Electric guitars began to appear in the early twentieth century. In the early experimentation, microphones were placed inside of existing acoustic stringed instruments. The result was an instrument with low sustain that was subject to very harsh and uncontrollable feedback. The solution was the solid body guitar. With a body made from solid wood, there was no resonating chamber, it eliminated the feedback. It followed logically, then, that the more isolated the vibrating string became from the solid body of the instrument, the better the sustain would be. The instruments didn’t have the tone and resonance of their acoustic counterparts.
In 2007, two builders came together with the notion that the last word on solid body electric instruments had not yet been spoken. If the steel diaphragm in a microphone can “pick up” the difference between one person’s voice and another’s, then steel strings on an electric guitar would likewise “pick up” vibrations in the rest of the instrument. In the spring of that year, after a Sunday morning music lesson, Jeff Slatnick showed a maquette of his instrument design to Andy Dowty and explained his concept of a thin vibrating top with no back or sides and a floating bone bridge so that the strings could react to the top and vice versa. Andy began to imagine how a through neck instrument could be built with Jeff’s body concept.
Andy and Jeff built many instruments since 2007. After 15 prototypes, the shape was finalized.
The result is the LimulusTM design which was named after the horseshoe crab because of it’s shape.