jnewman

well,i have to SLIGHTLY disagree with you just a tiny bit. i feel as if blues is more about a feeling than it is about perfect tecqnique,although stevie ray was great at both. but since you phrased it like you did,i can only assume you have not heard a very wide range of metal.this is not meant as a slam,but just recently i have been introduced to the NEW metal scene(as opposed to the 80s thrash i was used to,such as exodus,slayer,etc.) what i am getting at is that i find metal to be one of the genres most **** about getting the guitar playing perfect...i don't mean Korn either(obviously),or napalm death or any of that ilk.i mean like "at the gates","lamb of god",and a whole slew of others who REALLY impressed me today with the way they have moved metal forward. i went for years thinking that metal was dying out,because i could never find any good new metal bands to listen to. but now i have that sattellite radio thing(sirius) and i tell you one thing...those bands that i heard today are VERY serious about perfect tecnique. and i will tell you another thing....those bands i heard today are also much better than what was the best in my day. especially "lamb of god" that music is the advanced form of what i thought was advanced music when i was in the eightees ← Well, yeah, I don't kow... I maybe didn't quite reach what I was trying to say with all that. At the very least, I've never heard any genre in which so few notes can be strung together so musically. I guess it's just the warm, creamy, thick, smooth tones that you find a lot in blues that I'm really attracted to (Allman bros. especailly Live at the Fillmore East, a lot of Clapton's blues, BB King, Albert King live recordings (his studio sound was way different) things like that, although I've spent a fair amount of time listening to really old recordings that don't have a lot to do with tone, like Robert Johnson and Freddie King, which are nevertheless amazing music). I guess if there was one guitar sound in the history of the world I'd most like to be able to do, it's Duane on Live at the Fillmore East. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to learn slide on a Strat with 9's for strings and about as low an action as you can get . Maybe that'll have to be my guitar after next, a good slide guitar (heavy wood, heavy strings high off the board), so I can learn how to play it. On the topic of metal, there's an eighties metal band called Savatage that I really like . They spent a little bit of time in the early nineties working on something called the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and a lot of their music is metal with a full orchestral background - some of it's pretty nifty. They're a little silly, sometimes - for one thing, they have this deal where all they use are circular guitar picks. I may have to look into some of the new groups... let me know what some of your favorites are? (Besides "lamb of god," which I'll go ahead and look up). Jimmy EDIT: Oops, forgot to include one of my very favorite blues musicians, Taj Mahal (who never really played anything but a resonator, and it sounds incredible).

You're right, this is a grounding problem, but not in the way you think - it's not the guitar that's having a grounding problem, is YOU that's having a grounding problem. Here's you: you're 150-200 (or something) of, basically, electrolyte filled water, which is very conductive, and your body is not grounded. You're a great big antenna for any kind of electric field, and the wires in the guitar (even if your pickups are absolutely silent, there are still other wires that can pick up noise) are picking up the noise that your body is focusing right next to it - hence the hum. When you touch the strings, on the other hand, you're touching something metal that is perfectly grounded - your strings - and so you become grounded. All of a sudden, you're not a focus for electromagnetic radiation anymore, and the hum goes away. If you shield every cavity in the guitar and shield every wire, you might get this to mostly go away, but I don't think I've ever heard a guitar that doesn't have this problem if you turn it up loud enough. Eh... it's pretty hard to ruin copper wire, and a single solder joint can't really form a path for noise to enter the system... I doubt there's really anything wrong with your wiring, and I bet the hum was there before you put in the new pups, you just never noticed it because strats hum - it was only with the "noiseless" single coils that did not render your entire guitar noiseless that it seemed odd and got noticed. I have a pretty new (2001, I think) stock Fender American Stratocaster. There's a lot of hum normally - some of it goes away when I touch the strings. Even if I switch to the humbucker (it's a Texas Special and has a PG+ bucker in the bridge) there's still a little bit of this hum. I could be completely wrong, of course, but this is something a lot of people run in to, and this is the answer that seems (to me at least) to best fit with the physics of electronics.

