Was the solidbody electric bajo quinto custom-made for you?
Cesar: I kind of got the idea myself; it came out of the frustration of having the traditional instruments on the road and having my Macias [bajo sexto] broken a few times. They’re kind of delicate instruments, but they’d get tossed around and broken. And I never really had a real cool pickup sound. I used to have a DeArmond, which was a love-hate situation, because sometimes they’d work and sometimes they wouldn’t. And sometimes we’d have to deal with feedback. We had a month-long tour all over Europe, and the first place we got to, in Spain, my Macias got stuck in the luggage turnstile, and it broke. At home I had a bunch of guitar bodies lying around, so I took this Tele body over to my friend, Bill Antel, and said, “Here’s my traditional Macias, and here’s a Tele body. I want you to copy the scale and make me a neck. Think Fender – maple neck, rosewood fingerboard – and then we’ll make the headstock symmetrical like a Gibson. And I want this thing to be a bolt-on neck. Can you do t
