erikbojerik

Guitar Finishing Step by Step Forget about removing the neck, pretty tricky for a beginner. Just tape off what you don't want to re-paint. You should try to remove the electronics together (i.e. still wired up) as much as humanly possible. Disconnect the pickups and the output jack, remove the knobs and screws holding the pots to the body, and all the rest should just should lift out. Label each of the pots with a piece of tape first, so you'll know where to put them back when you're done. Plan on spending a lot of time with various types of sandpaper in your hand.

Very true about the Graphtech saddles being non-conductive. I don't know if the Baggs or Fishman saddles have the same issue. On a TOM you can just ground the tailpiece, or if you're going string-thru the body you can use a single metal plate in back of the guitar to hold the ball-ends and ground to that.

Like most woods, walnut weight can vary a lot from piece to piece. Most of my stash I got from one tree and it is as light as most Honduran mahogany I've had. It is a little brighter than mahogany but not as bright as ash or alder to my ears, so I think you'd be fine. I just finished a 27" scale baritone LP with walnut neck & body with a bocote cap, it weighs a bit over 9 lbs.

Yep Baggs and Fishman both make good units, as does Graphtech (their Ghost system with Hexaphonic preamp). All of them will require the same thing, a 13-pin output jack that you need to send to an external pitch-to-MIDI converter. Roland and Axon are two companies that make good ones. I came this-><-close to putting one on a guitar I built recently, but I didn't have the cash to buy the Roland or Axon converters. One nice thing about the Axon is that the tracking is really good and you can actually program individual strings to have different sounds - or different parts of the guitar neck to have different sounds. A nice thing about Roland stuff is that you can use the VG99 which is like a Variax on steroids and has some cool Theramin-style hand-modulated effects. The tracking on some of the older Roland stuff is not nearly as good as their more recent models. They both have the usual array of synth sounds as well. I believe they all have small circuit boards mounted inside the guitar with the ability to send your magnetic signal to Pin 7 of the 13-pin cable, so that you don't need to run two cables from your guitar. But you'd have to look into how the different companies wire it up on the guitar end, and where that Pin7 signal comes out on the other end. I know on the Roland VG99 there's just a simple 1/4" jack that you use to send the magnetic pickup signal to your normal guitar amp.

Sorry I was so slow getting back to you...been busy. I was looking at doing a build with a 25" treble side scale fanning to a 26" bass side scale. Do-able? Yep do-able, but like Pro said I'd need to know which fret is the "perp", how many strings, and your bridge and nut string spacings. A 1" fan is not that much, so it won't make too much difference if the "perp" is #5, #7 or what. And fanned frets are not straight - so $100 extra because its hella lotta work to do it right.

By happy coincidence, I find myself in Austin the same week as the Austin City Limits music festival Oct. 8-10. Can anyone out there hook a brother up with a 3-day pass?

Different Floyd nuts can vary in how tall the slots stand up - my inclination would be to just cut a fret slot at the nut position and leave an inch or so behind that, and let you decide how much you want to take the thickness down to fit the nut that you have. Sound OK?

Yep - still cranking. What do you need?

Straight fret slots incur no upcharge - what's the scale length?

+1 for Lincoln Brewster, he's a monster player - but every time I hear him sing, I can't help but think "boy band". I think it works, but I would have gone with a Jazz body - just because I like the Jazz.

Also don't forget to factor in the trem block if you're going to have a tremolo. If I were you, I'd pick a fairly plain piece for the back, and find a piece with nice grain or figure for the top that you can resaw (bookmatch) and glue to the back.

If you have an iPhone, the Peterson is $10 and dead accurate.

I don't know anything about them, but it looks to me like your specs go to Shamray and he farms it out to whichever Russian builder can get the job done.

As long as the US and Europe continue to be separated by an ocean, shipping will always be higher US->EU than within the EU.

I'd be interested to see the fire hose system.

With that instrument, the catch is that you need 2 amps. One for the bass side, the other for the guitar side. In the second clip, Ben has a Leslie effect going but only on the guitar side, the bass side remains clean as day.

Thanks Ben just sending me some video links from the inaugural gig of the BH-8! You have really come along in just a month! It is becoming a natural extension of you. It took me a long minute to realize you guys were a trio with NO bass player. Yes folks, that's Ben holding down the bass AND comping over top. Nice!

For just a thicker sound, virtually any cheap delay pedal will do. Bring your axe into GC, try out a bunch of them, pick out the one you want, then go home and get it used off eBay. Done.

Yes my math is correct. One calculation I did after that post, was to compare the different bars-rods-tubes by mass - CF composites are more dense (heavy) than an equivalent volume of any wood, even ebony. So replacing a given volume of maple with the same volume of CF will always make the neck a little more heavy (though not as heavy as a Warmoth which uses steel bars). Turns out that using CF tubes will improve the stiffness of the neck with almost no change in mass, because of the air volume inside the tube.

"Delay" is a very broad term, and can be used for a huge variety of things. Some desired sounds could lend themselves to a very simple onboard circuit, others are very tempo specific (i.e. very specific about the exact time delay and amount of repeats) and are best obtained some of the more advanced pedals or even programmable rack units. The number of things you can do with delay are really enormous. Are you looking to just make your sound thicker, or something more fancy?

Looking great John! Very classy construction so far. What are your plans for the finish? Hehehe - I did exactly the same thing once. My solution was to add another dot on either side, so #12 has 3 dots. Then of course I had to do the same on #24 - more crowded for sure.

An interesting idea - to replace the magnet slugs with little electromagnets. But really - I think the effect you are trying to avoid (fringing fields from nearby magnets) are a small part of the overall equation. Try this as a test - play a single-coil guitar through only one pickup, then stick a thin 3" long bar magnet next to the coil (under the strings) and play it again - and see if you can hear an audible difference. Only issue I see is that you need a lot of current to generate the right amount of magnetic field from each electromagnet. My guess is that the current requirements may be more than is typically provided by phantom power (certainly more than you can get from any battery of the size that will fit in a guitar body).

OK - this is my first ever Facebook group, so bear with me. Dream Theater is playing a few select club shows between their dates opening for Iron Maiden. So far the closest one to the mid-Atlantic is Buffalo NY (which is to say, not close). I thought I'd throw up a Facebook group in the hopes that a large-enough number of names would convince their booking agency to make it happen. Could be Philly, Baltimore, Virginia, DC - don't really care, as long as its close and I don't have to share the experience with 15,000 other prog-metalists. So join the group and help hook a brother up with a DT club date. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=108789829165991#

I think the rubber may just be so that the rings don't marr the finish or dent the spruce (if its a spruce top). Standard OP is to lay some sandpaper on the top of the guitar - face up - and sand the underside of the pickup rings to match the contour of the top. Do this before you finish to avoid scratching your buff job.

You know you're a builder when you cut your grass out front and find 3 guitars.