Can you explain how that jig works? I can't really see what it does from that picture, and I'd like to see all the options before I bother with building something. The sort I was talking about is for use with one of the big stationary belt sanders, and the use of rotating joints on the main board that holds the fretboard, as well as the use of a groove that allows one of those joints to slide along the axis of the board. When this happens, you get an uneven pendulum setup that actually doesn't rely on the joints having any give at all - with the rotating joint at one end of the board and the rotating/sliding joint at the other end, the setup is completely articulated for the set of motions it needs to make - you could machine the whole thing out of steel and use something like a ball-bearing lazy susan rotating joint and a ball bearing slider and it'd still work fine. If you build it properly with adjustible length arms on fittings that are themselves adjustible for height, you can get any constant radius or any compound radius perfectly tapered from one radius to another. You do still have to build the arms so that you can slide them towards their centers of rotation about a little bit (the jig linked at the beginning of the thread does this with rods with threaded knobs at the end so that you can adjust the amount of movement youget) so that you can slide the arms up, push the fittings down until the fretboard touches the sander, and still have the little bit of extra distance that lets you sand the entire fretboard down a little bit for a completely even radiusing job.

Null vote: strat shape, les paul wood. I've never played a guitar that feels as nice in my hands as my strat, and I've never played a guitar that sounds as good as a really nice paul. Well, until I finish my mostly-walnut with a bit of maple through-neck more-or-less strat shaped guitar (that I haven't even started yet) .

I had to put in "other" because it's a combination of things up there and things not up there. The process that has led me to beginning to seriously plan my first guitar build started a few years ago. I'd always (starting about ten years ago when I started playing guitar) played a strat, and had(have) a wonderful one (a 2000/2001 (can't remember which) Fender Texas Special HSS with a pearly gates + in the bridge in ash with a sienna sunburst), but had been listening to so much blues that I decided I really needed to get a short-scale heavy-wood humbucker guitar to get the other half of the blues spectrum. Which is when I found out several things: First off, a certain level Gibson is significantly more expensive than its Fender counterpart. The cheapest Gibson Les Paul (that is not a Jr. or a Faded, or a studio) costs d*mn near $500 more than I paid for my American Special strat. Second, and probably more important in the grand scheme of things, I can't stand the way a Les Paul feels . I like SG's a lot, but they're pretty expensive too. So I started looking at custom guitar manufacturers, and found a few that could make a Fender/Gibson custom-shop level guitar for about what a nice LP costs. I've been on and off about to buy a custom guitar for a couple of years. Then, in my quest for a good DIY tube guitar amp (I've done a good bit of electronics work), I stumbled across big groups of people who make their own guitars - and I think to myself "Hmm. I love building things and I'm pretty good at woodworking, I can do this - and if I do, I know I'll get EXACTLY what I want, not what some custom shop guy thinks I'm telling him I want." So I started reading and planning. to be continued.... .... ..... Just kidding - but that's as far as it goes. I have my guitar all planned out, but may have to wait till summer to start building it (I'm a college student - so it'll be hard to do it during the school year, but I'm going to do my best to get started in the next few weeks because I don't want to wait that long). I'll let you guys know how it goes and post plenty of pictures .

Bluuuuueees! Heh. I don't know. As a decent guitarist and a serious guitar lover, it seems to me that blues guitar has more music in it, more warmth, tone, and emotion, than anything else I've ever heard. It seems far more about perfecting the guitar playing itself than any other music. Although I like pretty much everything as MUSIC (including modern metal), in terms of GUITAR I can't STAND the solid-state or _____-rectified toneless distortion sounds so many modern rock and metal bands use. It just drives me crazy. I guess I just really like that blues guitarists can take it slow and make amazing music out of even just single notes, and I just can't stand thrashing around all over the guitar as fast as you can (including when blues guitarists do it, actually - nothing screws up a good blues solo more than trying to go to fast or do too much at once, with a FEW exceptions, like Slowhand ). I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but it's how a feel. I have a lot of respect for people coordinated enough to shred, I just personally am not a big fan of the way it sounds. EDIT: Forgot to include this, but if you'll believe it, I'm only 19. Heh. Not quite the normal point of view, I know.

