The Nefarious Effect: Creating revolutionary, eye-popping new designs on wooden instruments, Nefarious co-founders Marko Babineau and Frank Czajka’s artistic vision, innovation and creative design are rooted in what they call “The Nefarious Effect.” But it’s not just a clever branding idea—it’s reflective of the science that goes into the artistry. According to them, when a large amount of electricity is discharged, the insulator material starts to react.
As this reaction occurs, branching fern-like conductive channels form extremely quickly, allowing the trapped charge to torch out in a large spark. During the discharge process, the powerful electric charge leaves (up to) 100 percent of branching fractals. The stunning result of these intricate details was on display at this year’s NAMM show, where they attracted much attention for their first two prototypes, built by Rex Rose and named for Czajka’s late parents, in a booth they shared with Megadeth bassist David Ellefson.
Quote from Marko Babineau: “For the last 20 years, we’ve seen nothing but retro relic guitars with paint taken off the edges with a chain and sander to create an antique look. That’s all good, but ours have a whole different look from actually burning into the face of the guitar. Also, the Nefarious Effect has no effect on the resonance or tone of the guitar.”
Origin Story: Long before Nefarious, both principals enjoyed lengthy careers in the music industry. Babineau worked for 25 years in marketing, promotion and artist development for Clive Davis, A&M Records and Geffen, directly impacting the careers of Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, Neil Young, Nirvana and Elton John.
Czajka launched his career working with A&M Music Publishing (Almo Irving) before working in A&R for Impact Records and then as a talent manager for Left Bank Management. Later working successfully in real estate, Babineau took a client to a home and saw a raw wood guitar body. He met the seller, Czajka, who did the burn on the instrument as part of his side business of taking reclaimed wood and creating unique burn designs. Two months later, Nefarious was born.
Guitar Center Foundation Auction: Nefarious has contributed their exclusive Nefarious Patch Guitar—featuring a denim design and “patches” of famous band logos—for a charity auction which benefits The Guitar Center Foundation.
Nefarious’ mission statement says it all: “The commitment is to dream, envision and execute everything the team can do. The reward is to see the hallucination come to fruition in our work.” The Patch Guitar was produced by Flynn (foodogluthiery.com).
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