Brian.Kentosh.com

Electric Balalaika

This is an electric balalaika I built for my senior project in high school. We had this project where after the AP tests where we could do whatever we wanted, and we were only graded on creativity and effort. I'd been learning balalaika for a while, and I'd been trying to find if there were any electric balalaikas around. I didn't find any, so I ended up making one as my project.

I was heavily inspired by Fender guitars in making this. I made the body from alder and the neck from maple. For the dimensions I measured my acoustic balalaika in order to produce an instrument that played like the original. I made the pickup myself because pickups for three strings are not commercially produced, and then I put it inside a Telecaster pickup cover. The instrument is far from flawless, but as my first real musical instrument, and without any predecessors to go by, I feel the end result wasn't all too shabby.