crafty

I really think it's all about the tradition with the Mad Anthony bit. I think this whole recent tour was about throwing a bone to the fans and Mad Anthony had to come out and play. In '98, his solo was "Somebody Get Me a Doctor" and he added some bass riffs to the end of it. I mean, comparing it to Stu Hamm's bass solo on Satch's "Live in San Francisco", sure, it's nothing special. I guess I really didn't say why I voted for him though. Michael Anthony was the only one in the group we never heard bitch about who was the singer, the songwriter, or the management. He remained loyal to just about everyone in the band, except maybe DLR, even when the band went through all of its changes. He's not the best musician in the band, but I really think he was the only one who really put the music and the fans first, so that's why I think he's the best member of VH. He continued to tour and record with VH even after they hired Gary, and he continued to do summer tours with Sammy because of their friendship. It takes a lot to be the "go-between" your friends, especially for a whole decade. He probably deserves most of the credit for getting them back together with Sammy. So best bassist in the world or not, I think he's definitely the best "human being" in VH.

Sunburst!

I had to vote for Michael Anthony. I'm a bit younger than most people, and the first VH album I really remember hearing on the radio was "1984" back in, well, 1984. Since I was born in '79, do the math. Anyways, I first really started getting into VH around '93 when things were starting to sour with Sammy, and the first VH concert experience I had was watching Extreme Van Halen in St. Louis in 1998. What else did you think "EVH" stood for back then? The best part of the show in '98 and the show I saw in July in KC was when Michael sang "Somebody Get Me A Doctor". That song and "Panama" are my two faves. He is a great singer and I really wish they would have given him more of a chance to sing alone, not just harmonizing Sam, Dave, and Gary. Especially when they let Ed sing on the VH3 album. I still cringe when I think about "How Many Say I?". Pure pig vomit. And to the people who complain about the Mad Anthony "bass solo", what do you expect, Stu Hamm? C'mon, he's playing a "Jack Daniels'" bass for crying out loud! The whole bit is just tradition, kinda like Alex playing the same "helicopter" drum solo he's played for years, and Ed just screwing around with "Cathedral", "3:16" and "Fur Elise".

How about an EMG Select with a Carvin neck? Angled peghead, graphite reinforcement, and ebony fretboard are all better than Stew-Mac for a few dollars more. People rag on the EMG passives but they're not bad at all for the money. Remember, the pickups are only about 5% of the equation. Wood selection is another 5%. You could put some Dimarzio Evos in there but if you don't have the chops to make up the other 90% of the sound, they're not going to sound any better than a $24 EMG Select. You can always swap out the pickups later, too.

Can't beat a Chevy Astro for sheer deer killin' power! My sister once hit three deer at the same time in her '94 Cavalier about 10 years ago. Car spent a month in the shop getting rebuilt. She still drives that car to this day. A/C don't work, but who needs A/C in Ohio?

Making a neck pocket without a router isn't too bad...just use a good set of sharp chisels after milling out most of the wood with the drill. Not very pretty, but it'll work.

Um, okay...first of all, what kind of skills do you have with wood? Do you have a basic understanding of standard power tools? Or is you experience more with hand tools and sculpture? Either way, you can make a guitar, but you certainly don't want to get hurt if you don't know what you're doing. Case in point: 13 years ago I was in Advanced Woodworking in school. I was walking past a friend who was using a router. He suddenly took the router he was using and turned it off while swinging it back behind him--driving the still spinning bit into my side. Fortunately, my sweatshirt stopped the bit (moving around 10,000 RPM) and my undershirt saved me from being cut. We both sort of messed our pants over that one. My point is that power tools, especially jig saws, drills, and routers, can be very dangerous if you do not know how they work or if don't you have the proper environment in which to use them. You cannot learn how to use tools from pictures on the internet or messing around with them in a cramped space. If you want to know what a sander, jigsaw, and router do, check out Sears' website, or some tool manufacturers like DeWalt, Porter Cable, or Makita, to name a few. Try to find a basic woodworking course at a technical school, or hang out at some wood supply shops and talk with them. Please, just don't start anything until you have a basic understanding of how these things work.