I just had to vote for the drop top - it's just such a beautiful, unified whole. It all seems to fit together perfectly, fit, finish, hardware, wood, everything. (except the knobs, which are silly ) Great guitars though, everyone - amazing work! Jimmy Newman

If you go to http://www.guitarbuild.com/modules/mydownloads/ the second item from the bottom is called "WinFret" it's a pretty simple program, but it prints off the fret distances for you no sweat - you give it the number of frets and the scale length and it tells you right off what you need in a chart and gives you the option of printing a template. I had it print up a 25.5" 22 fret template and held it up against my strat under the strings and it's perfect. It prints them in several rows, so you have to cut it up, but the way it prints them makes it very easy to line each part up perfectly with the others. It's what I'll be using for my next guitar. (Along with a home-made miter box)

If you take the straight up output jack on your guitar and plug it into the input jack on your computer's soundcard, not too much will happen - it is NOT a line-level audio signal. The signal has to be amplified first. There are a couple things you can do: One: Buy a microphone to plug into your computer. This is probably your best option. Two: Go buy one of the $30-40 9V battery-powered Marshall or Fender 4" speaker portable practice amps that have a headphone out (which you can plug into your computer just fine, although it will sound like crap). Three: Find a line-level-out guitar amplifier schematic on the internet and build it yourself. Be warned, it will at the very least use opamps and possibly also transistors - if you've never done DIY electronics before, it might take you a few tries to get it. Four: You can buy a line 6 pod or whatever they're called, those silly little modelling boxes that have a headphone out. Any of these things will let you use a normal stereo mini-mini cable with a mini-1/4" adapter to hook up directly to your computer (except the microphone, which may have a mini plug, which is fine, a 1/4" plug, which will need an adapter, or an XLR plug, which will also need an adapter). All cables and adaptors, except possibly the XLR one, are available extremely overpriced in extremely poor quality at your local radio shack.

Right. I was thinking about this and drew some stuff up, and this is wrong - in several ways. What you actually need is the places where the arms are fixed to the board the fretboard goes on to be able to rotate about the axis of the arm (sorry for the complicated wording - I'll draw something) and a way for the joint between one arm and the main board to slide along the board about an inch. All of this can be accomplished with nothing more than nuts, bolts, and washers - I'll put up a drawing tomorrow. Why it works: Properly built, the fretboard's surface will always be tangent to the circle scribed by the path of each arm. What this means, is no matter how you move the two arms around, the fretboard's always at the same angle all along its length as compared to the surface of the sander. However, the point on the smaller circle with the same angle as any given point on the larger circle is closer to the centerline than said point on the larger circle. This being the case, the fretboard's surface begins to angle away from flat more quickly on the side with the shorter arm. Perfect. The length of the arm at each end corresponds to the radius of the fretboard at each end. One radius tapers linearly to the other. One problem with this, however, is that the fretboard needs to twist a little bit for this to happen - which is why the board the fretboard is attached to needs to have a rotating attachment (i.e. a bolt, a nut, a few washers, and not too tight. This generates another probelm as well - when the fretboard twists a bit, the fretboard is slightly off of the angle of the line between the centers of the two circles. If you have something 18" long, it'll only connect two lines 18" apart if it's perpindicular to them - if you twist it, it's not long enough. As a result, there needs to a groove at one end of the main board of the jig so that the distance between the actual points of connection can become longer as the fretboard twists, while maintaining an equal distance on the axis of the machine itself. Sorry, I know this is hard to understand. I'll draw it out to post later.

I have a Marshall JTM-60 that I love. I got mine for around $350 used. It has actually a really good clean channel and a great boost channel - it doesn't do metal sounds or anything, but it sounds great for classic rock, blues, etc. It also has a master volume knob (which some people hate) which allows you to control how much of the volume is coming from the preamp tubes vs. the power amp tubes, which lets you get all kinds of different tones. When I bought it I looked at the blues jr. and the pro jr. and the hot rod, and I liked the Marshall a lot more than any of them - its clean tone is almost as good and its boost tone is so much better it's scary.

Aww, c'mon, it's not that bad... my first guitar was a Peavey made from pressed sawdust (particle board) . It was worth about $15 of the $150 or so it cost new ten years ago.

