The Most Unique Guitar in my Collection | Mule Resophonic Mulecaster | Feat. Jules Leyhe

The Most Unique Guitar in My Collection... A hollow steel body tuned to B Standard. A four-person shop in Saginaw, Michigan. And Jules Leyhe playing slide and fingerstyle blues through a 5-watt tweed. Welcome back to Edge of Breakup.

In this episode, the Mule Resophonic Mulecaster T-Style is the story — running into a 1957 Fender Tweed Princeton 5F2-A with a Weber CVA-8 pre-broken-in 8" alnico speaker, with the Effectrode Tube Vibe along for the ride. Played by Oakland blues guitarist Jules Leyhe.

Matt Eich founded Mule Resophonic in 2012 out of a garage closet in Saginaw, Michigan — a man who had trained at the Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery and spent years building instruments for Huss & Dalton in Virginia before a single concert changed everything. Watching Kelly Joe Phelps play slide on a metal resonator and send a crowd into a frenzy, Eich left the venue with one question: could he build a resonator that looked more like the raw material it was made from, and sounded warmer and more acoustic than anything the format had historically produced? He had never cut or welded a piece of metal in his life. He figured it out anyway. Mule is now a four-person shop with a waiting list that keeps growing and a roster of players that speaks for itself — Dan Auerbach, Billy Gibbons, Ben Harper, Ariel Posen, Joey Landreth, Jeffrey Foucault, Jason Momoa, Celisse Henderson, Rebecca Lovell, and Kristian Matsson of The Tallest Man on Earth.

The Mulecaster is Mule's bridge between the resonator and the electric guitar worlds. Single and double-cutaway variations on Strat and Tele-inspired outlines — this one is the T-Style single-cut — with hollow steel bodies, a 25" scale length, and availability in both standard and baritone tuning in a range of powder coat finishes. The Mulecaster featured here is tuned to B Standard baritone — a full step-and-a-half below standard E — and fitted with Mule's own Tom Thumbucker mini-humbuckers, hand-wound in-house. The hollow steel body creates what Mule players consistently describe as a 3D quality to the sound — a resonant, acoustic bloom beneath the electric signal that no solid or semi-hollow wood body can replicate. Eich himself has said these instruments wake up his ear like nothing else, and when he goes back to other guitars he hears them in a new way. That's exactly right. Put one in your hands and your playing changes.

At B Standard baritone pitch, the Mulecaster's deep fundamentals interact with the hollow steel body's natural compression in a way that rewards both slide and fingerstyle playing with an expressive, vocal quality that sits in its own sonic universe. Into a 5-watt, single 6V6, Class A tweed Princeton and the warm alnico character of the pre-broken-in Weber CVA-8 8" speaker, the Mulecaster finds a platform intimate enough to let every nuance of Jules's playing breathe at full volume.

Jules Leyhe is a Berklee-trained Oakland blues guitarist who has shared stages with Buddy Guy, Jimmie Vaughan, Charlie Musselwhite, and Taj Mahal. Premier Guitar called his playing the best blues slide since Derek Trucks — maybe even Duane Allman. The Effectrode Tube Vibe adds its all-tube photocell-and-bulb univibe swirl — triode tubes at real amp plate voltages, Classic and Smooth LFO modes, Chorus/Vibrato switching.

This is the Mulecaster doing what it was built to do.

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🎸 Mule Resophonic Mulecaster T-Style | B Standard Baritone | Mule Tom Thumbucker Mini-Humbuckers

🎛️ Effectrode Tube Vibe

🔊 1957 Fender Tweed Princeton 5F2-A | Weber CVA-8 Pre-Broken-In 8" Alnico Speaker

🎵 Guest Artist: Jules Leyhe

🎙️ Recording Rig: Absolutely no virtual / IR / direct sounds. 4 mics on a real cab. Royer R-121, Lauten Audio LS-208, Ohma Ribbon on front of cab, Royer R10 on back of cab. All mics sent through Universal Audio Apollo x4 with default preamps and no digital preamp emulation plugins, mixed in Ableton Live 12.