Drak

I think with the zebra-weed, it has acquired a drop of George Lynch along the way. The Lynch-erator?

When I did the 'yellow brick road', I already knew the neck pickup was yellow and black. So I was tying that into the body purposely. And the yellow/black pickup ties in really well with the green guard. If you look at the guard closely, there's blue spots interspersed, so the blue knobs and pickup coordinate with it. These guards are a thin layer pattern over white plastic, so I sprayed the sides and all the routed edges black, if you happen to notice. Bridge pickup is a DiMarzio Gravity Storm, neck pickup is a DiMarzio Fred. The interesting thing, tho, is you could apply several different color combinations of pickups and knobs and they would all work. I could have done a Blue Leopard guard w/ yellow knobs, would still work. And so the rear pickguard is also green leopard, as well as the truss rod cover. When its all put together, it'll look even more in your face colorful than it does here w/ body only. There's a lot of color, but...that was the plan all along. Would it look better with a Black Floyd? It was a tossup between gold and black hardware...

Unveiling...Mockup, call it what you wish, love it or hate it, this is the Crayon! (Not the real neck)

Yes, I'm quite pleasantly surprised by what that wound up adding to the recipe. Remember the point where I said it was nearly too serious (and it was, way too serious). And it needed to take a hard left turn in the direction of frivolousness and '80's fun from that point forward. The weeds and the yellow brick road definitely did the trick (for me). Many disparate, seemingly disjointed and disconnected parts. But they do seem to add up to a particularly pleasant sum, which was exactly the goal starting out. I'm now officially ga-ga over it, which every guitar I build must achieve or I won't finish it. And there's nearly No green and Zero blue yet. One can only wonder what could possibly be coming next...

So I needed to line up and connect the neck seaweed with the body seaweed. Even though the neckplate will cover most of it, it still has to line up and connect. The back of the body came out a little more like trees than seaweed I think, but I still totally adore this build. I didn't give as much thought and time to the back as I did the front, kinda rushed it a little, but everything can be fixed in the mix. As you can see by what I'm doing here, its pretty easy to edit black wavy lines. I can re-tape and quick-shoot to alter them a little more like realistic plants or seaweed. I might also enlarge/enhance the green seaweed bits a little too. And you haven't even seen the pickguards yet. But I have .

Yet another disparate part, adding its part to the Big Picture. I can get away with this much, but no clearcoats, too humid lately. BTW, the pickguard is finished minus mounting the hardware to it, completely cut out, routered, drilled, and done. I think we're rounding the last curve headed toward the yellow tape and finish line!

So, marching on. Or...should I say everything is going just swimmingly... I'm really getting behind the seaweed thing, the green really agrees with the color scheme. I tried to make the bottom half of each seaweed a bit darker than the top half. Not really obvious, but there all the same. A week ago I could never have imagined it would be looking like it is now. And I'm keeping 3M in business, never used so much tape before. Once this dries, I cover up the green bits and shoot the rest black. Fascinating.

It all looks really well executed, Bravo! Yes, if you had asked, I would have gladly told you Spruce doesn't dye like a Maple and not to try and dye it directly. The general rule is to clearcoat the Spruce first, level-sand, then add your colors as shader coats mixed into your finish medium. Then more clearcoats to lock it in, like a sandwich. And not to dye the wood directly, as Spruce is known to react in a blotchy way to direct dying. If the Spruce reacts in a certain favorable way to direct dying, the 'blotchyness' can add a certain character to the look you couldn't otherwise achieve. But you never know going in, you just take your chances doing it like that. I love what you did with the logo, pretty trick-'er'. Its going to look great! P.S., did you wind up keeping the gold side-banding? This is also a Spruce top, clearcoated first, then some slight shader added to the finish in later coats. No blotch, and you can clearly see the Spruce grain underneath.

There is an entire Ancient Aliens episode dedicated to Da Vinci and all the secret messages hidden among his works. They claim he was 'connected', and had special powers, connections, and abilities...if you know what I mean...

It doesn't take a 'lauded artist'. I see guys building beautiful guitars all the time who will immediately point out every area of imperfection no one else would ever see. It's kinda normal. That one area is already fixed, the back is now done, I got one clearcoat on the whole thing before the end of the day. Rainy temps for the next few days so no more finish work for a bit. But the pickguard material is here so I can finally bang that out and that's what really brings everything together. This thing is more a total of the sum of its various disparate pieces. When you see it all put together I think it will all come together and make sense.

