitar makers, if you buy in a pickup set, they cost so they’ll go on the guitar. But now we have this little rehearsal room right next to the workshop where we have my touring gear all set up, so we can take a guitar in there and put some pickups in, and if we feel for that piece of wood the pickup needs a bit more zing or maybe the opposite, this one’s a little top heavy, we can swap them for another set.

“Paul can literally go and wind a new set to more suit the guitar. It does make it a bit more long-winded, but we just feel the guitars are going out sounding their optimum, really.”

One fan, of course, is Audley Freed, who now has his own pickup set. “It’s a bit mad, really,” says Neil. “I’ve been an Audley Freed fan for years, in The Black Crowes and even Cry Of Love before that. Then you get these emails saying basically they’d like to try a guitar and meet up and you think, ‘Well, it’s not going to be that Audley Freed, is it? There must be umpteen Audley Freeds in America!’

“Then the penny drops that it is that Audley Freed. But you just find with all of these people, they’re just guitar geeks like us. We were talking about Firebird pickups and how that bridge can be really spiky – famously Allen Collins put a dog-ear P-90 in the bridge [position] on his Firebird.

“We told Audley we were developing a P-90 that fits into a Firebird case, so you still get the look, but it’s actually a P-90 and it takes away that harshness and there’s a bit more middy grunt of a P-90.

“Audley was keen to hear them, so we wound him a set and, although it was our first go, he was over the moon. I think I delivered him a set on a Wednesday and the following night he was using them with Sheryl Crow.”

What about selling the Ivison pickups aftermarket? “At the moment, it’s a no,” Neil tells us. “But never say never! It’s just the two of us building the guitars, so it’s über-boutique, really, and we’re both flat out five or six days a week.

“I tend to handle all the woodwork and finishing,” continues Neil, “and then Paul does the pickup stuff. We’re making around 40 instruments a year, so it’s still very small numbers. Moving forward, we’re looking at the finishing process – we could really do with someone [to help] on that – because at least half of the build time goes on finishing. I seem to spend most of my time in the spray booth right now. I’d rather get back to the sawdust and muck,” he laughs.

A big part of the demand comes from the Dakota guitar itself. “It’s our biggest-selling guitar, about three times more than anything else we do. It really is its own thing now. I’m still waiting for someone to say, ‘Oh, that was my design,’ but I sort of think it was there for the taking – surely someone has done this before? This can’t be mine,” he laughs.

“To be honest, I’ve seen a few that have come after the Dakota, but instead of getting angry I’m actually quite flattered.”

“There are a few more iterations on the Dakota platform we’re planning to do. We’ve had a few requests for a reverse-headstock version and we’re doing one of those for Richard Fortus at the moment – a sort of scaled-back version of a Firebird headstock that’s completely our own.

“Obviously, with the ’25-spec Standard you have there, we’ve done the bound top edge, which I think really works, so we’re looking at different colours and perhaps sparkle tops with Filter’Trons, that sort of thing.

“It’s nice that the Dakota outline shape has been so accepted as it’s a great platform for different styles. We might try a Jazzmaster vibrato, but it’s doing so well at the moment that I’m loath to change it too much. There are definitely things we can try, for sure, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

• “A very clever original design, albeit one that could easily have come out of the Gibson factory in the early ’60s. That’s not easy to do”: Ivison Dakota Standard review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.