Just about the shielding the electronics bit: shielding the electroncs won't do anything about feedback. Feedback is when you stand in front of your amp, and you strike a note. Your strings begin vibrating at a certain frequency, and your amp starts moving air at that frequency to make sound. This vibrating air then hits the vibrating strings and causes a resonance in which the vibration of the strings is amplified - making the sound louder, which makes the strings vibrate more, etc. What shielding everything will do is cut back on 60 cycle induced hum from the electrical wires around where you're playing - which is rarely a problem in a guitar with humbucking pickups (to see if you have a problem, stand to the side of your amp, not in front of it, with the guitar plugged in, the amp at normal playing setup, and the volume on the guitar turned all the way down. You'll most likely hear some hum - this is hum from the amp itself (and maybe your cable). Now turn the volume on your guitar amp - does the hum get louder? It's this part of the hum (and this part only) that you'll help eliminate by shielding your guitar's wiring. Oh, and I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to put a normal LP pickguard on it.

I've never used them (been planning on picking up a set for a while, though), but I've heard some amazing things about Jim Wagner's pickups. You might want to check them out. You can find his stuff at www.crcoils.com. They are REALLY expensive, though. REALLY expensive. The cheapest humbuckers he sells run $250 per set of two. They might be in that 100% more money for 5% more performance zone. Well, you did ask what the best on the market are . I suppose you could always look for real actual vintage ones, although that can be iffy.

I believe that if you're going to try to make a jig like that and use it to make compound fretboards, you're going to have to use a sort of ball-and-socket or gimble hinge (that permits rotation on two axes) at the top of one of the arms and a single-axis rotation hinge (like a bolt through both pieces) at the top of the other arm so that, for example, if you wanted a 10"-16" compound fretboard you would: Make one arm 16" long from the hinge to the desired surface of your fretboard and make the other arm 10" long from the hinge to the desired surface of your fretboard, then move the short arm's mounting bracket down the frame until the fretboard is perfectly horizontal. You then back off the knobs at the top a little bit so that you can push the fretboard down onto the sander, and as you swing it back and forth, the long arm would swing straight and the short arm would swing in a slight curve in which it moved towards the long arm as you pushed it away from the center. You wouldn't have to fight it at all, and it would do perfectly even compound fretboards. If people are interested, I can draw up a blueprint of what I'm talking about and find parts numbers of the kind of hinge I'm talking about.

Actually, the point of putting a maple cap on a mahogany body guitar (a la Les Paul) is to brighten it up a little bit. Maple's harder and a bit more dense than mahogany (something like 44 pounds per square foot versus 36 pounds per square foot), so it's a brighter wood. That said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with a solid mahogany body guitar - go to a guitar shop and play an SG, which, standard, is probably the most widely-known solid mahogany body guitar in the world. It's a little different sound from a Les Paul, but it still has that Gibson sound. Scale length also has a lot to do with the sound of a guitar, as it helps determine what harmonics dominate the tone - so if you're going for a Gibson/Les Paul sound, MAKE SURE TO USE GIBSON'S 24 3/4" SCALE, not the 25.5" scale that's more common. That's important.

A lot of people just get a really long drill bit (they're pretty available, you just have to be looking for them) and drill from one corner of one pup cavity to the other corner of the other cavity - the rear-route control cavity should be big enough to pretty easily drill from it onto one of the pup cavities. I guess it just depends on your drill, how deep your pup cavities are, and how far apart you have them.

It doesn't make intonation a problem, it makes it nonexistent . That bridge has a set intonation just like acoustic bridges do. I suppose you can adjust it a little bit by changing the whole bridge's angle, but that's about it. There are some other one-piece tune-o-matic sort of options, like: http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Bridges,_tailp...es.html#details and, if you go to http://www.universaljems.com/cart/bridgetunematic.htm the gotoh labeled number 2570-010 and the schaller labeled number 0533-010 All of these offer adjustible intonation in a one-piece tune-o-matic/stoppiece

