252 – 141223 Bich – Zachary Handcrafted Guitars | Bass| Pedals | Strings

Inspiration

The BC Rich Bich is one of m favorite body shapes. I wish I would have designed it. I first saw the first BC Rich Bich in a guitar shop in 1979, just after I started playing guitar. The image of that guitar made a lasting impression on me. It was a true boutique guitar with innovative neck-through construction, exotic woods, a novel 10-string option, with the additional strings tuned at the body end and very involved electronics and switching. Personally I had no use for the 10 string option or the active electronics with complex switching.

I always wanted a Bich but never had access to one after first seeing it. BC Rich was a small company with limited production and distribution, hand-made and basically built in a garage. A decade later I saw what they did to this great brand under new ownership. The cheapened and bastardized version of BC Rich in the late 80s was a travesty. It was offensive to see how they debased this hand-made boutique guitar brand to cheapened mass-produced Asian budget models, with bolt on necks and repulsive thick plastic paint-jobs. What a shame. The metal community had finally discovered BC Rich in their disgraced form and thought that it was a heavy-metal guitar, specifically just designed for them, which it is NOT.

I made the first Zachary Bich in 2011 (guitar 153, serial number 250411). This is posted on my old website zacharyguitars.net
It now came into my consciousness again for whatever reason and I decided that it was time to revisit this guitar shape again. The one pictured on this page is the first of the new batch of Bich Zachary guitars. Once I get on a streak, I usually make more than one, until I get it out of my system. This first one in this current batch is under 5.2 lbs, which is amazingly light, considering a LP is about twice the weight. However, my version, aside from the body shape, is quite different. It is completely a Zachary and NOT a BC Rich. The most salient difference is my glued neck joint, instead of the usual BC Rich neck-through construction.
This Zachary Bich is joy to play, in terms of playability and also comfort. The pickups are a special design, vintage powered but the slug side is properly staggered to give you equal volume for each string as the slug side is used as the single coil active coils.
This one is slightly relic'd but only aesthetically and not by physical trauma.

Watch the video on this guitar posted to YouTube and Instagram.