If you love motorcycles and guitars, here’s an instrument that combines both passions.
Custom guitar maker Terry Johnson has created the Hog-O-Caster guitar using parts from a Harley-Davidson motorcycle for the body. Johnson performs with the Swamp Drivers, where he uses a variety of guitars he’s made using parts from unusual sources. You may recall a story we shared a while back in which he demonstrates an electric guitar he built from a frying pan.
In the videos below, Johnson demonstrates the Hog-O-Caster by playing “The House of the Rising Sun” with a looper pedal, and he performs with it in the Swamp Drivers’ video for their song “Live to Ride.”
The “Live to Ride” video opens with Johnson playing the Hog-O-Caster solo and concludes with him describing how he put it together from a box of old Harley parts around the 4:05 mark. The guitar features a couple of gears for volume and tone controls as well as a clutch cover, brake lever, air cleaner cover and exhaust pipes.
“This is crazy cool—sounds amazing,” Johnson says.
Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
