j. pierce

I've got a cheap Sanatoga brand twelve string (one of those weird $150 dollar guitars from eBay) that's got a tune-o-matic set up- they just double notched a regular tune-o-matic saddle, like Mr. Alex mentioned. Actually intonates fairly well, I was suprised. Better than some of the three-saddle Tele's I've worked with. I've been wanting to pick up one of those bridges from Universaljems or somewhere, but seeing as this is just a bang around on guitar for me right now, I've got better things to spend the 70 bucks on.

With a chambered guitar, is it a must to finish or seal the inside of the chambers? If you put an F-Hole on it, does that change things? I'm thinking of just leaving the chamber closed, it's really just to lighten things. I usually spray the inside of my control cavities, and while I can get the insides of the chambers, I don't know the best way to get the back of the top before I glue it on. I was looking inside my acoustic, and it doesn't seem to have any finish inside, but it's also a junky old cheap thing. I tried searching, and didn't find quite what I was looking for in the archives, sorry if it's there and I missed it.

If you plan on going the vaccuum tube route, Kevin O'Connor's books (from London Power) are great references. You can get them from Antique Electronic Supply (http://www.tubesandmore.com) Tonnes Of Tone, The Ultimate Tone series, and Ready Set Go!; An Electronics Refrence for the Everyman are great references. The latter is especially helpful as a primer/refresher if you don't know much about electronics. Dan Torres' Inside Tube Amps - The Book On Tube Amps is also helpful. (Also available from A.E.S.) for solid state bass amps, I like some of G. Randy Sloan's poweramp designs (if I remember correctly, his books also have PCB layouts if you can know how to etch your own circuit-board coupled with one of the pre-amp designs you can find online (I believe the Acoustic 360 preamp is floating around online and I like the sound of that a lot.) Sloans books are a bit technical, however. Be prepared to spend a lot of money on books if you want to get into building an amp. Knowledge is going to be your best friend before you even start putting in an order or picking up a soldering iron. If you don't know anything about electronics, I would maybe take some introductory courses at a Community College or Tech School; (I don't know where you are located, but here we have those types of programs at our Community College, and a they are relatively cheap, and certainly worth it; you don't need to actually go to the college to take individual courses that interest you. They even have guitar classes!) Tell the administration people what sort of things you want to do/learn and they can help you take the course(s) that would help you. The ARRL (American Relay Radio League) used to put out some really good electronics books for beginners, I assume they still do. Your local library probably has some, or equally good books. Unfortunetly, I find a lot of the basic books do a good job of teaching theory and tech., but not a great job of applying it - for the longest time I knew my electronics stuff, and I knew how to build things given a schematic, but connecting the two knowledge bases was a jump for me. Even if you know how to solder (I'm assuming you do if you're here; those input jacks, volume pots and pickups don't hook themselves up!) you really need to know a different set of skills to build an amp - not only are you going to be working with circuits at line-level voltages; you may also very well be working with higher voltages, inside a tube amp. If you don't know what you're doing going in, you may very well injure or even kill yourself. Basic safety precautions and a bit of knowledge make this very easy to avoid, but it's also very easy to think you're prepared and do something wrong. It's also very easy to inadvertently damage expensive electronics parts in your build. If you know your way around electronics, but aren't comfortable starting totally from scratch, there are several companies that sell tube amp kits; Torres Engineering (http://www.torresengineering.com/) is the first that comes to mind. There are several more, but I can't think of anyone offhand who sells bass amp kits specifically. And while you can go the kit route, or purchase a schematic, pre-made board to populate with parts, and/or board layout, when doing an electronic project, it's much better to have some idea of how the finished product is supposed to work - this makes the build, as well as the inevitable trouble shooting much easier. I think building an amp is a great goal, but if you haven't done this sort of thing before, I think it's best to work up to it - start by building an effects pedal or a little radio kit or something, work up to a mini-amp, a practice amp; get your feet wet before moving up to a relatively high-powered, full featured amp. This of course depends on how much you know; just like jumping in on your first guitar build might be easy if you have a background in woodworking, but I wouldn't suggest a guitar as the first woodworking project for someone who's never held a powertool. In the end I think hand-built amps are great, just like handbuilt guitars, they can be exactly what you want, and I think you should push towards that goal if it's what you want, just be prepared. Also, know that the cost of any amp you build is likely to be more than most amps you can buy outside of the most expensive ones. Unless you plan on building several and can get better, bulk pricing on parts. And you'll likely need access to a fair amount of metal working equipment to build a good chassis. Cheapest, semi-diy way to do this, and probably what I would be doing if I was building a bass combo amp: Buy a rackmount poweramp that's relatively transparent. Build your own nice pre-amp, based around a circuit you like the sound of. Probably, I'd also construct this in a rackmount-type case. Then dig out the table saw and make a nice speaker cab of the type you want with an integrated rackmount on it to mount the electronics parts. My band already had a bass head, and built our speaker cab in a similar fashion, to make a combo amp. It actually looks really nice, everything wrapped up in one nice package. Sorry if this rambled a lot. I haven't had my coffee yet. I just see David's post before mine while I was typing and rambling - those are both great links.

this will sound kind of dumb, but depending on how neck heavy the thing is, changing straps might just help. My SG is a bit neck heavy, but using a leather strap instead of a nylon one like I usually use seemed to fix that - the raw leather on the back of the strap has just enough friction against the back of my shirt that it won't slide around on me. My Firebird is *really* neck heavy though, and a strap just wasn't going to change things. You could just chop the headstock off and set it up Steinberger headless style.

Guitarnuts.com has pretty much all the info you could need on shielding.

I was really thinking just staining the top - so maybe masking things off will work - it's just such a fine line we're talking about, so I don't know how well it will work. But yeah, that hadn't occured to me - thanks! Looks like one more thing to try out when I'm experimenting.

