WezV

if your fretboard is off anyway i would consider adding some carbon fibre reinforcement bars to the whole length of the neck at this stage, one either side of the truss rod. i would run them right under the locking nut just to the outside of the two bolt holes. - you should be able to get it to look stock but be massively more stable

because the bit where the tang meets the head of the fret is usually slightly rounded

its a magnetic pickup - so its not ideal to use bronze acoustic strings. They still have a steel core and you will still get a sound, but because the windings on the string are bronze (non ferrous) a large part of wound strings wont have any effect on the magnetic field electric guitar strings are made totally out of a ferrous metal

thats blue to natural maple. if you do blue to orange you gotta consider whats going to happen at the point where the blue and orange meet you could use some maple with a deeper natural colour, but then the blue would not work so well.

go for a floating pickup attached to the neck or pickguard - much less damage to the instrument http://store.guitarfetish.com/Neck-Mount-Jazz-Guitar-Pickups_c_96.html then ypu can put a jack on the edge or endpin (endpin is more difficult if working through f-holes if you used controls like this: http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Electronics,_pickups/Potentiometers/Schatten_Thumbwheel_Controls.html you would not need to add any holes to the top

I will repeat myself go to this thread! http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.php?showtopic=44760 it has everything you are asking for have a read, play some guitars and make up your own mind!

then the answer is simple - build more!

we had a little debate about this in the 'sapele VS mahogany' thread below this - have a read, play some guitars and make up your own mind! but dont take the use of pine as proof the woods are not important in the tone of the instrument, especially when almost everyone using it talks about its tone

exactly! doesnt rule out any pine - but it does mean we should warn those newbies not to pop down to the obvious sources for wood that looks like a banana and is still seeping sap the same rules apply whether its pine or finest south american mahogany - it needs to be dry and stable, preferably free from major flaws and preferably straight. this adice doesnt go out to all the people who know about working with wood - its for all those thinking they can build their first guitar out of the stuff they could buy easiest (in the uk that means a shop called B&Q who sell pine so bad i wont even use it for DIY) people need to learn how to choose wood - not what wood is best

pine= fine but that does not mean you can go to your local hardware store and use any old unseasoned pine to build a guitar. all these expensive pine guitars seem to use old stuff - and if you look you will find plenty of old pine suitable for guitars... probably a lot closer than the local hardware store. my local crematorium has the best pine i have ever seen for its pews. is it wrong that i noticed that at my gran's funeral? not to say pine trees these days are not worthy - but it needs to be seasoned and it needs to still meet the basic characteristics for a guitar build. close grained pine will be better than something with a grain line every two inches

trying to remember what i actually do, something like this ... with the neck attached i work out a centreline (from the edges of the neck) and mark on the scale length - i draw a scale length line bisecting the centre line at a right angle. If the bridge has a post centres distance of 80mm (cant remember what they actually are) then i would mark 40mm either side of the centre line on the scale length and recheck that i have measured 80mm. but it needs to intonate so the bridge studs need moving back a bit from the scale length. I move the treble side one back by 1.5mm and the bass one back by 3mm. you may realise that by moving the studs straight back from the scale length line i have actually created marks for the studs which could be more than the 80mm i was aiming for. not usually a problem, at worst it means teh bridge wont fall off so easily - but you can re-check the distance from the centreline doesnt really need that much explanation. mark it, check it, check it again - drill it

same as scott says - i tend to take measurements off the actual hardware to be sure

yeah, they are both bound in white, but the edges also have a round over to increase comfort over the usual bound teles -so there is a little reflection from that i was going to type something about perceiving there to be binding, but that i couldnt be sure it was really there without doing scientific tests to prove it actually was binding (sorry - couldnt resist )

i can see how it could potentially influence the air movement within the cavities - which may well be important with a chambered guitar. but i dont think it would make a guitar chambered this way sound the same as a solid guitar - but might make it sound different to one with complete chambers but then i am assuming thats why it has the pyramids - until i am told otherwise i cant see any other reason for it

is that an attempt to make the chambering purely about weight relief rather than tone? interesting, to say the least

swap those wires then - the volumes will now act completely independently like this: http://static.zoovy.com/img/guitarelectronics/-/wdu_hh3t21_01

+1 dremel +straight edge does it just fine

if i ever get around to owning one of these i promise you i will set-up some consistent string plucking machine and some frequency analysis http://www.teuffelguitars.de/english/guitars/birdfish/tonebars.htm would be a nice way to control a hell of a lot of the variables - somebody buy me one

yeah, that will work fine - but worth noting it wont be the way J-basses (i.e dual volume) do usually. On les paul style wiring like that diagram you get a master volume effect, that means turning down either volume fully down will kill the signal from both pickups- very useful if you want to quickly silence the instrument You can also slightly modify the wiring so that the volumes act independently - all you would do on that diagram is swap the red wire with the blue so the pickup connects to the middle tag and output connects to first tag. This is the way J-basses are wired as the dont usually have the 3-way switch so its more important for the volumes to act independently. Its also useful as it allows you to have one pickup turned all the way up and one all the way down to use the toggle as a killswitch So just decide which you would prefer, which is going to be more useful to you?

