In the summer of 2024, members of CME's buying team traveled to the Powers Factory in San Diego to hand-select tops for a run of guitars. Sorting through the  stockpile of premium figured maple tops, they were able to find the best pieces available to design some exceptional Powers guitars. This guitar features a top picked during that trip.

“San Diego is the pot that I was boiled in,” Andy Powers said at an exclusive press event announcing the debut of the Powers Electric A-Type guitar model. “I’ve lived here my whole life. Knowing what that looked like, what it felt like, and the kinds of things people did—those things shape who you are.”

Designed with the vibrant musical, artistic, and architectural backdrop of San Diego’s North County in mind—think surfing, skateboards, and classic cars—the new Powers Electric A-Type model blends these influences and aesthetics to provide players with a new tool to enrich and inspire their creative expression. Comprised almost entirely of parts made in-house, each Powers Electric guitar requires labor-intensive craftsmanship, meaning they can only be produced in small numbers.

Style  
Inspired by the lines of classic cars, hot rods, and surfboard design, the Powers Electric A-Type guitar sports an asymmetrical shape, without sacrificing visual balance. Featuring timeless styling and modern embellishments, the resulting model is a trussed, slim hollowbody design, for which—like a surfboard or roadster—every line was considered, both for its looks and its handling.

As if the aesthetic links to Southern California’s surfboard culture weren’t clear enough, the colorful knobs and vibrato arm cap on each A-Type guitar are shop-crafted in-house from layers of surfboard resin, which originally was a byproduct of the surfboard glassing process—and, as a result, no two resin knobs look exactly alike!

Feel  
Made to be held with ease, the A-Type is lightweight and perfectly balanced whether played standing or sitting, with contoured armrests and radiused body edges for additional playing comfort.

Not to be confused with an end-to-end compound radius, the A-Type’s Honduras rosewood fretboard features a split radius—meaning it’s asymmetrical from the bass side to the treble side, with the treble side slightly flatter all the way from the first fret down to the end (i.e. up to the highest fret, where the fretboard meets the body), for easy, better-sounding string bends.

Body Architecture 
Each Powers Electric A-Type features an Urban Ash hollowbody trussed with two internal soundposts fitted into a braced, solid maple top—similar to the soundpost in a violin—which allows the front and back to move together, increasing the resonance and sustain of the guitar while reducing feedback.

Pickups 
Available in “full Faraday” (FF42) and “partial Faraday” (PF42) editions, both pickup options are a new design that blends modern magnetic structure with an old inspiration, allowing the strings to vibrate more naturally, producing unprecedented fidelity and colorful warmth—tonal qualities that tend to be at odds with one another, but beautifully complement one another with these new designs—one emphasizing clarity and warmth (FF42); and the other, a firm, brighter response (PF42).

“CamTail” Tremolo/Vibrato 
Since pitch-shifting tails notoriously go out of tune, Andy Powers engineered his own ingenious “camshaft” tailpiece—which he’s dubbed the “CamTail”—with string ramps individually compensated for tension and gauge. So, when you dive on the CamTail Tremolo on a Powers Electric A-Type guitar, the strings move in pitch unison relative to each other—getting sonically closer to the way lap and pedal steel guitarists move a chord and maintain relative pitch.