Urban Style Thursday, January 24, 2002 Dexterous Luthier Specimen Products is Chicago's destination for custom guitars and setups.

While an undergrad, Ian Schneller coined the term Specimen Products to describe his sculptures. He liked the anonymity of the term as well as its tongue-in-cheek business pretensions. Following graduate school at the Art Institute in Chicago, Schneller found himself stranded in an art world that had forsaken object-making for the crafting of ideas. Schneller was undeterred. He had been playing music all his life; he simply added tone, pitch, and sustain to the repertoire of color, scale, material, and technique that informed his sculpting. It was a matter of blending his two passions into one.

Twenty-one years later, Specimen Products has become a real business and its products and services – instrument setups and custom guitars and amplifiers – remain low-key but very, very far from anonymous. Some say a Specimen guitar is a work of art; Schneller may simply say his works of art now resemble guitars. For the loyal customers of Specimen Products, the difference is nil.

Word-of-mouth has made this Wicker Park storefront the destination spot for musicians of all stripes. Over the past 16 years Ian and his wife, Nadine, have garnered local renown for providing top-quality setups for all varieties of stringed instruments. Both veteran musicians and the newly initiated have had their axes sharpened in Schneller’s laboratory on Division Street. The nondescript space is crammed with tools, wire, vintage guitars, and a wall of “projects” that includes broke-down guitars, ukuleles and a curious churango mandolin made from the hard-shell of an armadillo.

Yet, while Ian considers it a grave responsibility and honor to provide this level of expert service, custom setups are ultimately a means for his true passion – crafting his own guitars and amplifiers. To facilitate this, Specimen Products recently expanded to a huge loft space on Homan Avenue, west of Humboldt Park. Here, racks of guitar parts face a legion of drill presses, bench grinders, and homemade jigs. A nearby worktable is covered with the raw parts that will assemble into the Royale, Ian’s newly-designed, hand-carved jazz box. There is a spray room for lacquers, an office for drafting, and a space to maintain the ever-growing Web site.

Since 1986 when Specimen Products first opened its doors, the shop has turned out over 106 custom guitars. Schneller’s work is distinctively of the less-is-more philosophy. Played by rock stars and mortal folk alike, the guitars are universally acclaimed for their simple configuration and straightforward construction. Schneller’s propensity for experimentation has resulted in guitars carved from mahogany, laminated in phenol resin or Formica, and machined from aluminum. Regardless of material, each guitar has a richly developed sound as unique as its body shape. His amps lack the superfluous channel switching, effects loops, and distortion channels conspicuous in consumer versions. In their stead, Ian hardwires raw power into a resonant and indestructible casing.

Specimen Products is the Bauhaus of the music industry – each guitar and every amp is striped of excess and eschews ornamentation for a clear, sonorous tone. Schneller’s work urges you to lose the dogma of guitar playing and open up to the potential of the instrument. Between the volume and tone controls on the amp and guitar, insists Schneller, lies the whole of sonic experimentation.

“A broom has good tone if you know how to play it,” he deadpans.

Schneller owes much of his success to being a diligent student of history. His purist attitude toward building and playing guitars comes out of a hands-on matriculation with past forms of the instrument. Most of his guitars have roots in other models, be they the Gibson Les Paul, a Fender Stratocaster, or the revered Silvertone. Sometimes he may even dive further back into music history. On a table in the Homan Avenue workshop, photocopy enlargements of Stradivarius originals are glued to Masonite. These will serve as the template shape for a new guitar body updated with contemporary styling and a modern sound.

Given his love of guitar lore, it is no surprise that Schneller set up Specimen Products in Chicago. For decades since the 1940s Chicago was the epicenter of guitar production. Companies such as National/Valco, Kay, Supro, Washburn, Lyon & Healy, Hamer, Dean, and Harmony have called the Windy City home; Gibson was a short stretch away in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It is critical to Schneller that Specimen Products take a place in this history by continuing the excellence in production that was begun here.

“Specimen” may have been coined with a dry and scientific connotation in mind, but these days it denotes something very closely studied, something of acute interest and focus. In this way, the “Specimen Products” of today describes the tremendous care and consideration that goes into each of Ian’s custom-crafted instruments. A Specimen “product” is a unique thing, both because it is handmade and because it is couched in a rich musical history at the top of its craft. They are truly, as the eponymous store name suggests, representative of their kind.

JC Steinbrunner
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