I totally like this now. Still have to do the back (the side is done), and now that I can get a good look at it I might do some very small editing to the front. The one upper piece right next to the yellow brick road looks a little too straight and stiff for me, I can fix that right up easy peasy. This is finally looking like something I had at first imagined, I think I can call this done and be really happy with it. I did a fair amount of research on various animal prints...leopard, cow, cheetah, zebra, etc., they all have a specific 'look'. Then I saw a zebra print that actually reminded me of seaweed and I said 'That'll do, that's it, that's the look'.

The Pickguard Material Is Here! <a hushed, awe-inspired silence falls over the crowd, with some weeping from the children> And, Will Farrell had it all wrong. When you're jonesin' and in need, the answer is not more cowbell. It's Seaweed. Everyone needs more Seaweed. Healthy enzymes, nutrients, vitamins, Packed with everything good for humans being human. I prefer my seaweed blackened on occasion.

Dremel tools? To quote a phrase, 'I put that shit on everything'. I have two of them and use them reasonably often. One stays attached to its router base, the other I use for stuff like this. I take it for granted I'm going to break the cutoff wheel, it happens all the time, but they're cheap and I have dozens of them. But they come in handy-dandy in plenty of instances, I use them to cut pickup mounting screws down all the time. This was from building one of my pedalboards where I wanted a more secure corner-fastening mechanism than just a glue-joint and needed to whack off the extra screw length and protruding screw head. It works perfect for that kind of thing. Why I bother to take pics of this kind of thing, that is a topic for another day.

In one of my 'Ancient Text Documents', a Stew-Mac VHS finishing tape, Dan Earlewine does a blackburst. He used Silver-Gray dye for the figure enhancement and black dye for the edgeburst. I still have probably 4 full packets of that stuff I bought probably 25 years ago from Lockwood. Cuz...I never did make a blackburst, tho I have enough dye to probably make 20 of them .

I used to love Steve Winwood until he contracted the dreaded Phil Collins' 'hitmaker' disease. Which, oddly enough, started right around the album you posted, Arc of a Diver. He could do no wrong up until then. But I like how you intertwined two disparate comments I made and cohesively intermingled them. Classy...and observant. And I had to look up 'Mondrian', never heard of that guy before. You people know how to keep me on my toes, and educated too.

My bad. When I was doing the read-through, I thought it said multi-laminate Neck-Through. Doing the logistics of a neck-through using Ebony of that size on a body of that size (and depth) led to that comment. I re-read it back and saw it said multi-laminate neck, not neck-through. And, of course, the fact that you're building for a Paul Bunyan sized man was, of course, unknown to me. Carry on then!

If I were doing that, weight would be the most imperative consideration above nearly everything else. The Ebony being figured into the equation, as well as the massive size of the instrument. Something else needs to suck up the hit of the weight or that train can leave the tracks pretty quickly. Your client may not understand this, as clients sometimes only use their eyes of lustful desire and not much else. You may need to be the brakeman here, and you may need to lay it on hard. I would substitute something like Butternut instead of Mahogany, for example. I would say Basswood, but that's so boring to look at, but you get the general idea. Try to choose the right wood right from the start so you don't wind up trying to counterbalance a bad wood call by drilling a thousand holes or something. Or else it will wind up a very beautiful Trini Lopez boat anchor, sailing to the very depths of the sea. At every turn, at every opportunity, I would keep the weight in consideration and save wherever you possibly can.

So if you want to go deep diving, I'll supply the tanks and gear, tho you'll have to sign the required mandatory waiver and rental fees. So...I discovered how his guitar theme 'works', where the Cubist influence can 'hang it's hat' and not only survive, but flourish. I didn't really know, I'm no art major, and left unattended, cannot even draw a fair egg by myself. I just figured it out by looking at it for awhile. As with mine, I only figured it out after the fact. It starts with the 'frame', where the artist took tape, and by visual manipulation (black being a very strong visual influencer) changed the curvy Fender-ish outline into straight lines and various angles. That's what gives all of the free-form cubist shapes within the frame license to operate. The eye, by accepting the changeover from curvy outline to angular outline, literally 'strong-armed' to do so by the use of the black influence, then easily accepts any and all straight lines and geometric shapes within the frame. That's why his works (IMO). Mine, OTOH, uses the very strong singular arc (black being an influencer again) to set the tone for the rest of what lies within. So what 'is' the arc and why is it so influential? The bottom 1/3 is a 15" radius, the top 2/3 was taken directly from the right-hand side of the pickguard I made. I just flipped it over to give me the angle I wanted. The black/white separator 'arc' on the upper short horn taken from the pickguard also. So there are now Three reference points all correlating to the same arc, the right-hand side of the pickguard. The black/white separation line of the upper horn, the upper portion of the red/black arc, and the pickguard itself. The other arcs are 10" radiuses. So the control cavity simply is 'in agreement' with everything else, being of a pretty similar arc. Yes, You've Got It. The rear control cavity cover is made out of the exact same pattern as the pickguard material, so a very colorful addition to the back as well, you've got it. The back now mirrors the front in nearly every way. It's already made as I had some previous material, enough to make the control cavity cover out of, and the truss rod cover as well. But of course, if I showed it, it would 'give the game away', now wouldn't it? And everybody loves a good unveiling. Did you say Leppard? As in Leopard? Oh, I Love Leopard, yes I do.

