From the time he was a young child, Mike Thompson was always given a nickname with the word “monkey” in it. Maybe that’s why when he grew up, he chose to climb trees for a living. It also helped him name his new business.
“I've been a tree guy for over 20 years now, working with the City of Lawrence Forestry Department, and one day a coworker told me how he was milling a certain kind of wood and cutting slabs out of it,” he says. “Although it looked nice, his wife complained about the odor and said their garage smelled like a monkey house. And I was like, monkey house? That's a name right there!” In October of 2022, he founded MonkeyHouse Guitars.
Mike, who lives in Tecumseh with his wife Jennifer, started playing the guitar in his teens. So, he combined his job working with trees and playing the guitar into building guitars. Although he wasn’t great at general carpentry, he quickly became a master at building these custom-made instruments.
“It’s just something that clicks with me, and thankfully I've got access to all this wood at work,” he says. “I needed to start taking advantage of that.”
The type of wood Mike uses depends on what a customer is looking for in the final product. For this reason, he does have to supplement what can't be harvested from his job.
The majority of what he builds is done on consignment. “Somebody will call me with an idea of their dream guitar and it's my job to translate that into a playable instrument,” he says. “Bringing those ideas to life and then making it all fit together and work is one of the coolest things there is.”
A simple design may take a month, whereas something extremely intricate can take as long as four. “One of them, named the Multiverse, was a seven string, 32 fret neck through guitar,” says Mike. “It was like an outer space type inlay all over the fretboard with planets and a galaxy. It ended up having 92 pieces of abalone shell and copper in the fretboard.”
He was nervous about what his client would think because Mike knew that he already owned some very high end guitars as well as some really rare ones. When the client received it, he told Mike he couldn’t put it down. It was like it had a magic spell on it.
Another one he built for a good friend who he used to play with in a band. “He gave me zero input as far as what he wanted, and at the time I was super excited because I could do whatever I wanted. But, that quickly turned into me being super frustrated – what was I going to do?”
Out of that frustration was born a new body shape. “My friend named it the Illusion, and the name stuck.”
Mike says it looks like a mashup of two or three different styles of guitar. “It has aspects of a Telecaster, parts that resemble a Paul Reed Smith body, but then other parts of it feel almost like a Gibson. It has become my trademark body shape.”
He is very grateful to have the ability and opportunity to pursue his passion of building guitars. His ultimate dream is to see one of them being played by Pete Loeffler from the band Chevelle.
Check out more of MonkeyHouse Guitars on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
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