kenneth_b

I've seen lap steels that use <gasp> formica for the top. It's cheap, and sounds surprisingly good. I'm building a formica hollowbody. Rick Turner makes a formica top guitar: http://www.renaissanceguitars.com/modelt.html and a lot of people like it.

Best of all, Formica is cheap and comes in myriad cool finishes. Guitar makers/players are too conservative. Don't rule out new/different materials. Especially on your first few guitars. I screwed up one of my Formica bodies...who cares. It only ruined a couple of bucks worth of laminate.

Use a plastic card as a scraper. Credit card, protractor, what have you. Clean with a moist cloth, and then treat with lemon oil. Repeat every five years.

You could try some electronic cleaning spray on the pots, available at any Radio Shack type store.

As far as the Neck only pickup, I don't know. You could start playing jazz

Tal Farlow, Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrel, Ron Afif, Joe Pass, Johny Smith, T-bone Walker, Albert Collins, Steve Masakowski...Joey Ramone.

What's wrong with practicing scales in your room? Beats shooting dope and eating a gun.

Greetings:

Silly question. I have a full size template for the body I'm building, made out of 1/4 hardboard. However, I need to make an undersize version since I'm going to route it using a brass template guide in the base of my router. I went to a lot of trouble to get a body shape I like, how do I draw a new template exactly 1/8" smaller?

I tried using a compass, but it isn't very acurate.

Thanks for any tips.

To answer the original question...

Check out these lessons, from Fareed Haque:

http://www.fareed.com/lessons.html

Jazz Theory Made Simple and Jazzy Sounds for Rockers should get you started on how to start soloing. Fareed's main points are to learn arpeggios for each chord form you want to solo over, and then mix these into the soloing you are already doing.

So, you ask about a G-C-D progression. Well, that looks like a blues I-IV-V to me. Some things you could try would be a G major scale or a G blues scale (minor pentatonic). But, that can get boring. Mix in riffs around the G7(9, 11, #11, 13) over the G chord, and so on for the other chords. When using arpeggios, just land on a note in the arpeggio, you can come into it from a note above or below it. Also, any note sounds cooler if you slide into it

See if those free lessons don't help you, Fareed's a great teacher.