Okay, I hope my explanation works here: I'm thinking of doing something along the lines of this to one of the bodies I'm working on. I have my nice mahogany bodies, and some white veneer. And several pieces of 1/4" thick walnut to choose from for my top. The plan being to sandwich the veneer between the body and the top. I'm fairly confident with applying veneer, I've done it several times before, and I've got some assistance from a relative who's more experienced than I. So no questions there. The thing is, I'm thinking I may want to stain this top. I'm afraid that if I stain it anything too dark, the accent line from the veneer will get lost. Now, I know from past experiences the first time I worked with veneer, that with too much glue, it will bleed through, and keep finishes from working. Usually that's a bad thing. However, here, I'm thinking that might actually work to my advantage, by preventing whatever I stain the top with from affecting the accent line too terribly. However, I'm afraid that if I glue the veneer down in this fashion, I'm apt to have troubles glueing the top to veneer/body piece afterwards. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Any other ways to stain the top without affecting the accent line too much? Obviously, "practice on scrap" which is my plan when I get some time tomorrow. I'll be playing with finishes - I may not even go the stain route, we'll see how things look with grain fill and clear and what not. Thanks!

I've bought maple there before for a three-piece laminate neck. They haven't had any maple since. The pieces I got seemed dry and straight enough to me, but I didn't know about those things back then, though, and you can't really tell those things just by looking. But the guitar never had any warpage issues during the build. It was one of those pieces that sat around for months at a time during various stages in the process though. Pricewise I seem to remember it wasn't too bad compared to the local hardwood dealer, but things are a bit pricey in my neck of the woods. The guitar sounded great. Looked like ass, though. (First build, I still haven't mastered the art of finishing.)

No experience with that particular piece of equipment, but the hipshot gear I have used before (bass bridges and the that drop-d tuning peg gizmo for guitar) has all been really nice gear worth the money.

I' m not usually a huge fan of crazy guitars, but I like this one - maybe because while it's radical in design, it's still rounded? It looks nice. I kind of like the idea of a strat style headstock on it - although like Shreddy says, this one doesn't quite work, what about a big ol' 70's style CBS-era fender headstock? m Maybe even exaggerate it more? With those deep, curving cut outs on the side, between the pickups, I can't help but imagine a crazy small fretboard radius so you could play this with a bow.

I agree with the above - while I don't see 24.75" scale on their list of fret slotting scales they've got 24.625" which is closer; I know they'll do 24 frets, I've had them do it on three fingerboards in the recent past, and they very well may be able to nail the exact scale you need; they've always been real good about trying their best to answer any wierd request, be it non-standard sized wood or requests for specific figure or whatever. I'd call them, they're real easy to deal with on the phone. The wood I've gotten from them is some of the prettiest I've seen. How far off is that angled slot? Might the reworking be covered by the fret's crown? Inlay? Working on sleep deprivation is a bummer though. I've been there.

Billy - What type of ink/paint is this One-Shot? How's it working out? I do a little bit of screenprinting, and I tried using some acrylic based screenprinting inks on wood once and didn't have too much luck. Did you seal off the wood first or anything?

I used dowels (and glue, of course) when building my neck-through to keep things lined up so the neck angle would be exact. I just glued up several body blanks at once (The local lumberyard with the nicest wood doesn't want to sell me less than 9 feet at a time it seems) and didn't use dowels - both types of joints worked fien and held, but pegs or dowels or biscuits make it nice because everything stays lined up. If you don't realize it and something slips when you're glueing, if you don't have access to anything to surface the front and back of the body blank with, you're in for a litle bit of work leveling things out. The 5 minutes to drill alignment holes was worth the saved effort. Be careful though, depending on how thick the pieces you're working with are - I once used dowels to line up three pieces of maple for a neck I was making, and somewhere along the way the neck blank got reversed, and I was certainly surprised when the dowel showed up on my neck profile as I was carving!

I like finishing Maple more than Mahogany - less grain fill. The first guitar I built was a maple neck through with a mahogany body. The sound was killer. I think it was the perfect balance of the sounds of the two woods. Of course, the thing also weighed about fourty five pounds, since I made it too thick. It might be worth the extra money if you have a certain type of finish in mind - if you don't care for that stripe down the middle, but still want a translucent finish, it's a real pain to stain the two woods to any sort of a match.

Some of the Godin LG guitars have a through-body/tune-o-matic set up, with what appears to be through-body holes drilled at an angle - I assume they would still use ferrules in the back, but from the front, with the through body holes drilled in at an angle, they have a cool "slotted" look. I'd assume that by going through at an angle, you eliminate the need for string ferrules at the top since the string doesn't angle against the wood there. Again, I haven't seen these in person outside of hanging on the guitar shop wall, (It was too high to reach) so they may not be exactly how I describe them.

Wow, that thing does look amazing. that inlay on the back of the neck - I've seen someting like it in one of the LMI catalogs - does anyone know how you go about doing something like that? I can't think of a convenient way to cut out the inlay slot on a curved surface like that.

Hey, long time reader, first time poster. I've built a couple of neck-through-body guitars with moderate success, (well, except for the finishes, those don't look as great as I'd like, passable but not perfect. But I'm learning) Now, I'm trying my hand at a set neck. I've been reading up and looking at plans, but most of the plans I've seen have been for LP type guitars that are a good deal thicker than what I'm thinking of working on. (I'm thinking more along the lines of an SG) My question is, how deep do folks make the neck tenon into the body? Or rather, I suppose, how much thickness in the wood of the body below the neck tenon do most people leave when routing the pocket? Is there a potential stability issue here if there is not enough wood here? I hope I've asked this in a way that makes sense. thanks!