Jalien21

oh yeah.. heh. i'll post pictures later on today when i can get my hands on a real camera (if i can get my hands on a real camera)

next to my bridge pickup is the hole that my pickup selector switch goes in. i took that picture before actually putting anything in. (sorry it's not anything interesting...)

and yeah, the fretboard is pretty funky. it looks really good from low angles because you can really see the grain lines and what they're doing. head-on, it mostlyjust looks stripey because it's so long. but that's cool too

so, i haven't updated here in a while

but i'm pretty much done. i hand buffed for about an hour tonight and it's looking really shiny. still, i think i'd like to see what a buffing wheel could do to it. i'll try that tomorrow and probably string it up.

but for now, because i'm super excited:

...i had the 100 watt frontman for like a week. i hated that amp so much... i got the 30 watt vox hybrid modeling amp. it sounds great. i'm now working on getting the bigger more complicated, ad120vt. i feel that people are just too stuck on the word 'vintage' to give hybrid amps a fair chance. that's where my recommendation lays

dude. huge speaker cabinets are all about the stage presence. you can't rock out in front of a 15 watt amp, no matter how loud it is or good it sounds.

dimarzio pickups are tight. my brother got a js1200 last year, with a joe in the neck and a fred in the bridge. he plays through a spider II right now, too. it sounds really good on the insane channel with the stuff he plays (same idea. satch and vai mostly). i liked the sound so much i got the same pickups and put them in my ibanez s470. also sounds super-cool. i'm sure the evos and paf pros and many other dimarzio pickups are all going to sound similar, so i wouldn't worry about the specifics too much. i'd recommend them any day.

as for EMGs... you know, when you distort your guitar to the point we're talking about here, the wood isn't going to matter all that much anyway. active pickups have really nice cleans, i think, and plenty of dynamics. they're clearly different than passive pickups, but i don't think it's necessairly in a bad way. tone is totally subjective, though, so whatever

S's are my favorite guitars. that looks pretty attractive, man. have fun with it

not a lefty, i just took the pictures with my computer's isight camera which mirrors them for some reason... i'm really excited. i cant do a whole lot more before i get back to school (two weeks!!!) but i can order the last parts i need

so, i scored a pair of EMG-HZ pickups for 50 bucks on ebay the other day. i got a 40HZ for the bridge position and a SJHZ for the neck. i think they'll work out. and i cut my body the other day. i'm pretty excited with how it came out:

http://www.rpi.edu/~miglij2/Photo%20109.jpg

http://www.rpi.edu/~miglij2/Photo%20110.jpg

http://www.rpi.edu/~miglij2/Photo%20111.jpg

http://www.rpi.edu/~miglij2/Photo%20112.jpg

i've bought electronic components, pickups, and tuners there. all have worked out quiet well. especially those tuners, what a good deal. they feel great to me and are way cheap.

one word: (that is actually three) LEDs. anything's coolness is directly related to the number of LEDs in/on it. just stick them all over and your squire strat shakes off it's lamesauce and turns into god. when i'm in charge, my first decree is that everything needs to have 1000% more LEDs in it.

ohhkay. so a quad coil pickup is two humbuckers side-by side, so each pair of coils is under two of the strings. rad. the wood was about 150 dollars all together. i bought it all on rockler, which worked out well.

i'm not sure a vintage sound is what i'm after. i want something funky fresh that i can play rush-style counter melodies with. and phish. should i look into the Bartolini/musicman sort of stuff more?

how do 3 or four coil pickups work? i understand how humbuckers work, but 3 coils? is it like, 3 coils is just a single and a hummer, while four coils is just two buckers in a box? or, woah, do the humbuckers each cancel with eachother? so it's like a super-humbucker? that's sort of neat

the p/j dimarzio set seems pretty do-able. does anybody else have any thoughts on it?

pictures!

