Redhat

I use a lot of 3rds and 6ths in my playing, and equal tempering just doesn't serve my playing style terribly well. To me, werckmeister3 tempering actually sounds like an improvement. I checked out Tru Temperament this afternoon, and I think I'm going to try an emulate the idea. The guy there even outlines the process. I'll post how it goes. Cheers

http://www.kirnberger.fsnet.co.uk/TempsII.htm This site contains a lot of historical data on temperaments, including Werckmeister III.

I'm thinking of trying to make a fretboard using the Werckmeister III well tempered tuning system. Any one looked into this before, willing to offer any tips? Thanks!

What your website URL? I'd love to check out your other guits! Also, I love the second guitar, what types of wood is the top made from?

Bet you can blast out some wicked runs on that thing! Sorry, just had to! Anyways, awsome build!

I should also mention that I ended up not reinforcing the neck. After many discussions with many builders, it became very clear that to do so was really only catering to my paranoia. So, next up, sanding down to the final shape, and sourcing the fretboard.

Ok, here's the roughed out neck and body, with truss rod installed. Now I just have to find a fretboard for it. Does anyone know where to get a 3" wide ziricote fretboard?

Ok, so I got the truss rod cavity routed and the rod and top cap installed for it. I did the cut on a milling machine, and I'm absolutely amazed at how precise it was, exact to 3 decimal places! I have to get one of those. I'll be roughing out the rest of the shape tonight, and will post pics then. I had a blond moment trimming off some of the excess wood though. I did it on the table saw, completely oblivious to all put the highest point on the blade when doing the excess wood around the neck joint. Ouch! Must have had my fill of lucky charms that morning, or I'd be starting from scratch. All the over cuts will be trimmed off when the neck is shaped! On another note, I'll also be building the prototype for my intonatable nut tonight, and I'm pretty sure my design will work fine. Anyways, pics tonight. Cheers

I agree with the headstock comments. The only thing I would mention in addition is that it looks to me like the angle of the oval and the angle of the upper horn offset are similar but not quite exact. Maybe matching the angles might work better. Then again, they might match anyways, and I'm just looking at them wrong. Otherwise, I really like the color combo you've picked out. Props.

Thanks Elysian, appreciate the info.

Elysian, just out of curiosity, what guage strings do you play? I run 11 to 52's on all my 6 strings, and I really like to crank the string tension up pretty high. The 7th string will be a low B, and the tension I have on most of my necks is why I was thinking of the carbon fiber. Are there any negatives to reinforcing a neck with carbon fiber? I really have been jumping back and forth with the decision, but at the end of the day, I'd pick sound quality over piece of mind if I HAD to choose. If there aren't any negatives, I'm just going to do it so I don't end up worrying about it. In reguards to the fretboard, I've pretty much settled on Macassar ebony. No point experimenting with woods I can't find info on, and orange and olive wood both fall into that category in terms of musicality. That being said, if anyone living in south western British Columbia knows of a local hardwood suitable for fretboards, please let me know.

In terms of top and bottom, i was thinking from a playing position, so left and right when upright is what I meant. I have a full size drawing with all the details. It has indeed helped, and doing so actually lead me away from my original headstock design, which was originally a little more Gibsonesque. I actually traced a copy of it Photoshop to do the rough mockup I did. Still thanks for the tips, and I do hope they help out any other newbs who might be reading this thread.

First off, I gotta say hats off to the LED side fret markers on the Priest Tribute. Anyone who's ever played on a dark stage knows what a life saver those would be. However, I have to give the nod to Mythical Dream. Though all the other entires were awesomely done builds, Mythical Dream is just so unique, and so utterly far beyond my simple skills, it just has to win. I will add a caveat to my vote. Dream only wins if I'm showing off the guitar in a hermetically sealed glass case. Otherwise, for actual use, Priest Tribute would get the nod.

