Ruokangas Mojo Classic w/ Valvebucker #366-M

To Juha, Making guitars is like playing the blues. It’s easy to stumble your way through the 12 bar shuffle – but to master the Art of Blues? That’s a whole different ball game. He dodged for years the idea of touching this guitar style that has so often been modified but rarely improved upon. We're glad he finally went for it – got the Mojo working good!

The Mojo Classic body is made of thermally aged alder. The bolt-on neck is made of thermally aged maple. Thermal ageing? Read more about it here. 

A NEW SOUND - HOW RARE IS THAT?

The first tube driven electric guitar pickup

Simply put, Valvebucker is the only tube driven electric guitar pickup in the world. No more, no less. And… truth be told – the Valvebucker might also be the most important Ruokangas Guitars invention ever. Why? Because it’s seriously out-of-this-world.

How often do you hear a genuinely new electric guitar sound? I mean ‘new’ to the extent that even if sounds great, it makes you confused? ‘New’ in the sense that you can’t place it into any of the familiar S, T or LP style boxes? That’s right. That kind of a new sound is extremely rare. The Valvebucker is that different.

If Jules Verne was a guitar maker…

The very beginning of this journey roots back to the year 2007. I was on a car ride with a good friend and he asked me this question: “What if the electric guitar would have been invented in 1895?”. This started an unreal session of brainstorming and fantasizing, resulting eventually in what we decided to call Captain Nemo. A steampunk -influenced one-off custom guitar with an active pickup driven by vacuum tubes!

Great looks but what about the sound?

The guitar looked superb, for sure, but we didn’t really know what to expect from the sound. I guess we were hoping that it would sound somewhat decent – but to our pleasant surprise the tone of the tube powered pickup prototype turned out to be jaw-dropping lively, delicious, rich, organic… It just blew us completely away!

I got the Captain Nemo ready just in time for the first ever Holy Grail Guitar Show held in 2014. Here’s a video made prior to the show where I tell you more in detail about the birth of Captain Nemo. And another video shot at the Holy Grail, where you can actually hear and see the guitar being played live. The Guitar Connoisseur magazine also wrote an in-depth article about the Captain Nemo project – read it here!

More Valvebucker-related videos can be found on this YouTube playlist. Enjoy!

Does it get hot? Is it battery driven? How does it integrate to the rest of the signal chain? On this short video Juha answers to a few of the most asked questions about the Valvebucker.