Project?? Maybe not

[fidgec94]

I have a squire strat body purchased from ebay, you can tell its squire cos it cost £35 and its ply-wood.

Funny though, its routed Hum-Sing-Hum, do they do this for versatility and then load with 3 single coils? I dont think fender do a h/s/h guitar do they?

I digress......i bought this on a whim cos it was cheap but im not sure whether i should do this as a project. The body is ply, nothing good, infact pretty crap. Now, do i....

a)go for it, cos once the rest of the parts are in, it'll sound fine (this would be using a pre-made neck)

b)throw it in the skip, it'll never sound good or the cost of harware to make it sound good would be astronomically compared to the value of the body.

Ive been toying with the idea of buying a new guitar (£300 region), but if i do this squire body thing, i wouldnt be able to afford the new guitar well.

I guess the third option is to store the body, not buy a new guitar and go for build from scratch project...but even that would be using a pre-frabricated neck cos neck building scares me!!

Any suggestions?

Chris

[Hotrock]

Use the neck and hardware (bridge/machine heads) off the dodgy plywood guitar and make your own body. You should be able to make a body and buy pickups for under 300 quid. Just an idea anyway.

Good luck geezer.

[GuitarMaestro]

Funny though, its routed Hum-Sing-Hum, do they do this for versatility and then load with 3 single coils? I dont think fender do a h/s/h guitar do they?

I think the do it that way in order to cut production costs. If you route all bodies the same it is cheaper than routing for every PU configuration the sell. I dont know if they sell a H/S/H guitar though. But the definately sell a S/S/H guitar. Doing H/S/H would kill the nature of a Strat though. The nice single-coil neck PU is what makes a Strat sound special in my opinion.

a)go for it, cos once the rest of the parts are in, it'll sound fine (this would be using a pre-made neck)

b)throw it in the skip, it'll never sound good or the cost of harware to make it sound good would be astronomically compared to the value of the body.

Difficult question. I have a cheap Martinez Playwood Strat which I picked up for about $120 brand new. The plywood definately does not sound as bad as one would tend to think. I bought the guitar without knowing that it is plywood and I thought it sounds ok for the price. I cannot really judge the sound of the plywood, because the PU's are very cheap too, so I cannot isolate the sound of the plywood. It's my feeling though that the plywood sounds a little lifeless and bland but not terrible. I think if you add good PU's and a cheap but ok neck, then you'll end up with a quite usable guitar. It will not sound great, but it will definately not sound terrible. If you can get a cheap neck and cheap but good PU's then I would go for it. If not then I think its not worth it to pay much money for hardware to end up with a plywood guitar. There are alot cheap and good non-plywood guitars out there.

HTH,

Marcel Knapp!

[Hotrock]

Just looked at your original post again. As you've only got the body and not the neck just ignore me. I'm off to hang my head in shame

[fidgec94]

Use the neck and hardware (bridge/machine heads) off the dodgy plywood guitar and make your own body. You should be able to make a body and buy pickups for under 300 quid. Just an idea anyway.

Good luck geezer.

What i actually bought just the body, so it would mean buying the hardware aswell...i'll have to give it some thought

[erikbojerik]

In my experience, if you almost always play with fairly heavy distortion, then with good pickups (and amp!) it almost doesn't matter what the body is made of.

If however you play 'clean' then the quality of the body really matters, that's where the 'tone' really comes out of the tonewood.

[Digideus]

Im interested in this. I had a Marlin Randy Rhodes copy as my first guitar back in the 80s. It had a Plywood body and a maple neck with a maple board.

I used it in the studio a few times and it screamed horribly when not being played. Back then, my friend who was working in a guitar shop told me that changing the pickups would definately help. He suggested EMGs as the 81/85 combo would prevent the feedback and sound great, even on a plank of wood. Dunno if there is much truth in this. Anyone know?

[GuitarMaestro]

In my experience, if you almost always play with fairly heavy distortion, then with good pickups (and amp!) it almost doesn't matter what the body is made of.

If however you play 'clean' then the quality of the body really matters, that's where the 'tone' really comes out of the tonewood.

Thats not entirely true. I might be correct that you can hear the differences more exactly in the clean channel, but especially with high distortion the "liveliness" of the guitar is very important. A good body wood makes the difference between a sterile sounding and a lively distortion sound. And the overtones, harmonics and pinch harmonics can be heard far better in the distortion channel. A guitar with bad body wood which does not produce good harmonics sounds dull in hi gain mode.

It's a matter of attitude. The people who do not play with distortion much tend to think that distortion=distortion anyway. In my opinion there are far more amps with good sounding clean channels than amps with really great hi-gain channels ala Triaxis and 5150.