Wow, you should be able to get a few guitars out of that stuff! Nothing like free wood. I'm going to the White House to hit up Bush for some nice walnut later on this weekend

Well, I've rented routers for $7.00 a day and borrowed a friend's garage to work on my guitars. There's always a way to do it if you really want to do it. I'd say find a friend who has a house, buy a Roto-Zip type tool, a drill, and a sander, and you might have something to start with. If you're lucky, you could probably get those three tools and a set of clamps for around $150-200. You could start with something easy, like buying a Carvin neck-through neck and adding the body wings to it. It's going to be tough if you can't find a garage to work in because routers are loud, like any high-speed wood cutting tool. Check and see when your neighbors are away during the day and use the router/rotozip only when they're gone. Keep in mind, you'll probably be only able to build very basic guitars with that setup. It will be very difficult to build a neck with only those tools, but it can be done if you take your time. The big iron in the shop gives you speed and precision. Hand tools give you character and patience.

I kind of like the inverse pickguard colors. Seems like something Eddie would do... The inverse would also go better with the black pickups, IMHO.

You should send a PM to MKGBass. He'll make a fine guitar for you if he's still around.

On a strat, the neck joins the body at the 16th fret, give or take a millimeter or two. That means that five or six frets will be over the body, depending on whether it's a 21 or 22 fret neck. Keep in mind that the more wood surrounding the neck/body joint, the better your sustain will be and the joint will be stronger as well.

Well, if you take a look at his rants section, you'll find that he HATES salesmen working on commission. So he probably pays a salary commensurate with the going rate in Vegas. If I were a salesman in his store, I wouldn't care about helping customers out and I certainly wouldn't care about customer service since my paycheck doesn't depend on customers buying product from ME. I'd be willing to bet that his idea of not paying commission has more to do with saving money by not having to give a percentage of a $3,000 guitar to a salesman he can pay $10.00/hour to do the same register-jockeying. I've worked commission sales. It sucks, big time. But I always knew that I had to stay on the ball and actually sell something in order to eat. Every music store I've ever been to has had commissioned salesmen (and women) who know how to play, what sounds good, and what's the best product for the money. As for not letting you check out the parts on your own, who knows? It might be some sort of policy to keep an eye out for hired guns looking for counterfeit or trademark infriging parts. I'm sure PRS doesn't like him selling PRS necks without factory authorization, so you know if they spy a non-authentic PRS neck with the label on it, he's toast. I think like everything in Vegas, his showroom is probably something one must see just once in their lifetime. I may go see it sometime if I make it out there, but I'll call ahead to see if I need to make an appointment first, I guess

I live in the USA. The way our system works here is a little different now. Law school use to be about getting your LLB (bachelor's) and then an LLM (master's) later on. After you got an LLB you'd apprentice for about a year or so and then you'd sit for the bar. In modern US law schools, you get your bachelor's degree in whatever at University first. I have a business admin bachelor's (BBA). Then you go to law school and get a JD (Juris Doctor). If you want, you can also still get an LLM in a specialty either at the same time or in the future. I don't know of any American universities that still give out LLB's, though. I think they stopped back in the '70s. After you get your JD, which HAS to take at least three years but no more than six, according to the American Bar Association, you sit for the bar exam and then get licensed to practice. No internship is required, but I have clerked for a judge and worked for a prosecutor. It sounds like you're over in Great Britain. I have a cousin in Canada who received her JD but still has to practice under another lawyer before she can be licensed. It sounds essentially like the same system you have. So in the USA it's at least seven years from the time you start your bachelor's until you get your JD and are licensed to practice law. Be happy you only have five years I hate hijacking threads, so feel free to PM me if you want to talk about this anytime. I'll give you my email then, too.

You know what, man? Don't worry about it! If you think something might work, just do it! Nobody here knows how it will affect the overall tone of the instrument. Personally, I don't THINK it will make much of a difference, but I honestly don't know for sure. And neither does anyone else. So if you want to do it, just do it. Let us know what happens.

If you live in the U.S., find your local Sears Parts, Service, and Outlet center. It's usually not listed, so you may have to call a regular store to find out where it is. They usually have all sorts of good rebuilt power tools for a cheap price, especially routers. Try local rental companies, too.

<snotty voice> Good Lord...you must be the dumbest member of Project Guitar. Everyone knows that Black Walnut trees fall to the south and Poplar trees always grow to the north of Black Walnut trees! And even if they DID fall to the north, which is STILL IMPOSSIBLE, surely that river two miles away (as the crow flies) would drown out all but the mid and bass frequencies generated by the sudden collision of the walnut cellular structure with that of the poplar's bark. Water is a major component of Titebond glue and we all know that glue just kills your tone to the point where no one can stand to listen to you play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with your fancy MXR Yngwie Malmsteen Overdrive into the Crate Blue Voodoo half-stack in your Mom's basement. I think the moss growing on the wood would have an effect on the overall tone and you can't account for the little things like ants, termites, and butterflies flapping their wings. </snotty voice> Just trying to lighten the mood...I think everyone's taking themselves a little too seriously again

