frank falbo

The OFR should fit fine, because that angle you have there is really "extra space". So your OFR's should start to round over and in at the same point that your old one angles back.

Lots of instruments have no gaps. Lots of '80's and '90's Japanese instruments for that matter. It just depends on what the factory was doing at the time. There's no reason that a near perfect slot would push the fret out over time. Then again I use a little CA on mine just to make sure. The thing you have to remember if you're buying pre-slotted boards is that you're going to level and smooth the board before you fret it. So that's going to take off a little material. I don't like a deep slot for structural reasons, but not cosmetic reasons. But a little extra depth like .030 won't hurt, and it'll be too small to see if you fill it right. The compression won't amount to anything unless you're smashing a groove into the fretboard from pressing or hammering so hard. Don't do that.

I always thought those Warmoth swiss-cheese holes were lame. To me, you can loosely analogize to a speaker, or a string section as follows: If a hollow chamber is like a speaker, then a jazzbox is to a 15" woofer as a semi-hollow is to a 2x10. A thinline tele or an f-holed LP or LP double cutaway is to a portable boom box, and the Warmoth body is like 100 pairs of earphones. If a hollow chamber is like a string section, then a jazzbox is to a string bass as the semi-hollow is to a cello. The thinline is to a viola as the Warmoth body is to 100 1/4 size kids violins. Or how about motors? A jazzbox is to a diesel 18 wheel truck as the Warmoth is to 100 electric toothbrushes. Or the Jazzbox is to a huge horsefly as the Warmoth is to 1000 mosquitos? The fun never ends!

Of course you can. The Ibanez S series and just about every figured top Les Paul copy coming from asia have a veneered top. You need some form of vacuum clamp, and someone here even mentioned those "space bags" that compress your clothes down for storage or travel. I like the idea of an ebony trapeze tailpiece, like the Benedetto one Stew Mac sells. Or even one that has a metal outer shell but the wood filled section in the middle. You could do an inlay of contrasting wood, and do it like a maple leaf shape or those crown type things. Or like the way Ibanez used to do the fancy brass overlays behind the tune-o-matics, you could do that kind of shape as an inlay.

Dan Erlewine uses a neck jig that tilts into playing position. You can read all about it in various Stew-Mac catalogs, videos, and other marketing materials. I like the concept of the neck jig and I understand it. But I use intuition and pre-analysis while the guitar is still strung up to do most of what the neck jig does. So while I use the same philosophy and I believe in it, I never needed the jig. I'll also make some minor adjustments based on the playing style and radius of the board. Like Satriani's tech puts a slight compound radius into the upper 10 frets or so, and I'll do that a lot. Most of the time I'll put it in as a trapezoid starting around the 12th fret between the B and G strings, tapering out to all 6 strings at the last fret. Little things like that make the neck jig less necessary. If you don't want the expense of the neck jig you can analyze and philosophise about the straightness of the neck in the playing position, not laying flat. Then what you want to do is get the neck to be as close to what it looked like when you were holding it up with strings on it. So that usually means loosening the truss rod a bit and watching for the hot spots where the rod was doing a lot of its work, vs. the areas that weren't really affected by the truss rod. You can use straight edges to read the neck in the playing position or you can sight it. Then you can mark down the high and low spots if there are any under string tension. The neck jig is good for beginners, too because we all have the tendency to push down hard when we level, and that will actually flex the neck as you're going back and forth. So you won't get a true level anyway, since you're bending the neck with your sanding hand depending on where the neck is supported. The neck jig applies even support all throughout the neck so you don't level the "flex" into the frets.

I had a solid piece of quilted maple that I got 2 one-piece body blanks out of. It's 30mm thick, not much thicker than their 27-28mm. It's really fantastic. I have another guitar that's maple with a Rosewood neck and an Ebony board. It's really true, if you have a warm neck you can have a sharper sounding body without sounding thin and weak. I'll bet those guitars are great. The one quilted maple blank is almost finished as a 7 string, and the other I'm thinking about using for an 8-string. With a thinner maple body the low strings don't get muddy. I have this: http://fvcc.com/music/guitar.html which is basically 30mm thick all the way around, but a little thicker in areas like the neck joint. The top is arched like a Brian Moore and the back is scooped out to match, except for the control cavity area. So the body blank was thicker than 30mm to get the arch, but that's what it is now. The Ibanez S guitars are 38mm thick or so and they use a real short trem block. You could put a top on it but you won't have to. If the trem block sticks out the back you can just leave the cover off until you have the means to shave it down and re-drill.

