Ian Schneller. I began using Specimen Products as a name for my sculptures in 1981 while I was an undergraduate at the Memphis Academy of Art. It was the anonymity of the words "Specimen" and "Products" that appealed to me. It also seemed a funny little ruse—pretending to be a company instead of myself.

After I became a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984, Specimen Products expanded into a music and instrument-making endeavor—first to fulfill my own personal needs, and then for my friends, fellow bandmates, and other musicians. A growing clientele quickly turned this little ruse into a real company.

Since 1986 Specimen has operated out of four different Chicago locations. At first it was housed on Archer Street on Chicago's south side, in an old lamp factory that was a labyrinth of funny little spaces with several walk-in safes and gingerbread hutches. There was an electricity room, an aquarium room, a woodshop, a metal shop, a darkroom, a music room with adjoining recording cubicles and control room, and several bedrooms. We even operated our own radio station with a broadcasting range of only one-quarter mile—enough to reach Interstate 55 with a constant flow of our own music. It was like the rock 'n' roll Little Rascals. Here is where I started to make musical instruments and began my formative study of tube amplification.

With formal training as a sculptor, not as a luthier, it felt like I was putting one over. I read everything I could get my hands on, notably Don Teeter's two-volume set The Acoustic Guitar and Hideo Kamimoto's Complete Guitar Repair. I realized that my instruments were not only quite usable but were gaining favor among local musicians. I sold only one instrument on Archer Street—a Hybrid Pippin— but I had many others in tow as we packed up the caravan and moved onward.

In 1992, I moved Specimen into an old Salvation Army building on Madison Street, an immense two-floor space in the middle of what was then no man's land. It was here that the business side of Specimen started to grow. Guitar and tube amp repair work became a routine demand and my ever-expanding gallery of Singletons gave way to my first standard models—the Pippin and the Maxwell. I also began producing versions of my standard models emulating the traditional production models of major companies. Guitars like my Flame-Top Pippin and Yellow Pippin are examples. I then inverted this concept mimicking the exact silhouettes of major companies' standard models using radically different materials. This led to the production of my Silvertone series, where I used masonite and pine to build the first-ever Silvertone Tele.

Although Specimen was on Madison Street for only two years, many benchmarks were established there (i.e., fine-tuning of the aluminum body, finishing, neck formats, cosmetic embellishments, and various standard processes). By the end of 1994 many musicians were purchasing my instruments and I had a backlog of orders. I also began a small production run of 10-watt Petimor amplifiers that came to fruition after Specimen's third move into a storefront on Division Street.

This new space, located in the heart of Wicker Park, opened the door to a growing guitar repair business which in turn afforded the most valuable vantage point for my own work. After having to correct the numerous shortcomings of my customers' equipment and make sense of the growing number of needlessly elaborate designs on the market, I became convinced that a minimalistic approach with uncompromised structural fortitude is a much-needed credo. I directly applied this learning to my own fifty-watt tube amplifier model, the prototype of which is used as my shop's service amp, running eight hours a day for the past five years. This amp became my working template, my sonic control group, and a reference for new variation.

The Division Street guitar shop soon became an ideal showroom for my new Specimens, with a constant stream of local and traveling musicians coming by to see the latest creations. By 1999 I produced and sold more than 100 custom guitars and tube amplifiers.

In the summer of 2003, due to an expanding service and custom clientele, I moved the Division Street shop into a larger industrial space located on Chicago's westside. This improved workshop is equipped with new tools and fixtures for spraying, buffing, and design. Click here for a glimpse of the workshop.