Woohoo! I got it right! Is it that specific body you're trying to get a neck for? If so, I *think* you'd just need a 24 fret 25.5" scale neck, as that was most likely a 25.5" scale guitar to begin with (all of Charvel's current guitars are 25.5", and a lot of companies just stick to one fret length except in special cases). Normal stock Fender necks are 22 frets, so that wouldn't work, but you can get 24 fret 25.5" scale necks no problem. Two things: First, you might run in to problems with the body's neck pocket fitting the new neck - you might have to sand out the pocket or sand down the neck if the new neck's larger than the pocket, or shim the pocket up to make it smaller and then carve it out to fit the new neck if the new neck's smaller than the pocket. Second, the new 25.5"/24 fret neck might not be exactly the right length, and you might have to plug the bridge holes with dowel and redrill a touch forward or back to get the scale exactly right (which, I suppose, isn't VITALLY important to do, but scale length effects guitar tone so if you're trying to stick with an EVH sound you should try to stick as close to 25.5" as possible). I can't imagine it would be more than a half inch, and wouldn't expect it to be more than a quarter inch, but I'm not really an expert. The floyd rose trem EVH's are supposed to have actually might be adjustible enough for it not to matter - you basically want 25.5" from the nut to the high-E saddle, with about an eighth of an inch or so of play to move the other saddles away from the neck. I guess you could also sand out the neck pocket a little more toward the bridge or shim the neck pocket to move the neck away from the bridge and drill new mount holes in the body to fix the problem without moving the bridge. This might be better as it'd keep the pickup positions correct. Please note, I'm not saying these things will be necessary, just that they could be. When you have a body and a neck that you didn't get from the same place, it's never a given that they'll fit right (hell, it's not REALLY a given even if you do get them from the same place) and you might have to work at it to make them fit properly. At the very least, you could get a cheap 25.5" 24 fret neck and make it into a learning experience . Oh, also, I don't think you can get one of the 22 fret Warmoth necks with their 24 fret extension - that doesn't change the shape/size of the neck, it just extends the fretboard so that you can mount it in a body meant for a 22 fret neck (at least that's what it looks like from their website - I've never actually used one). Jimmy Newman

Looking at Charvel, who makes EVH signature guitars or whatever you'd like to call them, a normal EVH is a 22 fret 25.5" scale neck that looks almost exactly like a fender neck to me. That said, on my stock actually Fender strat, which I just measured, it is close enough to exactly seven inches from the heel of the neck pocket to the trem mount screws as makes no difference, while the body you posted a picture of is only about five and a half inches - which is confusing. On two 22-fret 25.5" scale guitars, that large a difference shouldn't be there. Are you sure the body you measured is a completely standard EVH body? Please note, I've never actually used EVH bodies, but going by my strat and the picture you posted, there seems to be something wrong and I'm not sure why. Did that EVH body you took the picture of have a 24 fret neck? I guess that might explain the shorter difference between the neck pocket and bridge.

Here's a little drawing I made and then photographed of more or less what I want the guitar to end up looking like (please note that it's drawn without a fretboard on top so that you can see the neck structure): The dark areas are black walnut, the light areas are rock maple. The headstock drawn is just a very rough outline of sort of what I'd like to end up with. The body would have standardish strat contours, and I'll probably make the pickup selection done with a push-pull pot or something so that I don't have to add an extra switch anywhere. The center maple piece is square. The center walnut pieces are tapered so that their outside edges are parallel with the edge of the neck and continue in that taper into the body and headstock (so thickest at the rear straplock spot and thinnest at the end of the headstock). The outer maple pieces will be squared once the neck-through piece is glued together so that their outer edges are parallel to each other and the centerline of the guitar. Drawing it out actually helped me cement my ideas a lot - it really helped to see what relative thicknesses of things look like, placement of the knobs, shape of the headstock, etc. You can see plenty of places where the drawing is smeary with pencil from erasing lines and redrawing them a hair or three over. Jimmy Newman P.S. Before anyone gets too excited about my drawing skills, I cheated a lot and printed off a strat from the fender website and traced it, and used a ruler to draw almost everything.