If you don't have enough angle (or neck height) then you won't get good downward pressure against the roller balls. They'll sometimes rattle a little, but also you want some nice downward pressure for a clear note. I have a Kahler that was for Les Paul replacement, so it's the one with the big studs in the back and the height adjustment/levelers in front. I have it recessed into the body about 1/8"-3/16" but most of that is made up by the bottoms of the stud and the height adjusters in the front. I have a "tune-o-matic neck angle". In other words, I think even with the flatmount, you'll want the strings to be at about a tune-o-matic height to ensure a good break angle at the saddles. Many times (with a bolt-on) I'll cut a straight neck pocket, assemble the instrument, and then go back and reverse engineer the neck angle. Then there's no guesswork. I can just calculate the angle off of the desired reduction in action height at the 22nd fret. You can always recess the trem after its built if you need to, just make sure you routed enough clearance under it in the trem cavity. I think Kahlers look great with the baseplate recessed.

The location of the harmonic is irrelevant. But don't use phrases like "you're wrong" when 1/4" movement in either direction does indeed make a huge difference in the neck pickup's tone. It is just as Hardtailed said, more about the distance away from the saddle. Some 24 fret guitars like the old Ibanez RG's were actually 22 fret style necks with the extension. So you could put any stratty neck on there and have a big gap with a recess showing. But the scale would line up. But that warmoth 24 fret extension neck is exactly that, too. So either would work. But if it's cut for 24 frets and no extension, you have very few options besides moving the bridge and maybe the middle and bridge pickup routs.

Yeah, sorry Hevn... Chrome favors blueish "cold" colors while Nickel favors the warmer earth tones. I like to think if Nickel as favoring a pinkish hue, but I'll accept yellow, orange, or amber, whatever. And for sjaguar13, be careful you don't confuse stainless steel with nickel. The Fender saddles could be stainless and the baseplate chromed. And don't judge the look of any alloy by looking at a "nickel" coin, unless it's wooden. Then you should not accept it as currency at all. Old nickel with also get a little cloudy and blotchy if not buffed out, while all the fingerprints and markings on chrome usually wipe right off. As a sidenote, what you're really looking for in the "coloration" of the metals is how they treat colors that are reflected into them. For example, the chrome doesn't look blueish necessarily when staring at it, but when you put a colored item in it's reflection, it will cast that item with a blueish tint, and nickel with a pinkish tint. Try it with a photograph of a person.

If you just want to locate the holes in the body then do a search of this forum for some suggestions I and others gave a few months back. You can use dowel centers to press and locate holes or you can use phillips head pickguard screws to make an "X" indentation in the body where the holes will go. Or you can trace the neck heel onto some paper, cut it out, then poke out the holes, and mark them on the body. There's tons of ways. I wouldn't suggest dowelling anything yet.

I knew a guy that made graphite instruments, and I think Ken is playing a little mind trick. Basically toddler68 is right. there could be balsa or anything in there because the neck is self supporting. Basswood has a tendency to bend over time, and I think it would be a bad choice for necks if left by itself. With a purpleheart or whatever laminate or graphite rods, it should be fine, like the Carvin Holdsworth neck made from alder. The mind game is that first, "the neck is wood" idea is a marketing tool. You have to say there's wood integrated under that shell or else you're selling plastic. But secondly, he knows that we want our guitars to feel a certain way when we play them. If the neck doesn't vibrate at all in our hands, or create any audible sound when played unplugged, we'll perceive it as cold and lifeless, rather than bright and responsive, which is what the Parker really is. If you load something like basswood in there, you'll have a little resonance. It won't necessarily make it to the pickups because the string vibration is governed by the graphite shell. But the player will feel more response from the instrument. The guy I knew tried a lot of things, and filling the neck with high density foam produced the same basic effect as basswood. Ken arguing that basswood is a valid neck wood but too soft for mounting is an attempt IMHO to validate the Parker to the simpleton rocker. If you want to use basswood, use it with a laminate or graphite, but not with the Parker as your inspiration. That guitar sounds like it does for reasons other than the basswood "filler" in the neck.

Flame wars? Why you little... how dare you...Oh wait, you didn't actually disagree with me on anything But seroiusly there doesn't really have to be any flames if we all agree that it does affect what comes out of the amp. To what degree and how, well, maybe we should just all keep that to ourselves.

I had an article about 10 years ago in Guitar Shop about exactly this. You'll get a lot of responses because everyone believes it does affect the tone but not everyone can agree why. Basically your logic is right on, and GregP's answer is all there is to it. The pickup is hearing the string's vibration, but everything about the guitar is affecting the way the string will attack and sustain. The length of sustain and the frequencies that are dampened or enhanced are all attributable to the wood types. Now if you take a guitar with dead strings and replace the body with a maple one, keeping the strings, it will still sound dull and dead. So there are obviously other things at work like the bridge type and neck attatchment method that will affect things too, but if you're just looking for why does wood affect the way a pickup hears the strings, that sums it up. It doesn't change what the pickup hears per se, but it changes the way the string vibrates, which IS what the pickup hears.

