The Perfect Single Pickup Junior Guitar | Grez Guitars Mendocino Jr. | Feat. Jules Leyhe
The Perfect Single Pickup Guitar | Grez Guitars Mendocino Jr. | Feat. Jules Leyhe
A tree for a thousand years. A structure for a hundred. Now a guitar. Welcome back to Edge of Breakup.
In this episode, the Grez Guitars Mendocino Junior takes center stage — played by Oakland blues guitarist Jules Leyhe, running into a 1957 Fender Tweed Princeton 5F2-A with a Weber CVA-8 pre-broken-in 8" alnico speaker. The Effectrode Tube Vibe is along for the ride.
Barry Grzebik builds guitars in Petaluma, California — just up the coast in Northern California wine country, between Armstrong Woods State Preserve and Muir Woods National Monument — and his defining material is reclaimed old growth Redwood. Not recently harvested timber. Not farmed wood. Old growth Redwood sourced from deconstructed structures: train tunnels, wine barrels, water vessels, vinegar tanks, barns, and factories. Trees that were 800 to 1,000 years old when they were felled, seasoned for decades or centuries inside the structures they built, and now given a third life as a musical instrument.
Barry plants a tree for every guitar he sells, in partnership with the Redwood Forest Foundation. The wood he uses has already lived two extraordinary lives before it reaches his workshop.
The Mendocino Junior is Grez's take on the classic Junior-style solidbody — an homage to the stripped-down 50s electric guitars that prioritized feel, resonance, and tone above everything else. The body is a single piece of reclaimed old growth Redwood, 13.25" wide and just 1.45" deep, weighing in at an astonishing 5.75 lbs. The neck is one-piece Honduran mahogany with an ebony fretboard, 24.75" scale, and 22 nickel silver jumbo frets. The single pickup is a Wolftone Meaner Dog Ear P-90 — a pickup chosen specifically for its ability to translate the natural acoustic voice of the Redwood body into an electric signal without filtering or compressing that character. Electronics are Emerson 500k volume and 250k tone with a .022 PIO capacitor — exactly the right wiring for a P-90 circuit at this weight and resonance. Music City Compensated Wrap Tailpiece. Matte nitro finish. This is a guitar built to disappear in your hands and let the wood do the talking.
"Building with first growth reclaimed wood originally harvested 100 years ago gave us a head start," Barry has said. "This wood is super well-seasoned and has a liveliness that is hard to get from younger recently harvested trees." That liveliness is not a marketing claim — it is immediately and physically apparent the moment you pick one up. The Mendocino Junior is acoustically vibrant in a way that almost no electric guitar is, and that acoustic resonance translates directly into a singing, three-dimensional electric tone that rewards both the player and the microphone.
Into a 5-watt, single 6V6, Class A tweed Princeton and the warm alnico character of the Weber CVA-8, the Mendocino Junior finds a home that feels entirely natural. Jules Leyhe — Berklee-trained, Bay Area-based, Premier Guitar's best blues slide since Derek Trucks — brings his full vocabulary of slide, fingerpicking, and flat-picking to an instrument that meets him note for note.
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🎸 Grez Guitars Mendocino Junior | Reclaimed Old Growth Redwood | Ron Ellis Pickups P90 | Emerson 500k/500k Bumblebee PIO Wiring
🎛️ 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.
