Jim Pontius

Jim Pontius, born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1960, is a guitarist who in the 1980s concentrated on New Wave and jazz music. He currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada working as a musician.

As Luthier and Custom Guitar Builder
As a luthier and builder of custom guitars at Downtown Vintage Guitars in Las Vegas, Nevada, Jim Pontius has created several of note, including “Tux” Custom Strat, built by Jim Pontius, with a custom electronics scheme by Woz. This guitar, featuring all-brass hardware, employs the Secret Fatness mod by Woz gives the player Gibson-like tones as well as single-coil thin action. It even has a push-pull pot that activate the Bitch Boost feature for 100x gain.

Other guitars customized or created y Jim Pontius include the “Kennedy” the K Caruso Strat Pontius put this body through an extensive relic process to mimic a K’s own 62 strat. The setup is similar, except it has an upside-down lefty neck fitted with Woz’s custom-made slick-tree string retainer. This guitar also features Woz’s Identity Crisis Mod, giving it not only the standard Stratocaster range of tones, but that added gibson switch can take it into Gibson-esque high output caramel humbucker territory. It changes what the original pickup selector does, and in it’s third setting unlocks a whole palate of quacky out-of-phase settings. It can do tele twang, surf spank, lo-fi thin rhythm, or get added harmonics in this mode without the usual volume drop of traditional out-of-phase configurations. Also, no batteries.