Not replicas.
Vintage grammar, handmade punctuation. The ghosts are invited, but they do not get to drive.
Small-batch electric guitars
Old California voltage, built by hand.
Familiar shapes, half-remembered from a neighboring reality. Roadside modernism, pawnshop romance, and instruments that feel like they already know a few songs.
Tupelo Guitars are handmade in Southern California by Drew Pomatti. Each build is made one at a time with a focus on feel, proportion, resonance, and the small decisions that make a guitar hard to put down.
Player first.
Big necks, useful controls, resonant wood, and parts chosen because they belong on the guitar.
One at a time.
No catalog maze. No shopping cart. Just finished and in-progress instruments, available by inquiry.
Available / In progress
Current instruments
Finished and in-progress guitars available for purchase or inquiry. Status changes as builds are completed, claimed, photographed, or sold.
In progress
Plume
Korina, P-90 voltage, wraptail directness, and an Esquire/Jr idea brought into focus.
In progress
Craters
An original swamp ash Matti concept: spare, familiar, and a little lunar around the edges.
In progress
Creamy
Swamp ash, cream plastics, P-90 attitude, and a cleaner Esquire outline.
Build language
Classic shapes, slightly misremembered.
Tupelo is the accessible side of the shop: vintage-adjacent, useful, direct, and built like something you might have found in the back room of a music store that closed before you were born.
Matti is the original-design side: still familiar, still player-minded, but more intentionally shaped around a voice of its own.
Marlowe is the darker future corner: thin bodies, heavy woods, noir geometry, and the sense that something followed you home.
Process
Built in the shed.
Tupelo Guitars are built in a backyard shed in Southern California with a bandsaw, router, drill, hand tools, templates, patience, and a lot of looking. No showroom. No CNC glamour reel. Just drawings, wood, hardware, wiring, and the slow work of bringing an idea into focus.
That does not mean casual. Each guitar is planned, revised, measured, questioned, and brought slowly into focus — familiar without being a replica, handmade without being precious, and personal without becoming decorative.
Made for players who like a guitar with a past, even when it was finished last week.
About
Built by Drew Pomatti
Tupelo Guitars is the work of Drew Pomatti, a Southern California builder with a background in art, design, music, brewing, and web development. The guitars borrow from familiar vintage language without trying to be replicas: slab-bodied workhorses, elegant misfits, pawnshop survivors, and the clean confidence of postwar electric-guitar design.
Every instrument is built individually, with its materials, design, and construction working together to create a guitar with its own narrative, personality, and reason for being.
Contact
Ask about a guitar.
For available instruments, in-progress builds, more photos, local pickup, or future work, send a note.
- Email
ampomatti@gmail.com - Instagram
@tupelo_guitars - Maker
drewpomatti.com - Location
Southern California