How Hard Could It Be? The Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall) of an Upstart Guitar Brand

In the ‘60s, Micro-Frets was a spunky challenger to corporate guitar brands. Decades later, William Meadors revived the name. But making memorable guitars—and making money at it—are different things.

Photograph of William Meadors by Michael G. Stewart

“Geez, those are gross!”

In retrospect, William Meadors’ first encounter with a Micro-Frets guitar was not an auspicious one. It was the early ‘70s, and Meadors was one of the countless teens who spent their idle time haunting the music shops of Frederick, Maryland. Nestled amongst the mass-produced Fenders and Gibsons were a handful of decidedly odd-looking guitars, their finishes ranging from polite browns and oxbloods to eye-peeling, radioactive blues and greens.

It wasn’t just the colors that were off. The Micro-Frets aesthetic was futuristic, but in a ‘50s B-movie sort of way. Some body styles were more or less conventional, others awkward and strange—the “Plainsman” can charitably be described as “a playable sack of flour.” Many featured detachable two-part bodies held together by a “Tempered Masonite Gasket” (read: cheap engineered wood). “They were just rattling and creaking,” Meadors recalls. “They felt crappy!”

The guitar-buying public more or less agreed. During Micro-Frets’s original run—1967 to 1975—it’s estimated the company sold fewer than 3,000 guitars, and probably never even approached profitability. Which is a shame: Creative mainspring Ralph Jones was an inspired engineer, responsible for the intonatable “Micro-Nut,” a notably musical vibrato (the “Calibrato”), and very possibly the first consumer wireless FM unit, which allowed the space-age “Orbiter” to be played through an amp equipped with a receiver (or even a nearby radio set).

By the early ‘70s, Micro-Frets appeared to be on a roll. They’d ditched the clunky two-part bodies and gained a handful of celebrity endorsements— most notably Mark Farner of Grand Funk. Given a couple more years, they might’ve fielded a credible challenge to the depressing Norlin-era Gibsons and CBS-era Fenders then flooding the racks of music stores. But time wasn’t on Micro-Frets’s side. On April 18, 1972, Ralph Jones dropped dead of a heart attack. The brand staggered on for a few more years but the writing was on the wall. But though it seemed the name “Micro-Frets” had all but been forgotten, fate had different plans.

Bonus: Tune into a podcasted conversation with Fretboard Journal’s Jason Verlinde on Micro-Frets, the DC punk scene, the epochal early Fugazi shows in Frederick, the use of psychedelics as a healing modality, and more.

William Meadors, the guitar-obsessed teen, grew up to become a software engineer.

He never left Frederick and he never forgot the quirky, quixotic guitars he’d stumbled upon in his youth. The fact that in rural Maryland, a maverick company had dared challenge the hegemony of mass-produced guitarmakers tugged at him. Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Meadors—having hit midlife and casting about for something creative to do—had an inspiration: Why not revive the brand? After all, how hard could it be to mass-produce electric guitars from scratch?

If you were casting a vintage sci-fi movie and you needed an absent-minded professor, you might call on William Meadors. Now 66 and sporting a grey pouf of thinning hair, Meadors is a genial and seemingly inexhaustible talker, given to long, discursive loops that sometimes peter out before reaching their intended destination. One morning not long ago, the part-time musician, sometime photographer, and full-time tinkerer led me on a virtual tour of his workshop over Zoom. Stack after stack of books, chunks of wood, and random guitar parts flitted in and out of focus as Meadors narrated his story:

“When you were a kid in elementary school, did you ever get those ice cream cups, the kind with a little wooden spoon? I used to take those wooden spoons and turn them into guitars, even as a kid! And I was always kinda artistic and interested in design and architecture and such.”

That interest in the technical world led him to a fruitful career in computer programming, but by the early aughts, finding well-paying contract work was iffy:

“I’m sitting on the bench and I’m just kind of getting…disaffected. You know, you’re 45, you’re sitting there going: There’s got to be more to life!”

Meadors and his buddy Paul Rose—like him, a musician and an engineer —had a standing lunch date. And like him, Rose was looking for a project to sink his teeth into. When the topic of Micro-Frets came up, something clicked into place:

“Paul and I were sitting there talking about what we can get into and I said: Hey, how about making guitars? By then I’d actually made an electric guitar and a couple of mandolins or something, you know, just put them together. We’re both hometown guys, so we’re like: Well you know there was this company here, Micro-Frets. What about that?”

They weren’t the only ones. Around this time, a passel of discontinued guitar brands such as Danelectro, Hagstrom, and Framus were popping back to life. In Meadors’ words:

“The way a patent works is you have [legal] protection as long as you’re producing it. You stop producing this stuff in 1975 and you’re no longer protected by it. The name ‘Micro-Frets’ was a registered trademark, but it was abandoned. So I called a lawyer and he went down to the US Patent and Trademark Office and there was nothing active.”