Sounds like a hot guitar! Heh, nice! 3x3 is definately the way to go with laminated necks - I think it looks really silly to have a wildly asymmetrical headstock with those lines going up the middle. Good luck on yours, too! Now that's slick! I was up last night thinking about it, and I'd about decided on making pretty thin laminated maple panels for the back cavity cover and a side jack plate and maybe pup bezels (I think the contrast with the walnut it'd be mounted in would look really cool, especially with the maple in the neck), but your way may win me over - those are some pretty good looking guitars, I'm impressed. Well, I guess I'll just go ahead and try it, especially in light of: I'm still going to do my best to make this first one perfect, but I know you guys are right - I'm going to be coming up with new ideas as I build this one, and once I get it done there's no way I'll be able to keep myself from doing it again (and again... and again... heh ). So with that in mind, here's what I've decided on doing since it doesn't matter if it ends up being my perfect tone: It will have an LP scale length for the sound, but will otherwise be as close to exactly strat-sized as I can get it - I want it to play as close to my strat as possible. With the shorter scale length and full-size strat body, the bridge'd normally look too far forward, so I'm going to use a tune-o-matic and tailpiece to help counteract that. I'm going to route a small depression to put them in so that I don't have to have any neck-angle (staying as close to the strat feel as possible). It's going to have electronics just like an LP, two humbuckers and four pots (although I may steal VanKirk's idea and use two concentrics), and a not-gibson-huge 3x3 flat headstock that's mostly symmetrical (maybe something like the PRS headstocks or the Wolfgang headstocks). The neck-through'll be a maple | walnut | maple | walnut | maple laminate, shooting for between 1/2-2/3 of the neck being maple, with the maple extending an extra inch or two beyond the neck line into the body (I'll post a drawing later to explain what I mean), with walnut wings and a pau ferro fretboard. Like I said earlier, probably laminated maple rear cavity cover and side jack plate (although I may go with Maiden69's style), and the jury's still out on that or chrome pup bezels. I think I'll probably make maple knobs, too. I guess I'm being a little ambitious making my first guitar from straight up raw lumber, and not body-blanks or premade necks or anything, but I really want to've actually made it from scratch and raw lumber, so that's what I'm doing. Oh, by the way - I'm from Houston, too, johnsilver, although I'm in New England for school. How's the weather down there? It's been COLD up here for someone who's always lived in Texas . Do you know any good places in Houston to buy wood? I'm sure there are some, but I've never really gone out to try to buy nice wood, so I have no clue what they are. I'm really a bit leery of ordering wood on the internet, I want to be able to touch it before I decide to put it in a guitar. Anyrate, thanks for all the responses and advice, I really appreciate it! I'm getting itchy and don't want to wait till I get home in may to start (I'll have all the patience in the world once I get started and am actually building it so that I know I'm building it right, but it's going to be pretty rough waiting if I don't start 'til May), so I may have to see about getting into the woodshop here - aside from a bandsaw or jigsaw and a router, I'm mostly planning on doing everything by hand anyway as that's the way I'm most comfortable with and the way I think I'll be able to do the best job. Oh, and once I get started building, I'm going to post EVERYTHING I do, and make a thread on a start-to-finish laminated neck-through guitar with some extra touches (like the wood covers/plates and knobs if I decide to do them) from the standpoint of someone who's never built a guitar before - there are some things that people tend to just gloss over that are kind of important if you don't know about them beforehand (like me). I got a digital camera a few months ago, so I can take all the pictures in the world of the process. Thanks again for the comments, and I hope I can get things going before too much longer so I'll have something to give back to you guys and this forum, which is pretty amazing. Jimmy Newman EDIT: Forgot to mention - I'm going to oil the hell out of it for the finish . Not sure what oil yet though, I'll have to do some reading.

I know walnut's not a bright wood - I'm really NOT looking for a bright guitar, my strat has me pretty covered there, I think. From what I had read, though, I thought it would be relatively brighter than mahogany, and might help add a bit of highs in the neck/neck-through laminate that I would be missing from taking away the maple top - if walnut's really that similar to mahogany (maybe even deeper) maybe I'll just make it a walnut-wings, walnut and maple laminate neck-through - it'd be nice having a bit of light wood in for contrast, and I guess I could have maple on the outside tapering wider into the body so that there'd be a pretty thick stripe of it in the body. That's a REALLY good idea! (And one I never would have come up with on my own.) It's definately a good option - I'm just going to have to look at how things turn out and what kind of parts I can get - and how I'm feeling the day I order them, heh. Things like whether or not the walnut would add a bit of high end that'll be missing from taking away the maple, and if I should just make it walnut with some maple in the neck . I've never actually done this before, so there are bound to be some things I get wrong just thinking things through on paper. Oh, and also, if I ever get that far, what's a good PAF-ish pickup (blues and some 60's rock)? Thanks for the responses! Jimmy Newman