Yeah, definitely use a piece of wood to fill most of the hole. I have a friend who used Bondo to fill the entire neck pickup cavity on his flying-V mod/refinish. It looked okay until you got up close to it and realized that the Bondo shrank a little. The cavity was filled, but there was a 1 mm "dish" where the center of the Bondo shrank and you could make out the outline of the cavity, too. He painted the guitar (*ahem*) PEARL HOT PINK, as he was going for a Poison/Twisted Sister look, so with the solid color and pearl combination the outline really stood out. Hopefully your VH-style paintjob, if you do one, will hide any imperfections. BTW, that guitar was the first real guitar I ever saw someone really build themselves and do a good job with it. The cavity filling and hideous paintjob aside, he did an amazing job repairing the neck that was broken at the headstock AND body joint and re-radiusing the neck.

I don't think a maple top on the spruce is necessary at all. Yes, spruce will ding with a thin finish, but the wood is actually very strong and certainly strong enough to use trem studs. It's not balsa (technically another hardwood). If you can do it with basswood, you can do it with spruce. Keep in mind that if you put a maple cap on it, you will accentuate higher frequencies. It would be similar to an acoustic guitar with a spruce top and maple sides/back. Spruce is an awesome wood to use for an all-around even frequency response. Parker only puts the carbon-glass fiber mat on the back and it's there only to control temperature and humidity-related expansion/contraction of the wood. They wrap the neck in the material because they use tone woods that are easily warped without it.

Contact cement WILL work. I mean, it will at least stick down with it. But it's difficult to use because once the veneer is down it's STUCK! It's also more difficult to roll out the air bubbles, too. You could probably use any woodworking glue--Titebond's just what I've used and what they've used in the article. The veneering tape is also great for making sure the seam doesn't have a gap. The iron is a good idea, just keep it cool and don't let it sit in one place for very long.

Jumping to conclusions? ***? Nobody ever does that, especially me Yeah, I should have definitely put a smiley next to the "are YOU calling ME out?!" statement. I actually meant that to be kind of a funny play on "are you talkin' to me?" Sometimes I really do snap at people, oftentimes in real life. But hey, we're guitarists, we're supposed to have a little angst inside. Then again, the girls keep running away after the first or second date... It has gotten a little out of hand on some of the threads, I've noticed. Especially between the "new" guys and the "old" guys. I really think we all take ourselves too seriously sometimes. BTW, Maiden, I haven't started building a new guitar yet...but I am planning to start one come August after I'm done with the bar exam. Prolly do a Rhodes-V neck-through with a Carvin neck and either black walnut or zebrawood sides, Original Floyd, and a Lawrence L-500 with tone signal path/coil split switch. It's still all up in the air, just random ideas for now. I did finally finish up the last of my electronic mods to my Strat, which was just replacing the pots, going to master tone, coil-splitting the new pickups, and cleaning up the Afterburner installation. I might do a veneer/refinish on the Strat eventually, but we'll see what happens with the Rhodes-V first. Okay, now that I've totally hijacked this thread...

The scale of the guitar is distance from the nut to the bridge of the guitar. If you put a longer scale neck on the guitar, you will have to move the bridge further back as well. Your pickups will be out of their harmonic sweet spots, too. If you can get the neck adjusted properly, you shouldn't have any buzzing from the zero-fret. Short scale necks are the bane to most semi-hollow players with big hands (like me), but the whole guitar is designed around the scale length and modifying it without destroying it and starting over is difficult indeed.

I learned how to veneer out of a Popular Mechanics article about twelve years ago. I was in wood shop in high school at the time and it was very helpful. I couldn't find the old article on PM's website, but this article about their 100th Anniversary Dresser has a good tutorial on basic veneering: http://popularmechanics.com/home_improveme...hogany_dresser/ As they said, try Titebond Extend. Try using a wallpaper roller to squeeze out excess bubbles before clamping, too. It's always best to practice with scrap before you try the real thing, too.

One thing you could do is get a flame veneer from universal jems and apply that to the top after you strip the paint. Then you could do a sunburst finish and that would hide the ugly plies on the side if you do it dark and smooth enough. I've been thinking about doing something similar with my MIM Strat after I finish school this year.

Parker has a few models made out of spruce, the Fly Artist, Nylon, and Bronze. Very nice wood to use if you're going to incorporate piezos with the design as well. The whole guitar just seems to sing out, even when unplugged.