Orf With 'Is 'Ed!

[curtisa]

7 hours ago, ScottR said:

I was starting to wonder if you'd ever get there, what with the once a month updates.

As always, it looks fantastic. Just goes to show that while taking your time is not so good for guitar watchers, it is very good for guitars.

Carry on my friend, whilst we wait with bated breath.

Never fear. I hadn't forgotten about the project, just had a few other things on the go that were otherwise occupying my time.

Still on the to-do list:

• Decide if the nut bothers me enough to throw another $15 on a Graphtech nut blank
• Raise the height of the neck pickup slightly with some compressible foam
• Find something non-oily/greasy to lubricate the tuners a little (as the string tension come up the tuners get quite stiff to turn by hand)
• Experiment with gain cut/HF cut functions on Fishmans.
• Oil fretboard
• Bust out mad roxxorz skillz for @KnightroExpress

And there's still the sister build for this one to get on with...

[KnightroExpress]

I'm not picky, you can just bring out tepid roxxorz if that's how you're feeling. 

Really though, I've heard the Fishmans a few times and I know they tend to be pretty good. 

[curtisa]

Yes, first impressions of these Fishmans are quite nice, not your typical EMG hifi-ness, although there is a bit of a volume drop between the two voice modes. Some experimentation is required...

[curtisa]

Over and out:

 

And for @KnightroExpress 's benefit, some obligatory roxxorz:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24052640/HM7 Test.mp3

Regarding the Fishmans, cleans were neck + bridge on voicing 1, distorted rhythm guitars were bridge pickup on voicing 2 and the various leads/melodies were either neck or bridge on voicing 1.

Ended up redoing the nut. Despite the fact the strings were unlikley to pop out of the shallow slots I wasn't happy with the way it looked. In hindsight, if I'd planned it better I think I would have tried a zero fret with these string locks. Their proximity to the back of the nut makes fettling the nut slots quite time consuming, as you can't just slacken off the string and pop it off to one side to fine tune the slot with a file. Every time you have to tweak the slot depth the string has to come off altogether and then the string lock needs to be removed from the headstock to give you enough room to use a slotting file.

[KnightroExpress]

Sounds good, looks good... a winner all around, I'd say!

[ScottR]

Despite the fact that I've always thought headless guitars looked like something a shark tried and rejected.....this is amazing. Beautiful design, timbers and craftsmanship.

SR

[curtisa]

Cheers folks,

Don't discount them till you've tried them, I reckon. It's surprising how differently they balance compared to headed instruments. You don't realise how much extra weight at the end of the neck is levering the headstock towards the floor until it's suddenly not there, and the lower cutaway makes playing the guitar seated pseudo-classical style with the neck pointed upwards quite comfortable

[curtisa]

Jury's out on the Blackheart Sassafras though. I like the look of it on the body, but it smells vaguelly like dog crap while it's being worked

[Prostheta]

Wow, I've not entirely been able to get what I want to say down yet. Amazing demo also! Do I hear some Townsend-ish stuff behind the intro? I've always liked that legato of yours too Andrew. Very very very nice.

That's truly 100% modern in every last respect other than that toggle switch. Not a Free-Way? 

On that note, perhaps implementing a Free-Way in conjunction with a simple elective buffer offering a degree of gain/cut and/or unity for the different coil modes would offset the differences in apparent volume?

[curtisa]

Thanks Carl, old bean.

No one does big like Hevy Devy does, although for the demo I was aiming more along the lines of an Australian solo artist (and co-incidentally a headless Strandberg endorsee) by the name of Plini. Check him out and throw a few sheckles his way.

No Freeway on this one, just a standard toggle and push/pull volume pot. But there's a second one in the works that will hopefully get the Freeway treatment. Lace X-bars going in that one, so there's scope for doing some coil tapping along with the usual dual humbucker shenanigans.

[Prostheta]

Do you think there'll be enough ways in the switch to do some monkeying around with gain levels per setting? That would be something worth exploring idly in your mind if you've gotten the Free-Way possibilities figured....

This was Devin's "birthday present" to me back in 2001/2002. 

[curtisa]

Crumbs. Who is that Strapping Young Lad, stage left (see what I did there)?

I would think the Free-way switch has more than enough switchery magic to allow for per-position boosts if you want it. The Fishmans are good in that it just takes grounding one pin on each pickup in order to engage each function, whether it be voice 1/2, gain normal/cut or HF normal/cut.

[Prostheta]

Nice. That sounds like a match made right there. I've got to investigate these Fishmans myself I think. They sound like they deliver what they're promising, either that or you make them sound good anyway....!

Yeah, that was me being told to sing Far Beyond Metal back at the London Garage just after Dev had done Physicist and I was working on the original HevyDevy Records site. Those were some good times, and entirely why I miss my old 5150 mk1 head too. Those things just ruled. Dev turned me onto those before he moved onto other stuff. Lots of love for those 5150s with a bias mod....!

[KnightroExpress]

I'm a big Plini fan, I definitely heard a bit of his influence in your demo. Great stuff!

