First off, you should know that all J.Nunis Custom guitars are made by one or two guys. Jim Nunis does everything himself by hand unless the order calls for highly detailed inlay. In those cases, Jonathan Brown does the inlay work. Jonathan also pitches in by doing some electronics, fret leveling/dressing and final setup work on occasion.

Jason Piona of Lillitu loves his J.Nunis Custom guitars. He’s also a big fan of Niklas Sundin of Dark Tranquillity. Jason suggested to Jim Nunis that he should build a custom guitar for Niklas and Jim thought it would cool. They contacted Niklas and he was very excited to have a guitar built to his specifications. Niklas gave Jim some guidelines on what he liked about his favorite guitars and what he didn’t like about some others. Jim put all of Niklas’ ideas together to come up with the design concept for the Dark Tranquillity axe.
The aspects that Niklas was looking for in his dream guitar were as follows:

• Light weight
• Fast, playable neck
• Set neck construction
• Stop tailpiece with strings wrapping around
• Single cutaway design
• More “pop” to his tone

Jim took those criteria and ran with them. The single cutaway design and set neck construction were no problem. Nunis has been building guitars this way for years. To get the tone Niklas was after, Jim chose a maple neck with ebony fingerboard and stainless steel frets. This combination gives you a real “in your face” tone. For that “pop” Niklas was looking for, Jim used African Limba (also known as Korina) in the construction of the body for the explosive attack it brings to a guitar’s tone. Jim finalized the tonal design by installing a special set of Seymour Duncan pickups that only Jim knows.

The inlay work is also custom as you can see from the pictures. The highly detailed Dark Tranquillity logos were hand cut from real silver by Jonathan Brown.

In April, when Dark Tranquillity were in Atlanta to play the Masquerade, Jim, Jason and Jon presented the guitar to Niklas. Niklas, of course, loved it. So much so that he played it that very night (much to his guitar tech’s surprise)! As you can see from the pictures on your site, he’s been playing it a lot lately.

Niklas has been a total pleasure to work with and J.Nunis Custom Guitars hopes to have a long standing relationship with him.

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Si ringrazia la J. Nunis Guitars per l'aiuto e la collaborazione.