Firstly bart - let me say i am enjoying this, and i genuinely hope you are too anyway - on with the show either you missed/purposely ignored my point - or you are trying to discredit me by making it look like i suggested wood had a direct effect on electromagnetic fields. What you suggest doing would be a fun experiment for primary school students! I suspect you know that i was not suggesting wood could have an effect on electromagnetic fields... its a nice debating technique - if a little obvious I am going to come back to the knock test in a minute as i feel its worthy of further discussion, but for now i guess i need to clarify why the body(and neck) wood vibrations are important. I am glad you concede that the things touching the string can affect the way it vibrates in some small way. But my point about the body vibrating was really to highlight the finite amount of kinetic energy you introduce to a string when you pluck it.... you accept the body vibrates so i am going to assume that you accept some of the strings energy is transferred to the wood This leaves us with 2 options: 1)all materials interact (absorb, transfer, reflect etc...) with that energy in the same way - therefore the result will always be the same. the string will continue to vibrate in the same way and therefore sound the same 2)all materials interact (absorb, transfer, reflect etc...) with that energy in different ways depending on there structure (i reckon stiffness is the prime variable there, but weight, density etc are worth considering) - therefore the result will be different with different materials. this will influence the way the string continues to vibrate (is its energy dissipated through the material, or passed cleanly through it) so things will sound different now, the knock/tap test earlier you said do i do the knock test with strings off as well? I am assuming the reason you want us to remove the strings is that you know full well that tapping on the body will pass vibrations into the string. I would say that demonstrates quite clearly that the way the body vibrates can influence the way the strings vibrate - but most of us dont play guitar with a hammer so lets move on anyway, thats not my main point here. when you suggested the knock test i immediately thought of the guitars i have worked on where it was not true - where a knock on the wood would be amplified - admittedly this is usually due to microphonics in the pickup, but i reckon that it tells us something. Microphonics happen because energy from the string vibrating is passed through the body into the pickups. If the pickup has a loose wind or moving parts they will vibrate - this directly influences the electromagnetic field and causes the squeal of microphonic feedback. not what we are after, but it demonstrates that the pickups are also vibrating, this varies depending on how they are mounted (yet another variable in the big picture, but microphonic pickups are still microphonic if you direct mount, use tight Vs loose springs or rubber tubing)... the pickups still vibrate with the body to some degree no matter how you mount them, you cant usually cure a microphonic pickup simply be mounting it differently (I say usually only because a loose baseplate microphonic may be cured by foam underneath the pickup) this demonstrates that what you have is not: it is more accurately described as 'a ferrous string vibrating in a vibrating electromagnetic field' - and the vibrating magnetic field gets its vibrational pattern from the body (which i would suggest has filtered vibrations from the string in different ways depending on its structure) i honestly dont think thats the main reason why body wood influences tone - but i do believe its one of the reasons.

oh, and good point about floating trems - i do believe they cancel out some of the bodies influence as the coupling is less direct. I still think its there though and i still believe i can hear it enough to make me like some strats more than others (all else being equal of course)

