The Offset Builder Has Gone Full Halloween (Bring a Torch)

Every year we tell ourselves we won't do a Halloween thing. Every year a skeleton turns up in the building asking to borrow a Jazzmaster. This year we gave up and let it.

The Offset Builder has a new Halloween box at the top of its options, packed with things no sensible guitar company would ever put in a catalog. It works on all eleven guitars — Jazzmaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Bass VI, Electric XII, Toronado, Meteora and the rest — and it's only around until Halloween, after which everything goes back in the coffin until next year.

Here's what's lurking in there.

Monster Body Art

Some of the finest guitars ever made wear horror-movie posters.

• Night of the Vampire Count — castle, green moon, a man who has clearly never seen daylight
• Tomb of the Mummy King — fire, hieroglyphs and a lot of bandages
• The Werewolf of Whitby — a full moon over the Yorkshire moors, which explains a great deal about Yorkshire
• Creature of the Black Marsh — swamp, scales, teeth, no dental plan

Pick one and the poster wraps the whole body. In keeping with the real thing, the pickguard comes off so you can see the art — on guitars that let you go guard-less, anyway. Relic wear still sits on top, so yes, you can have a battered vampire.

Pickguards: pumpkins, cobwebs, bats and skulls

Four seasonal guards sit in their own row:

• Pumpkin — wall-to-wall jack-o'-lanterns, stems pointing up the neck like they're trying to escape
• Cobweb — white webs dripping with strands, for that "nobody has played this in the attic since 1987" look
• Bats — an engraved colony, packed in tight
• Skulls — a pile of them in smoke, for the player who wants their pickguard to look like it has opinions

The color dials still work on all of them, so if you want a lime-green skull guard, that's between you and your conscience.

Bat fret inlays

Dots are for people who are afraid of the dark. Switch Fret inlays to Bats, and every inlay becomes a bat — eleven different poses, no two frets alike. They come in shimmering pearl on dark boards and solid black on maple, and the 12th fret gets a bigger bat because it earned it.

Burnt: the ultimate relic

We already had Used, Worn, and Abused. For anyone who looked at "Abused" and thought "not enough", there's now Burnt.

• Scorched — survived a small barbecue incident, still gigging
• Burnt — survived a large barbecue incident, should probably not still be gigging

Only the wood burns: the body, neck, and headstock char and blister, while the pickguard, pickups, and hardware come through untouched. Firemen will tell you that's not how fire works. Firemen don't play offsets.

Spooky scenes

The best bit. Four spooky backdrops for the Halloween season.

• Graveyard
• Witch flight
• Tiki Lagoon
• Crypt

Go and build something terrible

Everything in the Halloween box mixes with the normal options, so a burnt Mustang with bat inlays, a skull guard, and a witch on the neck is entirely achievable and, frankly, encouraged. Share your link with us — we want to see the worst thing you can make.

The Halloween options disappear after 31 October. The skeleton has been told. He took it badly.

Open the Offset Builder