A metal-loving musician in Tampa, Florida, has just made a guitar unlike any other ― no bones about it.
That’s because Prince Midnight made his “Skelecaster” using both the remains of a leftover Fender Telecaster and the bones of his dearly departed Uncle Filip, the man who introduced him to the rock genre back in the 1990s.
Filip died in a motorcycle accident in Greece in 1996 at the age of 28, and his skeleton was donated to a local college.
“After 20 years, he ended up in a cemetery my family had to pay rent on. Like, literally in a wooden box,” Midnight told HuffPost. “It’s a big problem in Greece because the Orthodox religion doesn’t want people cremated.”
So, with the help of a local funeral home, Prince Midnight had Uncle Filip’s bones sent from Greece.
But the plot thickened when he declined to buy a cemetery plot for Uncle Filip.
The bones were in pieces, and after a few weeks of showing them to his friends, Prince Midnight decided that since Uncle Filip was a metal head “we’d turn him into a guitar.”
Friends familiar with making guitars from scratch warned him that a bone guitar wouldn’t sound as good as one made from wood, but Prince Midnight was undeterred.
“I didn’t care,” he said.
Turning Uncle Filip’s remains into a ghoulish guitar was a challenge. First, Prince Midnight had to weld a metal bar to the spine to attach the neck to the skeleton.
Then he had to make sure the neck and bridge would be exactly parallel so the guitar strings would freely ring.
He also had to put a jack for the cord into Uncle Filip’s hip bone.
Although Filip’s skull was included in the remains, Prince Midnight said it was damaged and couldn’t be added to the head of the guitar.
Prince Midnight is forbidden by law from selling the “skelecaster,” but he’s having fun stringing along Uncle Filip.
Still, he admits his project caused some awkward moments with his mom.
“At first, she said it was sacrilegious and the work of the devil ― you know how moms are,” Prince Midnight said. “But I asked her, ‘Uncle Filip was the biggest metal head of anybody. Where would he rather be? In the ground or shredding?’”
“She said, ‘shredding.’”