Well, I've done some more work in terms of planning, and have a little mockup to post. I'll apologize again becuase my camera skills suck, and it looks a little askew though my full size plans are perfectly square. Anyways, I've also decided that I am going to add extra carbon fibre supports to the neck. The headstock is going to be 3 machine heads on top, and 4 on the bottom. What do you guys think of the design? I'm fairly happy with it, but am always open to suggestions. I just have to choose a fingerboard material. I had been thinking ebony, but am now considering some other woods my local supplier has in stock. Has anyone tried olive or orange tree wood? They both seemed quite hard and suitable to a fingerboard, but I want to do some research on these woods before jumping in on either. In terms of the optical pickups, my local electronics shop was out of stock, so I had to order the reflective object sensors. In terms of design, I did a little more research and found some guys at the Universiy of British Columbia who have used these sensors to make pickups for a standup bass, and their reports are that they offered better acoustic results than standard piezos. Their design had two sensors per string, perpendicular to each other, under the string so as not to interfere with the actual performer's picking, in a sort of 'V' shape. Anyways, I'm quite excited to get the parts in. I'll keep you all posted.

It is going to have a Fender style headstock, with a scoop down to a parallel face (in relation to the fingerboard) with a fixed strat type bridge. I'm still not sure if I should reinforce the neck though. I tend to run really thick guage strings, and I'm leaning towards adding carbon fiber reinforcements because of the added low B on this seven string, but any advice is appreciated. Thanks for everyone's input so far. I'm also going to pickup some reflective object sensors tomorrow to see if my optical pickup idea will work. My thought is, if it works, blending the optical with the piezos would create a really close approximation of an acoustic sound, leaving the magnetics for electric sounds.

Ok, so I have a few more things figured out. The nut width will be 1.9" The string spacing at the bridge will be 2.5" 21 fret neckthrough tele design 10" radius fretboard The body will connect to the neck at the 17th fret. The bridge will be affixed to the body back 1/4" from standard to allow proper intonation on the large guage strings I use. It will be bound to protect to cedar outer wings. It will have a tusq nut with a piezo embedded underneath it. Ghost saddles on a fixed strat bridge Tru-oil and wax finish Here's the blank after we thicknessed sanded it flat. Sorry about the quality, but my camera skills suck. Now I just have to decide what kind of wood to use for the fretboard, and to figure out if I will need to reinforce the neck.

I was over at my in-laws place this weekend, and I noticed some spare wood sitting around that looked like it would make a perfect neck blank for string through, so I asked the grand father about it. He said I could take as much as I wanted. So, on closer inspection, it turned out to be real nice cedar. I've always been curious about making a cedar body as well, so I cut up a few 10 ft lengths, and asked him if I could use his shop the next day. He was cool with that, and wanted to help out. Saturday morning, we headed down to his shop, where he also had a bunch of real dry and straight fir, which would make an interesting if odd neck. Back I was to making a blank for a string through, so I asked him if he had anything dark sitting around for a skunk stripe. At this point, he mentions he's had some mahogany sitting back in his basement for the last 40 years, and I'm free to it if I want. So we head back to his place, and pulls out these 3 10 ft 3x6" boards. We take them back to his shop, throw in some eastern maple, and glue them up into a neck through blank. Now I have this blank with a half inch maple skunk stripe, a 3" wide slab of mahogany on each side, with cedar finishing up the outer wings. It sounds super resonant just tapping on it, and I think I want to make it a seven string. It's going to have a fixed strat type bridge and 2 humbuckers. I'm also going to integrate a sustainer into the neck pickup, and add an optical pickup if I can get it working. The body design will be a modified tele with an extra long horn. I'll post pics soon. Anyways, can anyone offer any advice for the neck? I want a 25.5" scale, with a tele-ish sort of feel, but I'm not sure about a few things. Will a standard truss rod be sufficient, or will I need reinforcing rods as well? For the profile, will I get closer to what I want by simply adding the extra width necessary in the middle of a tele neck profile? Or should I stretch the entire profile equally in width to get enough room for seven strings? Thanks for any help!

I was wondering if anyone has tried different shapes for the coil? I was thinking something like this: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=d4h53kp_4cspr78 My thinking is to be able to adjust the driver for specific strings. Any thoughts? By the way, the red lines are just bobbin locations, the idea being to wind a pickup underneath.