That bridge is Korean and Mighty Mite has it, as well as others. A friend of mine returned his after he found out the price difference. The kicker is that the WD guy tried telling him that theirs was a better piece. They had the same "Jxxxxx" part number on the bottom. I worked at Cort/Mighty Mite for 3 years and I know the bridge. I mean who are they trying to fool? It's a great bridge though, and theoretically it's "worth" what WD is charging, but not when you can get it elsewhere for much less. Your guitar looks great by the way!

As soon as you touch the iron to the pickup its temperature starts dropping. I let the iron get nice and hot, and then you have to go real fast with it. Another alternative is to just cut through the solder with a Dremel cutoff wheel. Then you can melt the rest off once the cover is off. Sometimes you can get a flathead screwdriver in between and just break the solder joint, too.

I love Dave Bunker and the Bunkers have the best of intentions. They are nice people but I think their necks sound bad. They use phrases like "the neck wood is free to resonate" which is silly. You're not miking the neck, nor are you installing contact transducers inside of it. What we want from a neck is for it to affect the vibrations of the string. The PBC minimizes the neck's effect on the strings, by removing the tension from it. Its the same thing if you attatched a metal bar to the neck, and attatched the bridge saddle to it so it would float freely in an acoustic guitar top. You know, take all the tension off the top. (guess what? Dave actually invented that, too! ) You lose the "tone". It's also been my experience that if wood is left tension free, it is more likely to "warp". We use the term warp too loosely with guitar necks. Because if a neck has weak areas and it pulls into a twist, or it bows too much and the truss rod just puts an "S" curve into it, we say its warped. But actually it's failing under stress. Warped is when you go to the hardware store and the 2x4's all look like spaghetti! Yes, necks can warp, but a lot of time its something a little different. If you build a neck where the wood is just for looks and form, but not under any tension, it will be more likely to shift IMO. And I've seen it. For my money, if I'm going to forsake the traditional "wood" tone and feel and replace it with non-wood materials, I'd take the Parker route. Where he says "forget what you've heard in the past, this is new" instead of the PBC trying to say "this improves the old sounds" or "gives you more of what you want-more resonance" because the Parker is going after a snappy, highly refined sound. They are after efficiency in vibrational transfer, sustain, and frequency response. The result is a new sound. Putting a tension free wood neck on a wood body just lessens the net amount of what we like from a wood guitar. All that said, I don't have a Parker because I'm a wood man and I don't really like how they sound, either. But I respect them. I don't like graphite rods in necks either, and I can always tell if they're in there when I play a guitar. I think it limits the vibration of the neck wood. I suppose if you think necks with graphite rods sound 10 times better than an all wood neck, you might like the PBC, too. Or back in the day when Carvin used steel rods, their neck sounded like they were made of concrete to me. If you liked those, the PBC could be right for you.

I didn't want to weigh in on this one but I feel like I should. I've done articles and write-ups on the tonal differences of wood types, and on how the other things affect tone. The only way in which I agree with him is that he's trying to create a ratio. So: Wood affects tone? = YES To what degree? = UNKNOWN AND INFINITELY VARIABLE Basically its a percentage of the whole. The more stuff you pile on, the less percentage it occupies. For example, an acoustic guitar has "nothing" added. So string gauge differences, action height, and nut/saddle material is about all you can modify. Record with a piezo instead of a condenser mic, though, and you've just diminished the wood tone, you know? Almost like your equation now is 50% piezo/EQ, 50% wood. Pass through a tube compressor and some heavy chorus and reverb, and now its even less. If you're going for that ultra processed pop sound, eventually you could go back and unplug that $2000 Taylor and plug in a $350 Washburn and you'd still have the same basic sound. For electrics, it's even more diminished, because now you have pickups and amps. Stick a Floyd on and the wood is even less apparent. Use a Line 6 or some Digitech/Zoom/etc. ultra processor, and it's now even less. So I agree with all you guys there. It still makes a difference, but the degree is less than if you used a "hi-fi" pickup like a Bartolini (without active freq boosts) straight to an ultra clean amp. My percentages are just silly equations, but you get what I mean. The problem is Thompson is so nuts that he can't communicate without disenfranchising some faction of the industry. And personally, I think multilaminate bodies tend to sound like "multilaminate". That has a sound of its own, and I think it's less affected by the types of wood you use since you're locking them in with glue joints every inch or two. So to me his vantage point is skewed in that his styles of instruments can diminish wood type a little. Everything he says about player, scale, etc. having more of an impact is true, but it doesn't mean you take wood selection any less seriously.

