New Castle native makes guitars make noise at Stocktone Custom Shop

New Castle native makes guitars make noise at Stocktone Custom Shop

By: Kevin Vickery

I first met Sherman Stockton nearly 30 years ago when I was home for the weekend from Nashville.

We have mutual friends and family so I went to see him play with The Jimmy Sparks Band at The Broad Street Depot. It only took about one guitar solo for me to realize that he played with the passion and tone of a blues man twice his age. With every stroke of the pick against the strings, you could hear his influences from Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughan to The Allman Brothers guitar greats like Dickey Betts, Duane Allman and Warren Haynes.

Fast forward the clock another few years, and I had moved back to Henry Country and found myself in a band with him and some other local musicians like New Castle’s Bret Mann and Kennard’s Brandon Hastings. We played as a nameless band and once even did a show where we held a contest to let the crowd pick our name. That’s when we became “Plan B.”

We played quite a few gigs, had some fun times and it’s hard to believe that was over 20 years ago. Sometimes, Sherman and I would butt heads because I was always pushing for a more rock sound and he was more into blues. In the end, we’d always work it out and I credit him for teaching me about 12-bar blues and expanding my knowledge of the blues music genre in general.

When that band dissolved, Sherman went on to play in other local bands like, Soulshine, Blue Eyed Soul, The Unsung Zeros and he was labeled as the “Misdemeanor Cousin in Jimmy Sparks and the Felony Brothers.” His band Soul Biscuits even traveled a few times to Sturgis, South Dakota to perform at the huge annual motorcycle rally held there. He now works frequently with Long Haul Paul, whose Americana/truck-driver music is distributed through Flying J and Pilot truck stops nationally.

Sherman Stockton is the kind of guy who can hear a song on the radio and tell you just by hearing it what type of guitar is being played. He’s a master of guitar tone and has developed a business that coincides with his passion and pursuit of finding the perfect sound that he or any other guitarist may be looking for.

Stocktone Custom Shop

Around 10 years ago, Sherman started a shop out of the garage in his house to do guitar repair and custom guitar builds. Within a year, he had enough customers that he knew he needed to expand his business.

His current shop, located at 311 North 8th St. in New Castle, was found by a fluke when he was walking his dog down an alley one day and noticed a sign tacked to a telephone pole that a building a block from his home was for sale. He opted to buy the building and set up shop rather than relocating, as he had been considering.

His business, “Stocktone Custom Shop,” was originally conceived as a custom-build guitar shop and operated as such for a while, even building a guitar for the late local blues legend, Governor Davis. Eventually his work got more specific, focusing on the part of a guitar known as the “pick-up.”

I asked Sherman to explain what that is in layman’s terms and he said, “A pick-up is a magnet with wire wrapped around it that when installed in a guitar picks up the vibration of the string, disturbing the magnetic field, and then sends an electrified signal to the amplifier.”

He quickly figured out that if he was going to custom build guitars to his liking – or in his terms, “Make a Gibson sound better than a Gibson” – he would need to build pick-ups and not just guitars.

I was curious as to how he would come to focus on such a specific part of the instrument. He explained, “I thought if I wanted one to sound just like I wanted, I’d either have to pay somebody big money to build me that or figure out how to do it myself.”

He has done just that. His work has gained national notoriety and his pick-ups are being used in the guitars of artists like The Kentucky Headhunters, Deep Purple, Derek Trucks and others.

Sherman has upcoming work planned with the band Phish where he will be making custom pieces for their frontman, Trey Anastasio.

He has also been featured in several articles in Tone Quest magazine which has lead to him cloning pick-ups used by Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top for a pick-up he now calls “Sugar Browns.” He’s also known for cloning Duane Allman’s “Magic pick-ups,” Eddie Van Halen’s “Franken-Strat” pick-ups and a backwards built pick-up called the “Izabella” which is designed to give a right-handed guitarist the Jimi Hendrix tone without having to play a backwards guitar.

His custom, hand-made pick-up line has several more varieties including the “Gold Tooth Zebras,” the popular “Monkey Fingers,” the “Hank the Plank ’58s,” as well as “Tobacco Burst Filmores” and reproductions of Tele-Bass and Jazz Bass models.

Sherman’s work through Stoketone Custom Shop has also lead him to do specialized pick-ups and repair work for many local musicians like Brent Flynn, Hunter Lee, Waylon Thompson and yours truly. However, he said that on the local level, his favorite thing was, “Working with kids that are up and coming, still learning and trying to develop their sound”.

Sherman added, “It’s kinda like Indiana Jones finding the Lost Ark. Guys like me are geeked out over old amps and chasing that sound in our head and we might not ever get there, but every time I develop another pick-up that sounds a little better or the amp or the set up, I’m one step closer.”

Even though Sherman still spends the bulk of his time at at his day job, I believe he will eventually find that Lost Ark, and his dreams of his shop being his full time gig will come true. At least I hope so.

For more information about The Stocktone Custom Shop, you can find it at facebook.com/thestocktonecustomshop

Henry County resident and Ball State alum, Kevin Vickery, is bassist and lead vocalist for The Cousin Brothers. He spent several years working in Nashville for some of the biggest names in Country Music before taking over the reins at his family business. If you have a story idea or an event that you think Kevin should cover, contact him at kevin.makesomenoise@yahoo.com