[Mr_Riddler]

Never been a big fan of headless guitars, but I must say this is a piece of art

[curtisa]

11 hours ago, Prostheta said:

Yeah, that was me being told to sing Far Beyond Metal back at the London Garage just after Dev had done Physicist and I was working on the original HevyDevy Records site. Those were some good times, and entirely why I miss my old 5150 mk1 head too. Those things just ruled. Dev turned me onto those before he moved onto other stuff. Lots of love for those 5150s with a bias mod....!

You were "told" to get up on stage or you were invited? Either way that's pretty freaking cool. I got into Devin after the cool guy in the music class at high school loaned me his Infinity CD.

The rhythm guitar tracks on that demo are software emulations of the 5150. They're excellent go-to amps for that kind of stuff.

[Prostheta]

Told. I was at the bar at the time and had to negotiate my way (drunk....) through the entire crowd to get onstage. To my credit, I did manage to crowdsurf between choruses though. That's about the only credit I could get for my "performance". Infinity was a crazy album; Devin was having some intense personal and mental issues at the time, and that album reflects a lot of that.

What are you using as an emulator? I've been wondering about where to go in that respect as there seems precious little for bass in modern modellers. The last reasonable one was the Line6 X3 series, then they mothballed most of the bass models IIRC. Not sure about Kempers, etc.

Yeah, the 5150 records and plays beautifully as a real head. The bias mod on the mk1 to warm up the tubes was fantastic going through a Marshall 4x12 with G12T-75s or the other one with (I think) G12M-65s!

I've not had that much gear for many many years now....

 

 

Perhaps we should stay on topic instead of discussing how old and nostalgic I feel right now? haha

[curtisa]

Thanks everyone.

15 hours ago, Prostheta said:

What are you using as an emulator? I've been wondering about where to go in that respect as there seems precious little for bass in modern modellers. The last reasonable one was the Line6 X3 series, then they mothballed most of the bass models IIRC. Not sure about Kempers, etc.

VST plugins. There's lots of stuff out there that sounds really good for little or no money. The 5150 emulation I use is "X50" by TSE, which used to be free but looks like it's now a paid plugin.  They also used to do free versions of the Ibanez Tube Screamer, ProCo RAT and Tech21 Bass Driver pedals. The freeware plugins might still be floating around out there somewhere.

Other stuff that's good is LePou plugins (Bogner Extacy, JCM-ish clone, Mesa Dual Rectifier, couple of others that escape me) and Ignite Amps (mostly software versions of their physical amp products). All of them also require the use of an IR convolver plugin to simulate the speaker cab, but there's plenty of free ones around and zillions of cab impulses to try out all over the place.

Bass stuff is thin on the ground, but most of the time I'll run the Ignite Amps SHB-1 plugin in parallel with one the other high gain amp plugins and blend the two channels together to get various degrees of grit.

It's been years since I've been able to crank up an amp and stick a mike in front of it.

[curtisa]

Resurrecting this old thread. You may recall that this originally started as two side-by-side builds, so it's time to finally provide an update on the progress on the second of the pair.

Good God. I'm never doing this again:

[ScottR]

10 hours ago, curtisa said:

Good God. I'm never doing this again:

From some angles that looks like a hot mess. And from others it looks like reflections on a chrome body hanging in a blue room......with black curtains.

SR

[Prostheta]

What went wrong?

[curtisa]

That was the second attempt. And after dozens of practice runs on timber and plastic scraps to work out which paints worked best, paint consistency, water temperature, borax dilution etc. Very frustrating when you think you've got it all down pat and you go for the final dip, the paint suddenly behaves competely differently to how it did during the your experiments, you end up with a body covered in massive paint clumps and you have to strip it all back and start over again.

Even now, a lot of the blue areas are covered with tiny pinholes where the paint has shrunk back as it dried. Kinda looks intentional, like lots of micro-bubbles under water, but not what I was expecting. I think I can rescue some of it with a little bit of gentle massaging with the airbrush (or at least live with the outcome) without having to completely redo it a third time, but it's a messy, time consuming and unpredictable way to paint.

[curtisa]

Executive decision - swirl's coming off, it'll get dipped a third time. Here's why:

 

I could just run with it, but I'll be forever reminded that the guitar is covered in all those little pinholes underneath the clear, and it'll only bug me that I didn't try just one more time to get it right.

So, off it comes:

[pan_kara]

swirling is a pain .. I tried it once so far (incidentally also on a headless body), had to actually dip the body twice in succession since the paint wasn't enough to cover the whole body. I think this is because of the surface area of what I was dipping into - a huge trash can, so deep but little area for the paint to spread over.

But I'm using magic marble, not the borax trick. The multiscale strat is supposed to be swirled eventually, I think I'll try a baby bathtub this time.

Too bad about the bubbles, it came out pretty cool otherwise, love the color combination.

Super nice playing and tones on the demo BTW. I did a song once purely on VST, using the LePou amp sims - I have to say they do sound pretty decent. (moved on to the kemper since)

[ScottR]

In years past, I used to do something similar with painting canvases. It was called marbleizing and it only involved floating oil based (artist) paints thinned with turpentine on water and creating the swirls you want on the surface and then dipping your canvas into that. For the vat, I just made a square frame out of lumber and laid a plastic tarp over and into it and stapled it to the frame. It made a nice big pool, and when the job is done, you just poke a hole in the bottom to drain it. The paint floats all but the tiniest amount stays in the plastic, which you roll up and toss into the garbage can.

SR