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March/April 2005
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by Trent Salter
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MH: Mercurio Guitars made its official premiere at the 2004 Summer Namm Show. Give us the lowdown on when and how the company was formed? Brett: The company was formed in July 2003 when a very promising
prototype of an instrument that provided pickup interchangeability
was developed. The design still had some issues, but it proved the
viability of the basic design - a high end electric guitar with
highly engineered parts and sophisticated electronics that enabled
any combination of pickups to be used. Peter Mercurio, a studio
player from the Boston area and the owner of the original patent
for the idea, worked with Michael Graves, our CEO and founder, a
guitar collector and enthusiast to set up a company to pursue the
idea. A team was assembled over the course of several months, and
a shop setup in Chanhassen, MN to produce the guitars. Nearly a
hundred prototypes and a year later, we emerged with an instrument
that we were ready to introduce to the world. Mike: These are high-tech guitars, no doubt about it. But
our goal is not to produce a cool "gadgety" guitar. Quite
the opposite. Mercurios are designed to have the look, feel, balance
and tone of a classic, high end guitar. MH: In closing Brett, Mercurio Guitars has certainly hit
the ground running with the launch of these unique guitars. What
do you feel is the next step for the company, how you plan to get
there, and what do you feel has contributed to your incredible success? |
Mercurio
Guitars 
In
our continuing series featuring cutting edge guitar companies, Musicians
Hotline is proud to introduce you to Mercurio Guitars of Chanhassen,
MN. The guitar company with the interchangeable pick up system,
and incredible advancements in tone control technology. "Choose
Your Voice" is more then just a marketing buzz, it represents
revolutionary technology. Traditional designs coupled with advanced
electronics is what this newer guitar company is all about. Here
is what marketing manager Brett Petrusek, and company president
Michael Graves shared with Musicians Hotline regarding Mercurio
Guitars...
MH:
What was the vision for the company and more importantly the
penetration of these unique guitars into the higher end guitar marketplace?
As
far as market penetration goes, that's the big question. We've got
the product side ready, and have made good steps in getting the
guitar introduced to boutique dealers, but there's still a large
challenge ahead in getting "mindshare" in this market.
It's a big business, and the capital costs for a straightforward
marketing campaign - lots of print ads, etc.< are enormous. We're
depending heavily on customer and player enthusiasm for the instrument
to help spread the vision. We work on three things: building a quality
dealer channel, getting some important players to endorse and play
the instrument, and starting to build an advertising campaign that
will help build and enforce the brand.
While
the electronics at work when you're playing are revolutionary, we
believe there's a feel we've built into the instrument that is positively
"old school". When technology is deployed correctly, it
becomes transparent. With a Mercurio guitar, it should be easy to
forget you're playing a high-tech machine. When you're on stage
or in the studio or in the basement playing, the instrument should
perform like any of your other favorite guitars - or better. Then,
when you want to change the voice of your Mercurio, just pop the
current set of pickups out, pop a new set in and, you've got a new
set of tones to work with. For us, the technology should get out
of the way - the focus is on an exceptional instrument that also
has the nice bonus feature of swapping pickups in and out at will.
Mike:
There have been several attempts in the past to do the interchangeable
pickup thing. It's not a new idea. Anyone who's taken the time to
plugin a soldering iron swap pickups in and out of a conventional
guitar has had to have to come to the conclusion that there must
be a simpler way to do this.
What
we ended up with is a system that allows any pickup to be used with
any other pickup in an optimized way; high output humbuckers sound
good with low output singles, active pickups can be mixed with passives,
etc. And you can access all the features of each pickup - if it
supports coil tapping, you can access it easily. If you want to
switch between series and parallel signal aggregation, you can do
that. You can control the phase polarity of each pickup, so they
can all be in phase with each other, or in any combination of polarities.
All of which presents more power and complexity than even the most
ardent gadget enthusiast would want to deal with on a regular basis.
We're guitar players too, and appreciate the power of simplicity.
More than a couple knobs and a switch on the guitar is pushing it
for a lot of us. So Mercurio guitars are simple to use out the box.
One five way switch, a tone knob, and a volume knob. The switching
works like a standard strat; the rule by default is that all coils
are brought to bear on the signal. It's very straightforward to
easy, and easy to remember.
To
access the sophisticated features of the guitar, all you need to
do pull up on the tone knob. This switches the guitar from "standard"
mode to "custom" mode. In custom mode (with the tone knob
up), the five way switch relies on an array of dipswitches on the
back of the guitar. This array of dipswitches allows complete control
over how the pickup signals are used. For each position in the five
way switch, the player can specify the following settings for each
pickup (neck, middle & bridge): 
Visual
esthetics play a big roll as well, a slab style Butterscotch Blonde
T with a 1ply black pickguard or maybe a Metallic Candy Apple Red
or Shoreline Gold S with mintgreen parts are great choices for a
retro/vintage vibe. If rock or metal is your thing how about an
all black guitar hardware and all with EMG 81s.
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