Prostheta

Kahler? www.kahlerusa.com

Air stapler permanently attached to your toolbelt? Pesky racoons, bothering me when I build....in the UK, we have chavs instead.

Plenty of places, for sure. It's difficult getting them in small quantities from most manufacturers however, so you can end up paying a lot for just six! I'm going to test out the headed and headless varieties for size. I think the headed will be nice. I might even recess them slightly a la back ferrules :-D

Tension affects the timbre of the instrument. Having a longer scale increases tension, reinforces fundamental frequencies and cleans up lower notes somewhat. The slinkiness of a LP is due to a shortish scale length. Baritones have longer scale lengths to allow lower tunings otherwise the low tension over a short scale would turn them to unplayable mud. Shorter scales with lower tensions allow wider and more expressive bends - although this doesn't mean you can't be expressionate with longer scales of course! Think LP blues. Other factors such as the fret spacing, width of the first position affect playability (as mentioned previously) of course. Timbre won't be hugely different between the two scales but the difference is in there nonetheless. If you want space up above twelfth fret, how about popping jumbos on frets 1-12 and having narrower frets from 13 upwards? This gives you a little more breathing space :-D

A sign saying "Please wait here quietly and until called". Or be more mindful of your surroundings. My wife's done this to me a couple of times. Like turning the electricity off to the workshop, plunging me into darkness by surprise with heavy wood reducers winding down in my hands :-\

About guitars and finishes, or people? :-D It's good to hear - I hope you can use this mass of info to do your guitars justice!

Awww. You didn't use enough words!

Yeah - hella bright with the steel, the through-string tension, and the maple-like tonewoods. It'll be a little slinkier like a LP however. Brass might be a little warmer for what it's worth.

Well, whatever I do and however I go about it - i'll enjoy it :-D

Yeah - the contours come out at the correct places but it can be confusing. I loved what ESP did with the Viper's contouring because it's a bit more severe yet flowing. I guess the new and old school designs have their places of course. like this I'm sure it's turn out awesome Wez.

That's a really sweet spin on the SG Wez. The contouring on an SG is a hell of a challenge to get right. Is the rough chunking in the control cavity from the pickup wiring run? I bet you panicked ;-)

Rich is on the ball for sure!

If we were attempting to create an instrument which doesn't colour the sound, then yes. Guitars however benefit from a degree of voicing which the chain of which playing technique, guitar construction, pickups, effect, amps, speakers, ears/mics etc. are the total chain. Perhaps the angle of homegeneity was the wrong one to utilise. We can all agree that a wood in it's simple form has attributes such as density, flexibility (or lack of) and other factors which contribute to it having a "sound" or more accurately, a colouration on how it vibrates in sympathy with the strings stretched across it. An swamp ash instrument would sound different to a black walnut instrument for example. A maple topped Les Paul uses two woods which contribute their voicings (and interaction) to the system. Just in the same way as adding a maple top to a mahogany instrument affects the sound, so would bonding an appreciated heavy plastic finish to the body. It would just affect it differently, just probably a lot less. This is just a matter of degrees. I'm refinishing a mahogany explorer i've played au naturel for three years in white poly which I know will change the sound. I'll probably not notice it, or more likely, probably not care about the marginal difference of course :-D Not to go down the silly path of advocating wooden knobs (they are cosmetic - nothing more) but if an instrument was made from a million wooden knobs or a million plastic knobs, there would be a difference. This argument is invalid however as it's purely theoretical, and i've never played a theoretical instrument ;-) "I also believe that physical contact to the instrument would be a much bigger factor than what finish you apply." I agree. Contact is the key word here I think. If you layered on an inch of poly then that mass of finish will affect the system in some way for definite, as it is now part of that system. Same as if you glued on another inch of wood to the thickness of the body. My point of low complexity isn't down to the purity of tone - completely the opposite in fact. Wood colours sound which makes guitars sound interesting and different! A soundboard on an acoustic doesn't translate the resonance of the instrument perfectly/purely - it attenuates certain frequencies and creates interactions which result in an interesting sound colouration. Certain interactions however, may not be as pleasing to the ear - in my example, a laminated guitar body made of different types of disparate materials which don't work together very well to create a harmonious sounding instrument (or at least best guess - i've not played an instrument which is made of steel and cheese, but played metal cheese with one...). I'd never get as nitpicky as to consider accessories such as strap buttons, pickguards and knobs to contribute to what we hear. They really don't at any practical level. At a purely theoretical level perhaps! That's outside the scope of sensible people of course. Some instruments are not made with the tonality of the materials used (body/neck/fingerboard woods, not pickguards....) so the difference in tone between finished and not finished probably won't make much difference. An example of "sounds awful unfinished" and "still sounds awful finished"! An instrument built using well thought out and nicely chosen and combined materials has a voice which can potentially be changed for the worse if finished with something nasty and ultimately cosmetic. Again, degrees - most people would not not hear the difference, or would simply accept the sound for what it was - not A/B'ed for comparison. I wish I had the time to rebuild and record the sound of the Explorer *clean* before I start grain filling it, priming and applying a glossy white finish and recording it after. I'm am 99% sure however, that the sound would be more affected by the condition of strings, the instrument's setup and the amp and more importantly my playing technique that day! The voice of the instrument would be different in some (perhaps not immediately measurable to the average human) way. To answer the original question - yes, an acoustic relies on the tuning and resonance of the body's parts and finish will come into play more than on a solidbody, but it's not to say that it will not affect a solidbody. It will affect it marginally. This should be in no way a call for purists to go stripping the solids off their guitars. That would be a waste of time ;-)

Fry explained it better than I did here: http://projectguitar.ibforums.com/index.ph...st&p=320615 Aidlook, you know just as well as I do that red guitars play faster than pink ones. It's the incorporation of too much white light reflecting bacteria in the finish that slows down the phase perception of tone arriving at the ears in a sheared time-space relationship.