Soon Meadors had connected with Gary Free, who’d worked at the original Micro-Frets factory. Free had intimate knowledge of how to build a Micro-Frets guitar—and how not to. In the old days, Free and his co-workers would melt down aluminum cans in his carport, then use the reclaimed metal to sand-cast new parts. Meadors opted instead to make new, high-quality parts in-house:

“We bought all these [old Micro-Frets] guitars and we pulled them apart, and we got a micrometer and sat there and said: Okay, what is this piece? Do we need it? And so the whole idea was we’re going to make all these parts. So if you want, you could retrofit these new parts on an old guitar. And that way it would be true to the design and that sort of thing.”

What they learned was surprising. Though Ralph Jones never really got his due, some of the original Micro-Frets innovations were truly ground-breaking. Though difficult to set up, the Calibrato vibrato was a demonstrable improvement over standard Fender- and Bigsby-style units. In Meadors’ words:

“It looks like the aileron controls on an airplane with all the bell cranks and control rods. It’s fascinating. And he took those ideas and put them into a guitar, and it really worked! You could push it down and that chord just goes down as if you had a pedal steel guitar and you took the bar and just moved it down the frets and back up. It could compensate for the string tension. And I used to sit there and look at that and think: How can we simplify this?”

While Paul Rose handled the finance and marketing, Meadors got the logistical elements in place. After purchasing a computer numerical control (CNC) milling machine, he taught himself how to program it. And he brought in two more employees including Gary Free and Luke Greffen, then a 19-year-old college student from Frederick. In Greffen’s recollection:

“The shop was in a business park in Myersville: One room with the CNC machine, one room for all of the carpentry, and a little showroom. Gary Free was an interesting, colorful character. His father was in a local band—he was a fantastic picker in the style of Chet Atkins. He was there to supervise us, kind of be our foreman in a sense. There were changes [to the original design]. Some of the old bodies were two-piece, everything we made was single. The bodies were sent to an automotive booth; the finishes were better than on the originals. And we wound pickups with a homemade machine, which was really tedious. We used a cassette tape counter to know how many windings we’d done.”

The pickups would continue to bedevil Meadors and his crew. Some of the original Micro-Frets used a Bill Lawrence-designed pickup; others came with DeArmonds. But determined to maintain an in-house ethos, Meadors elected to make his own:

“My machinist had a connection at a plastics company so I said, well, we can get plastic bobbins and pickup covers made up. I think we used 52 gauge wire, finer than a human hair. If you look at [designer] Seth Lover pickups, they’re all like 42 gauge wire. With finer wire, you get more windings so you can increase your impedance and it doesn’t make the pickup huger. But what you have—which we learned the hard way—is quality control problems because the wire likes to break. It’s just a real, real thin wire.”

Still, for all the headaches Meadors and company took on trying to reverse-engineer—and steadily improve—a vintage electric guitar design, it wasn’t till they entered the marketplace that their challenges truly began.

Mark Farner of Grand Funk playing his Micro Frets Signature

Though the original Micro-Frets was never a household name, the company did achieve some notoriety—largely by giving their product away.

According to Meadors:

“They gave one to Mark Farner (of Grand Funk); they gave one to Carl Perkins. They gave one to (Johnny Cash’s brother) Tommy Cash and the Tom Cats, you know. And they gave one to the guitarist on the Lawrence Welk Show (Buddy Merrill). He had a really nice one. Like a Huntington with a maple body and a maple neck, ebony fingerboard with block inlays on it like a jazz box.”

But in early 2004 as they prepared to ship their first guitars, Meadors and Rose found they lacked the budget and the connections to follow suit.

We ended up pricing our stuff at, I don’t know, like $1595 at the time, which was too low. And, you know, nowadays it would be a $4,000 guitar. I mean, look what Paul Reed Smith sells [them for]. We were running on, I don’t know, maybe a hundred thousand dollars. We were running on a shoestring and we were severely undercapitalized.”

Bad went to worse when the owner of their rented shop space reclaimed the space with just two weeks’ notice. Worse still, after the crew shipped out the last guitars on the production line, the buyer never paid for them. Guiltily, Meadors had to abandon a stack of bodies at the auto paint shop. One was a custom left-handed model ordered by Elliot Easton of The Cars.

Just like that, it was all over. Owed money and lacking a production facility, the whole operation ground to a halt. All told they’d produced at most 50 guitars.

“We’re like: okay, maybe we go on a hiatus. So we just kind of stood back from it all. And I tried to revive it again, back in around 2010. But it’s just too much to do while you’re raising kids and working a 9- to-5 job.”

If the end of Micro-Frets Mk. II was bittersweet, Meadors doesn’t sound defeated. He’d taught himself to program and use a complex computer-operated piece of equipment, set up a functional production line, and built a batch of high-quality guitars. And though the experience left a bad taste in Paul Rose’s mouth, Meadows still hangs out with his former business partner.

Being the crazy dreamer he is, you won’t be surprised to learn that from time to time, he still yearns to give it one last shot:

“Now that I’m retired, yeah I could probably do it. But my wood shop has become a storeroom. I’ll say this: There’s a lot of piranhas and sharks and barracudas out there, and we met a bunch of them. But it was a lot of fun. I wouldn’t trade any of it.”