hence the smiley and the reference to qualitative 'data' But that is what i do, and i was making a joke out of it. I also make and modify guitars, and play as many as i can get my hands on. but i do it for guitars rather than science, so i am not about to make loads the same - just not why i am in the game you may have missed my point on this then. I was talking about going into a large guitar shop and playing as many of the same type of guitar as you can. Lets say playing 10 standard fender tele's made from the same wood - or comparing the alder/ash varieties, if they are still the same in all other respects. I purposely referred to CNC production and machine wound pickups as it reduces the variability down to the wood and set-up. This is really what you should do when choosing any guitar, especially when paying a lot of money. I have done it quite a few times. It lets you pick the best of the bunch, its still my beleif that what makes one sound better will be down to the woods, whereas i accept that what makes one play better will be the set-up (although if we are changing string gauge slightly or action dramatically then yes, i also believe that will have tonal influences). i mention trying this with fenders as they produce large numbers of the same guitar to fairly consistent standards. you will find more difference in gibsons, which i do believe is partly down to the woods, but they also have shockingly inconsistent QC. Newer ones are a bit better with the plek set-up, but that rarely seems to be a cureall. sorry, are you saying that bridge/nut materials do or do not make a difference to tone. if you are saying they do not make a difference, thats fine (although i do completely disagree of course ) If you are saying they do make a difference i would have to question why you think those materials do, but wood doesnt. I refer to my previous comments about the coupling that i believe exists in an electric guitar. i would say this coupling is clearly evident as you can feel the body vibrating. To me it seems that if the body is vibrating it must be the string that makes it vibrate, which is why i think there is a clear link between materials used to hold the string, and the way the string vibrates. I illustrated this before with the extreme example of coupling a string to a rubber or steel bar. i would refer to ripthorns post about the difficulties in doing this. It seems like you want to challenge commonly held and widespread ideas by telling us all to go and prove that we are wrong - most times when people want to do that they take on the mission themselves!

i have just remembered something relevant to this discussion, cant believe it only just occurred to me I recently made two identical guitars in every respect except the body wood and colour! Guess which woods i used! 1 was sold to me by a reputable supplier as Sapele, the other was sold by a reputable supplier as Honduran mahogany, these descriptions matched my previous experience of what to expect from these two woods. In this case both were a similar weight (towards the heavier end of what i find acceptable), but its obviously hard to tell if they were a similar stiffness or not I think i forgot as this was not done as science so i wont claim it as such, and unfortunately i dont have them to do tests. But as small builders & hobbyists we dont get to repeat our builds often and i can see why some people would suggest that made our tonal observations less valid (if you also assumed we didnt also play factory guitars on a regular basis) yes, I do believe there was a noticeable tonal difference between thsoe two guitars, both acoustically and when plugged in and played clean/driven. Less so with high gain - it was easier to EQ out. (as a social scientist I am OK with my qualitative data from a small sample )

lol - even with more advanced tonal analysis, they all still disagree. I like it

yes - subjective, glad we agree the frequency spectrum of different woods is... well its different. this isnt a debate about who likes what sounds but whether there are different sounds from different woods And so will mine, but you and I expect differences whereas bartbrn doesn't, we both hear what we expect/want to hear.. I am well aware of the arguments on psychoacoustics and suggestibility. I agree there is something to it, as well as the fact some people perceive a guitars tone to suddenly change - often it changes back if they play a different one for a while... our ears get used to certain sounds and it affects our perception of them. Its all interesting stuff - worthy of discussion. but for me it is not enough to explain the night and day differences i frequently hear between two identical guitars. Its not enough to explain why i have built guitars with quality hardware, proven build techniques and tried a few sets of pickups in them only to find there inherent tone is completely unpleasant (and projects scrapped for that reason). I made changes in hardware, pickups and electronics fully expecting to hear a difference. A difference was there - but the unpleasant character shone through and it could only have been because of the construction (i had made guitars the same way before without this problem) or the wood yet other claim to hear the difference between capacitors and pay a premium for PIO, or bumblebee caps... who's right? you or them? yes, i have paid a lot for many capacitors - i am not one looking to build guitars cheap and rarely skimp. I would swear when changing caps i heard massive differences. One guy was so adamant it made no difference i decide to do some tests since all it involved was adding a switch and two caps.... well my first problem was finding caps of the same value, otherwise the test would be pointless - every ceramic disc was well of the stated value, most well below. the spragues i have were consistently close so they became my baseline. I still have more caps to test but there was less difference than i expected when switching directly from one cap type to another - although I still think the sweep was a bit different. Fully on it made no difference (as expected), fully down it and very little difference (not as expected). in between setting did have differences, but not massive will have a look at that website later - there is a good comparison of cap types on youtube but unfortunately the guy does not check the actual value of the cap - just uses ones with a certain stated value - with a stated tolerance of +/-20% !!!! well value of cap makes a very noticeble difference so that tells us nothing what you can take from that is that i do actually listen to opposing viewpoints to my own - and if i have the time and resources (like with the simple cap test) i am quite happy to look into it and even change my own point of view... my cap point of view has moved a bit because of it. I know everybody gets their knickers in a twist with threads like this - never understand why. I guess its the cognitive dissonance that comes from people questioning others viewpoints. A bit of healthy debate (not 'your stupid if you think that' type posts) is good for us all!!!