So turns out I'm not 'really' done. The knobs (on the pickguard) are very much a part of 'The Look', of the theme, so they're set. But the EMG VMC is a double-ganged pot so I really need to use the knobs that it comes with, which are a sort of rubberized black. So...that wasn't going to work on the pickguard, ...which prompted me to do yet another 'double-guard' job. To both get that pot off the pickguard and onto the body, and to give me access to the battery from the back. Like I did on the Oak Floyd with the EMG SPC pot sitting on its own. Where there is a front pickguard, and also a rear pickguard. Since I now have room for more pots, I think I'm going to add a 'Spin-A-Split' pot (for the neck pickup) to the body too. Now, the story goes a little strange here. I only ever looked at the Belew guitar from a design/paint/inspiration standpoint. I never once 'really' looked at his control setup, but when I did, what do I see? The Same Damn Thing. He's got a loaded front pickguard, and more pots on the body, which means he has a rear pickguard too. Hi-Larious. So, I needed to make a rear control cavity cutout and a matching pickguard (to the front). BUT, it couldn't 'mess with' my design, No Sir, it couldn't interfere with that. So I made a CURVED custom control cavity router template, routed out the cavity, and used it to make the pickguard for it too. Airbrushed the edges and cavity white. Glad I snuck this in before final clearcoats go on.

The shoe on the other foot for a change. Now I get to sit back and say 'Where the Hell is this going? With full confidence that it is heading toward a spectacular ending, of course. But the ride ...is interesting.

I removed the sticker (successfully, no repercussions), ...just wasn't feelin' it. I think I'm going to call this one done, shoot some final clear, and wait on the pickguard. This thing has been like hiking up a mountain w/ a 200lb. backpack. Time to take a rest beside the crystal clear waters of the mountain lake, relax, and take in the view.

<Silent Running>

The 'end of the trail' (in this case) leads you to the very central heart of the guitar itself. Where physical manifestation (visual art) transforms into sound and every note that will get played on the instrument. The end of the yellow brick road leads you to transformation, from sight into sound, from the fixed into the possible. Its the 'leaping off' point, where what is known and fixed and dependable (visually) transforms into the world of sonic possibilities. Would you tell a child (using <sonic> crayons) what to draw with their crayons? Would you 'expect' a 'certain' picture, or result, from them? Or would you hand them the crayons and the medium and wait and see what they are inspired to create with it? How far can they go with it, using their imagination, which changes from moment to moment? It is the Road Leading to Possibilities Yet Undetermined and Unfixed, where Anything is Possible. This is what I was working on last night.

A few clearcoats, everything mostly smoothed out now. A little Glossy Sauce always fixes everything.

Oh, it gets sanded and spot-cleared(coated) all along the process, in areas. Mostly everything is done by 'areas' with overall clearcoats done here and there. The tape leaves residue behind that must be constantly Naptha'd off. The Xacto blade leaves scars in its wake. The paint, although thinned, still leaves ridges, bumps, and humps from pulling tape. There's always cleanup to do with an Xacto blade to keep the lines sharp. You have to be super-conscious of everything, all the time, so nothing takes you backwards. ALL of that needs to be addressed every step of the way, its tedious going. Especially if I've done something to the front then needs the back addressed the same. You can't just then lay it on its front with a fresh unprotected shoot. So there's spot-clearing over new sections, dry time, sanding, cleanup, etc. The Final Clearcoats make all that disappear and go perfectly smooth, as well as other aspects of the cleanup and detail. Clearcoats are my friend, but you can't clearcoat the entire guitar after every section, it would take a gallon of lacquer if you did that. So yeah, there's constant attention to detail on the section being done, and constant sanding and cleanup of surrounding areas.