The only other colors I've seen are greenish brown and rusty orange. Both can be buffed off! Warwick uses some bell brass alloy mixture so while they are clean and polished they look goldish but soon tarnish out. There aren't that many alloys that are strong enough to take the abuse that aren't naturally silver in color. I wonder if you could make them out of ceramic with a nice glaze over them. That would probably work for a classical at least.

Even on the same tree, your placement on the tree makes a huge difference. Down toward the base you've got some 100 year old wood whereas on a thick branch or way up high it's newer wood, and still growing under movement from the wind. I think tonally speaking, you lucked out that it worked that way. The harder mahogany for the neck and center block and the softer "furrier" wood for the back/side. You couldn't have asked for a better combination. That furry stuff is a pain in the butt to sand smooth, though. And if you use masking tape for anything like binding or to protect something from stain or finish, make sure its sealed first! The tape can rip off little shards and fibers from mahogany when it's like that. So you'll do a great job shaping and sanding something and lose a big piece right at the end.

Well they're not stacks. They are great pickups. I had one in the bridge of my first guitar I built a long time ago. (I was playing it in the basement that day) They are very strong, and very thick sounding for a single. But the coils are tall so they are still clear. To me they are like a really good tele bridge pickup sound. Strong and thick without the squeaky wimpy treble. I have it in the neck of another guitar now and it's pretty good there but its almost a little muddy and humbuckerish. Its not really P-90-ish like I've heard some people describe it because of the tall coil and the large magnets. A P-90 will be more rude sounding with a fatter more garbled midrange. All in all I don't think you'd be disappointed. Oddly enough, it's not really like any of the Tom Andersons either. But I do have it combined with 2 other TA's in the guitar now. I don't know your pickup combination, but I would suggest using a TA in the middle position if you're going to have one. The QP will be too blasty for a middle position. But neck is good and bridge is really good. They used to do a QP tapped pickup, too. Maybe that's a good idea for the middle and neck.

Totally unneccessary! And to boot, I have a story about that. My very first guitar had dowels in it to join the two halves of the body blank. Then when shaping the treble cutaway, all of a sudden, there it was! There was the dowel I had buried in there! It's a mahogany oil finish, so you can still see it to this day, eons later. I have a love/hate relationship with that dowel and have toyed with the idea of cutting and inlaying a mahogany patch several times, but I can't bring myself to do it. The only benefit to a biscuit or dowel would be to line the pieces up so they don't walk under clamp pressure. But there are better ways to do that, like clamping perpendicular to the joint with some flat cauls, or even cutting a couple little brads in there, like you'd use little pins with a fretboard.

Its not plexiglass. I was at Cort when they were developing it. Its pretty plasticky, not good for tone. They just wanted an alternative to wood that you could mold into any cool shape you wanted. That's why the Ergodynes are so weird. They asked me what I'd do with it and I said if you're going to be able to mold it, then you don't have to conform to the dimensions of a body blank. I said to do it like the Spectors where you had 3 dimensional movements, where you would have had to use a huge body blank or laminates. The Chromeboy reissues were luthite just because they thought it would withstand the chome and have more longevity, since it doesn't expand or contract. It was real heavy at first and I suggested pumping more air into the mix. That way you have pseudo-pores, and it should be more woody sounding too. It still sounds plasticky, but that's okay. It's not supposed to be wood. You either like it or you don't. (I can't stand it)

Twisting is more of an issue of wood warpage, and uneven expansion and contraction between neck and fretboard woods. If twisting is caused by uneven string tension, like from light top/heavy bottom strings, then an assymetrical neck back would help to prevent that, not cause it. The rod should still be centered regardless. Even in standard gauge strings there is more tension on the bass side. Until you get a wide enough neck like a 6 string bass or 8 string guitar, (or until you have a thin enough neck like the Ibanez wizard) Twisting is really not affected by the variation in string tension across the neck. Then you can use 2 rods, or in the wizard's case, its impossible to fit 2 rods in there or move it over because it's too thin. Then again, its also too thin to carve assymetrically. As long as the neck is near standard sizes it will not affect either the truss rod action or the twisting.

Not really. String tension isn't symmetrical. Typical string gauges have more tension on the bass side. So a symmetrical neck with a centered truss rod is already a flawed premise from the standpoint of tension. I don't mean a symmetrical neck is flawed from a playability standpoint, though. It just would seem that an assymmetrical neck would do more to "even out" the tension than throw it off. You wouldn't want to offset the rod at all.

The fatter part is on the bass side. The tremolo saddles are individually adjustable so virtually any radius is possible.