Has anyone tried this? I'm thinking of using reflective object sensors to detect string vibration, and combine it with a piezo to detect soundboard vibrations. My thinking is this would provide a very close approximation of the natural sound of an acoustic guitar, if I can get it to work. Has anyone tried to use reflective object sensors here? Any input would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

With regards to the use of a cell phone vibration motor, the are essentially the same principle as a speaker. The difference is in how the physical motion takes place. In a speaker, a sleave moves up and down over the coil. In a vibration motor, the physical motion is rotational, with a weight on the end of the spindle to create the vibrations. I would expect the frequency of the vibrations in a vibration motor, as with a regular speaker, to mirror the current supplied. Cell phones vibrate at a single frequency because they are only supplied with fixed frequency current. I think....

Ok, I had another idea that I'd like to implement. What about using a Neutrik combo jack in the guitar? If the sustainer was powered by a rechargeable battery, then an external box could be setup with a charger, XLR in, and 1/4" out. The idea would be to use an XLR cable when practicing at home into the charger box, then to your practice amp (pod, di, etc) so that the battery could recharge. When you were at a gig or studio, you could just use a regular guitar cable as usual. Thoughts?

The pickups really have 2 distinct parts. The pole pieces on the outside edges so the balance between neck and bridge sounds can be mildly controlled a little better than other pickups, and of coarse the use of the neodymium magnets. I would expect them to sound like having a distortion stomp box in the effects loop on a clean amp setting, when used for metal sounds. Should work really nicely, I'd surmise. Plus if you love a crystal clean tone, they'd be an extra boost. Just my 2 cents, and I may be completely off track here. I'm curious to here them, for sure.

Hi there, been reading this post for a bit, and finally decided to post. Must say, took a few weeks to get through the whole thing, and I've been really impressed with what everyone has done. I've been a semi pro guitarist for almost 20 years now, and started thinking about sustainers (didn't even know the term at first) when I decided to record all my guitars direct on my newest album. I wanted a big live sound, but wanted to be able to record at low volumes while the family slept. What I came up with was simple. I gutted a cheap 5 watt practice amp, chopped up the speaker so it made as little sound as possible, but kept vibrating, spliced it to a mic cable, and screwed it to a $2 hand clamp from wall mart. Feeding the remains of the practice amp a signal from my board, I was able to affix the clamp to different areas of the guitar (body and headstock) with a simple squeeze to get different fundamentals or harmonics. This worked fantastically to get the sound I was after without standing in front of my Marshall Anniversary (best amp ever IMHO) and buggering with angles. My buddies were uber impressed and suggested I should patent the idea, but my hopes were dashed when I saw Sustainiac already had . Oh well. Still the handiest studio guitar tracking accessory I've ever used, and no mods to any of my guitars, and it works with all my pickups on all strings. It's ugly as sin, but I may look at adding a ruby style amp and cell phone vibrator inside the clamp with a 1/4" jack on the thing so I can pack it around a little easier to other studios. Anyhow, here's what I'm thinking now, and wondering what you all think of the idea. Please excuse how I try and explain it. I'm going to create a 4 channel bobbin, with the channels running top to bottom instead of side to side. The 2 channels in the middle will be 3mm wide each, for 2 magnetic driver coils wired out of phase with one another. The 2 outer coils will be wider and again wired out of phase with each other to act as an actual humbucking pickup. The pole pieces for the 2 driver coils will be 2mm blades on the outside of the inner coils, while the humbucking poles will be height adjustable screws on the outside edge of the 2 outer coils. I'd make 2 such pickups/drivers, one with a hotter driver then the other, and use a standard singlecoil between them. I was then thinking of using one of the big 4 by 5 switches Stew Mac sells so that, when an auxiliary driver power switch was turned on, I'd have the option of using either humbucker on its own, or either with the opposite driver turned on, or the middle pickup with the driver turned off on both numbuckers. So, any opinions of the plan? I don't see why it wouldn't work, but you all seem to have a lot more experience than I with the magnetic sustainer concept, so thought I'd put it by you all before I go ahead with it. Thanks by the way fo any responses. Cheers, Daryl