A guitar body resonates in sympathy with the strings, and to a degree this resonance and it's "voice" attenuates the absolute resonance of the strings. This is why string movement translates a sound through the pickups which includes a degree of interaction with the medium they are stretched across. Simple. Strings vibrate. Body vibrates also. Body as a unit has a tight wrapping which is in a lot of cases brittle, heavy, and does not resonate like wood. This affects the way the body vibrates in sympathy with the strings, and also how the strings are affected by the medium they are stretched across. Unfortunately, finishes do not generally permeate wood through and through. They sit on and sometimes partially under the immediate surface. The finish does not resonate or attenuate at the same frequencies as wood. This interaction creates a complex attenuation "voice" which affects the overall output of the system. A wood which is acrylised would sound better than the same wood with an acrylic coating in theory, at least the attenuation being a lot less weird mathematically :-D Thinner or less weighty finishes seem to compliment the sound that wood returns to the strings. Bodies caked (or choked IMO) in finish do not do so as well. Imagine a guitar body with a thickness made up from laminates of 1cm steel, 1cm walnut, 1cm acrylic, 1cm brass, 1cm cheese. This does not make for a very good "tuned" system. It would suck hugely. If those five component constituents were blended in a big atom smasher and made into a homogenous material to make that body, it would resonant at a more pleasing even level....if they would indeed blend of course! What i'm getting at, is that a cosmetic finish does not make for the best tuned system for an instrument. Just as shrink wrapping doesn't make chickens look sexy anymore. Drums don't sound as good or as pure if you have a piece of duct tape on one side of the skin, or a dent. It becomes a more complex and generally less desirable sounding system. Like a trumpet with chewing gum and a few old socks stuck in it. You know what I mean, really. Probably.

Awesome. Great tip metalwarrior! I have a sheet of 2mm thick black ABS which I bought for very little here in the UK which can easily be ripped into strips and cleaned up for binding. It doesn't have the length but it sure has the lack of a large price tag :-D

Beautiful instruments as always. Are you mounting the MK.III stoptail at 90° in the recess at the back? Very nice touch! I don't know what to make of the Q Tuner pups. I'm on one hand fairly tempted to pop some in one of my five-strings. Ergh! GAS.

You're very right Perry. I chose the wrong forum to express curiosity in a decision I have already made. I could only expect a flurry of responses to buff me up and say "yeah, go for it" or "w00t" or "awesome" and other empty pseudo-superlative. Thanks for cutting to the chase here - this is Occam's razor in action....can we lock or delete this thread please? Thanks.

Just to make this one quick without going off-topic...what are you using to dye the Plastic Coating?

Sorry Xanthus - I was a little vague in that respect. Yes - the nut material is (heh) immaterial in that the Corian works great for guiding and is easy to work, but the resonance beyond the nut is a little annoying. The string length from the nut to the tuner is the issue - I always record with tape over the strings on my Explorer or sponge underneath, as staccato playing is ruined by the sustain of the remaining resonating string length. I didn't want to stain the maple all the way through before binding as it would eat loads of stain. It's easier to stain the face when mounted and radiused rather than the entire strip unless you're doing a shedload in a vacuum dyeing setup as described on the instructional by (Fry?). I'm not going to be able to pick this project back up until sometime in March/April as I have a new workshop to set up. In the downtime I have designed templates, jigs, processes and custom tooling to make several of these two eight-strings. These really were prototypes, this one being a refinement of proto 1 "put into practice" which it had done admirably.

Okay - i'm tooling up to produce a bunch of seven and eight string instruments this summer. If you were in the market to buy these instruments, what features in terms of strings and scales would you like to see available? I think that it's a foregone conclusion that 25.5" scales and shorter really do have problems with intonation and having to use higher gauge strings, so these are purely extended scale instruments. When answering, please don't come from the GAS angle. Come from the angle of practicality, economy (I don't want to tool up for too many different "standards") and playability from the end-user. Don't compare to sixes as this is outside of the scope of this poll. This is purely down to what is described here. If you're not hot on seven/eight string instruments, then try and be constructive rather than obstructive! Thanks - this is to help me get a better feel for what a client base desires from these niche instruments.

Answer a question with a question: "Why?" There are plenty of free or inexpensive CAD packages out there. Try TurboCAD or Sketchup. Paper is a fine alternative, but not free :-D

Heh! I was just about to say "he got a jorb". Hurry up and get five numbers Setch so you can get building for us all again :-D

Can you not pop into it with a centrepunch or even with a nail and hammer?

Wow, awesome! The headpiece looks good to me - nice work for a first time! Are you having a "guiding nut" behind the zero fret?