I actually just found this forum yesterday and spent all night reading through a lot of it - good stuff! Let's see, where to start. I've been playing guitar for six years and really love it, and for the last four I've been playing a Fender Texas Special Strat with ash body, one-piece maple neck, two single coils and a pearly gates. It's a great guitar, and it does ALMOST everything I want, but I play a lot of blues and I want a darker guitar I can put some humbuckers in and get that really warm, creamy, screaming sound that you can only get with a heavy-wood guitar (I hate to say this, but the LP sound as opposed to the strat sound, although I'm not terribly interested in trying to nail the LP sound). I'd been thinking about just buying a Gibson or getting a custom made by the folks over at shamray.net, but I've been into general DIY things for a pretty good while, most recently electronics, and stumbled across this forum while looking for DIY tube amps, and up popped a new idea - make my own! I've always been good at building things and taking things apart, and I've done a fair bit of electronics work (audio amplifiers and robot/remote controlled vehicles), a fair bit of woodworking of the table-and-cabinet variety, and even a little bit of metalworking, and I know my way around all the tools in a machine shop and can get access to one pretty easily, so I feel like this is something I can probably make happen. All that said, after reading through a lot of the posts here, I've gone and given myself delusions of grandeur . One of the biggest reasons I was looking at custom guitars is because I really wanted a neck-through design, so there's that. I was generally planning on mahogany neck/body with maple top and rosewood fretboard whether stock, custom, or DIY, but there are all kinds of things people do around here that've been giving me ideas. What's really starting to appeal to me now is getting rid of the maple top so you can actually see the wood the guitar is really made of and using mahogany (or, if I get really fancy, something similar tonally like koa) along with a bit of something a little brighter - I was thinking walnut, which is a wood that I've always thought is particularly beautiful. So at this point I'm looking at building a two-humbucker walnut neck-through mahogany (or koa)-wing guitar, or maybe even a walnut and mahogany (or koa) or walnut and wenge laminate-neck with mahogany (or koa) wings. And a fretboard from rosewood or maybe pau ferro (I don't want to deal with ebony and the expansion/contraction and the cracking, which I've seen in the past on guitars and on other wooden things). This seems pretty ambitious for a first project to someone who's never build a guitar, but at least there are a few positive tradeoffs - I don't have to make a perfect neck-pocket, just get a lot of wood perfectly flat (which I can do). I've really fallen in love with the Stratocaster body shape, so that's what I'd use, so I don't have to do any top-carving. I don't want to do anything but an oil-finish, so I don't have to deal with nitrocellulose or varnish or anything. On the other hand, there negative tradeoffs, too - if I make such a nice guitar out of such pretty woods, there's no way I'll let a pickguard cover half of it up, so I'll have to do basically the LP routing job, which seems harder than the strat routing (I wouldn't even be able to use a normal strat-style output jack - it'd have to be a side-plate). Basically, it'd be a labor of love - I'm pretty patient and knowing I'm building something near to my ideal guitar I'd make sure to do everything right, and I know enough about woodworking and tools to do that, although I'm sure it'll take me forever if/when I do it (it'll probably help that I have a friend with a two-story-garage metal-and-wood machine shop who's crazy enough to've build a mechanical clock from scratch, including the gears and screws, that I can get to help me if I need it and lend me tools if I need them). So that was pretty long-winded, but what do you guys think? Am I crazy? Should I try it? How do the wood combinations sound? I'd be using something close to PAFs, probably (having read about scale length tone changes) using an LP scale length, and it'd be a hardtail. I probably won't be able to do anything but planning and possibly parts-buying until this summer, because I'm currently in college to become a mechanical engineer, so I've got plenty of time to think about it . Anyway, that's all, thanks for reading, Jimmy Newman