It's a bird! It's a plane!Nope...It's a shovel guitar.Wow! A guitar made from a real #10 coal miners shovel. What a super idea - to build a real, fully functional electric guitar from a shovel came to Kevin Assoun years ago while he was employed at one of eastern Canada's under ground mines.Kevin explains it like this, ''at the beginning of each shift the men would ride an elevator down into the mine. Now a mine is a scary place.'' even seasoned veterans can tend to be a wee bit nervous on the way down.'' so just to help take the edge off. The guys would tell jokes or some times use their shovels to pretend they were playing guitar.'' one day I thought, '' I bet I could actually make an electric guitar out of one of these shovels.''And guess what? He did!
The #10 shovel that the mine supplied was perfect. '' A real steal'' Kevin grins.Kevin mounted a piece of channel steel on the shovels round handle. This gave him a flat surface to attach a portion of guitar fret board to the shovels handle. Now the handle became the guitars neck and on the opposite end, the scoop part of the shovel, Kevin used (get this) a Popsicle stick! This would become the bridge - (the piece that supports the strings at the base of a guitar. See pic at right with the original shovel - popsicle stick and all. Then with tuning pegs, an electric pickup (we won't say where he picked up the pick up!), volume controls and a few other goodies, the shovel guitar was born.Now that was not the end of it. Many modifications were required over the years, to get it to the stage it is now. A humble beginning? Yes, but wow! Have a listen to it now. It sounds just great! Kevin has played the shovel guitar you see to day on concert stages across the country with many of the world's biggest country music stars. Entertainers like Vince Gill, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, and Grandpa Jones, to name a few, have lent their signatures to Kevin's shovel guitar.I guess you could safely say that country music people from across Canada all the way to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville Tennessee really dig Kevin Assoun's shovel guitar! animal layout @ Unique MySpace Layouts - Movie Layouts - Music Layouts - More MySpace Layouts! - MySpace Tools