body layout

side profile

planed body side

i havent done any sanding yet, so there are still some burn marks from the table saw and stuff. but you get the idea

i did some more work the other day. got the neck blank side-ways profiled, cut the scarf joint, and planed the body sides down about a quarter of an inch. everything worked out really, and i'm totally pumped. i'll post pictures when i get back to my room this evening.

does anyone know where i should go to get some nice bass pickups? i really don't know anything about bass pickups. i'm willing to drop maybe 75 bucks on them. or so. maybe more if i need to. i've been watching ebay, but i don't really know what to be looking for, even. any suggestions?

i'm not terribly worried about the veneers and glue lines. i've made two other guitars, and one of them had a neck that had a bunch of veneers and stuff. i find that as long as you have darker woods in there, the glue lines just sort of blend in with them. plus, i used an absurd number of clamps on this. i went into my school's wood shop and used pretty much every clamp they had. i just kept on adding them wherever i could until there wasn't really any more space to put clamps. anyway. we'll see.

so, i started a bass a week or two ago because i've never made a bass and i'd really like to have one. it's going to be a through-neck with a whole bunch of woods and i'll probably shape it sort of like the alembic omega (though, to be honest, i still haven't finalized my body shape.) i bought the wood from rockler and most of the parts from ebay. still need pickups, but i'm thinking about the EMG select hybrid set from stewmac. unless an EMG HZ goes up on ebay for not too much money. or if people have any suggestions for pickups, this is probably going to be a jam band sort of instrument. fretboard is

Neck: maple/walnut veneer/maple veneer/purple heart/maple veneer/ipe/maple veneer/purple heart/maple veneer/walnut veneer/maple

spread

neck

Body: cocobolo/maple veneer/purple heart/maple/walnut veneer/mahogany

pre-gluing, wrong order (but they're pretty woods!)

gluing

aanyway. so far, i've glued up the neck and body, and i just planed the neck down flat. next i need to cut the neck profile, i guess. then i'll attach the body and start shaping stuff? or maybe i'll shape the body some first? we'll see.

S's are sooo cool. i got one a couple of weeks ago and i love it sooo much. they're so sleek and thin and your project is absolutely tight. rock on!

hey, now that's a neat idea. my biggest problem with doing through-neck guitars has been getting the face of the guitar flush with the wings and the center. because you can't really plane or sand it with machines very well because of the bit that's sticking out where the fretboard glues on. you seem to have a solution for that, by having the place where the neck sticks up be curved like that rather than a right-angle. you could just machine that on any sort of belt sander. cool idea. thanks. but what about pickup routes? i guess i could do the ol' drill n' file. but that's sort of lame. or i could suspend the router over it. which would probably work best. cool work!

i'm diggin the colors in the neck. reminds me of those black-white-red comics that you see once in a while. and man. that cab looks so cool under your table, there. i want one...

man. snow is one of the best things this worldhas going for it. you scroodges need to go out and have some fun! it flurried here the other night, and it got me so pumped. i can't wait.

hey, man. it's james. cool stuff. i'm pumped. i mentioned on the GZ board, the mahogany body pieces are wrong. 18 pieces each with a length of 2? oh, and, ah, for some reason, the mods on this board don't like you posting two pictures in one post. *shrug*.. and i didn't know there was going to be a kill switch... that'll be fun.

hahaa! awesome! you made the same mistake i did. you've got to make sure you got all of the steel wool bits off of the body when you put the pickups in... (:

i've been playing on a vox ad30vt. i love it. it's plenty loud for me (though there's a 50 watt model if it dosen't have enough rocket sauce for you) and it sounds great for the price. i think they go for 240 new or so, but you could probably find it cheaper. my brother has the 112 spider 2 amp and that's cool too, but it only really shines when you play heavy, crazy shread metal. the vox is better for variety.

woah. how'd you make that fretboard, again...? if it's getting scrapped, my bar is set a lot lower than yours....

have you ever seen those guitars who have the switch on the neck that flips all the frets upside-down to make it fretless? they're really neat.