Prostheta

Just checked out his work, because it's very tattoo-friendly I think. I'm sure this is not an uncommon opinion.

Very cool. I've really been digging heavier releases of late such as Anaal Nathrakh's, "Endarkenment" and Archspire's, "Bleed The Future". Some of the tracks from Neptune would dovetail into that. Very tattoo-friendly artwork as well. Is there a story behind that and the choice of artist?

Marco's style is very much like a rhythm guitarist. I'd even compare him in many ways to Lemmy in how he fits within bands. He's chilled out a lot the last decade though, and I miss Tarot. You can see a lot of Marco's rhythm style playing during the verse and chorus.

Amazing that you built a lefty version as well!

Job well done. Whether you use a pick or fingers matters not. The tone dialled in reminds me of Alex Webster a lot, so does it growl? Yep. Yes it does. Long haul but worth it in the end man!

Ah, excellent. A simple fix is always nice. Fewer mechanisms increase stability and reliability, so if you don't need adjustment then that's the way to go.

I wish that more people would let workpieces acclimate to their new shape after significant machining operations. It's better to spot any issues at this stage than it is for them to make themselves known near the finishing line.

Amazing. This is a standard to be followed when it comes to clean and crisp. Too cool, man! You've won me over with this one.

It's as large a shaving as I can make before it chatters or doesn't pull cleanly. Those Stanley spokeshaves are okay once the body is fettled, the iron sharpened and the whole thing set up correctly. Technique is the big part of the equation of course....the grain in the neck is nice and straight and doesn't turn at any point, so it was fairly plain sailing. I'd rather make curls than chips or dust.

Plenty of room for tuning the final profile. I want to do some more work around the heel, but for the moment this works out fine.

<edit: that's not a lump or bump in the neck, but a dry spot without DNA on it>

My spokeshave is always super sharp and honed before use. By clamping the neck at the heel into a radiused caul with cork coasters (all Ikea is good for) the work becomes a more ergonomic one of pulling towards yourself. Tieing a sock around the volute help protect it from getting bashed by the spokeshape overshooting the mark. All cuts are single pulls end to end. I concentrate over one corner until the shaving becomes wide and harder to cut. I then move other to another corner and repeat. Once the majority of material is gone, I reduce the depth of cut and take light refining shavings around the entire profile.

The profile at the 12th fret is the end of the straight section of the profile transition. From 1st it transitions into the volute and from 12th to the heel. This is generally why manufacturers state neck thicknesses at these points, as they're the final points at which any sort of specification makes meaningful sense.

Oh, totally. I think a better wording would be "well-formed". There is a fillet, however it seems smaller and produced by better draw tooling. This might vary from batch to batch as tools wear through their lifetime. Cheaper wires seem to be less crisp. You can see how well the barbs are formed in the second photo. What's interesting is the wavy edge under the tang showing material displacement during the forming process. I'm sure that this doesn't take it out of spec, but it's an interesting artifact.

Even though I sanded this profile with 80 grit and 180, this is nowhere near final. I smoothed it to identify any areas that need additional work before moving onto creating a rough D profile at 12th, which I'll do tomorrow....

This is the shape being aimed for. The triangle formed by the arrows around the neck, along the neck and around the volute form line should each have their own smooth transition. The volute form line blends into the flat side of the headstock roughly where the arrow finishes.

After removing enough material with the gouge to have a basic form, the rasp blends in a contour.

Next, I rough in the profile to a wide flat D. Not going into the sides at an aggressive angle or defining specific shoulder curvature means that I have room to tune later. I see this as a set of stages to achieve specific goals. Firstly, coarse stock removal to a vague shape, then refining roughly to the desired form and finishing up with fine tuning. No jumping the gun.

My process for shaping a neck to certain specifications.

I want the thickness of the neck at the 1st fret to be 20mm, so using my cabinet maker's rasp I created a mild bevel either side and a flat spot across the back. The bevels at this stage just help reduce the amount I have to remove over the rear face by knocking off the corners. The thickness at this stage is about 21,5mm. I also used my small 12mm out cannel gouge to rough in the transitional curve from the volute form line to this profile at the 1st fret.

I've found that it takes a good selection between pickup, vol/tone setting and amp (model) choice to get the right singing tone from the neck pickup. Brian May has always been a master of that in the studio. A flute-y sort of tone, a smooth cello string sound or a vocal timbre, etc. I'd like to try and capture that with the neck pickup and tone setting in Pearly and have the straight bridge pickup to kick back into for the rawk, but with a comparable balance in terms of output and not being too much of a contrast timbre-wise. I think Amorphis do this wonderfully as Esa's hooks sit really nicely with the keys, almost interchangeably. Nina and I have seen them something like 5-6 times now at festivals and clubs, and they never disappoint.

I think this track has some nice reference tone for that neck pickup with a slightly dialled back tone and what might even be a cocked wah sound? I'm leaning towards a Cold Sweat set as sound demos I've heard seem to hit the mark. Otherwise I think my initial Nailbomb/Mule combo might be too different in terms of what they're meant to do. It's obviously very hard to make a solid decision without simply getting your feet wet.

In my opinion, it's a quality question. Jescar wire seems to be drawn using better tooling than SS I've used before, and I wouldn't choose anything else now. One example I can think of is the residual fillet between the tang and the underside of the crown. Cheap wires end up rounded in that internal corner, which is one of the reasons bevelling fret slots help get a good seating. Jescar is very sharp. In fact, all of the wire's shape is very sharp and well-formed including the barbs. Sintoms (avoid: from Belarus) is somewhat soft and less well formed. It might be a perceptual difference, who knows? I've not spent time A/Bing, but I've always had continual excellent results from Jescar and I would pay more to find stock of it when I need it. Dunlop seems "standard". Reliable. I can't speak to the actual metallurgy of any wires.

1 minute ago, ScottR said:

Soooo true. Very meticulous work there Carl.

Of course.

This will be a winner.

SR

Thanks Scott! I'm hoping that both guitars are their own sort of winner in spite of being more or less carbon copies of each other off the CNC.

I suppose that I might end up playing around with some Amorphis on Pearly if it ends up in D standard. As it happens, both Esa (lead) and Tomi (rhythm) are both ESP players. It's maybe not the most complex of music to play beyond the somewhat more progressive rhythms, however I can hear some very sustained notes in the production which sit alongside the strings nicely.

16 hours ago, Muzz said:

That is very true about subtle differences having significant effects on guitars, a few years back I saw two same model LTD ST-213's (stratalikes) in a store and the visual impact at least was very different due to grain differences in the wood. That model also makes some changes to Leo's design that have an impact, a more comfortable heel and the vibrato block sitting directly on a slanted wood rest in the body. The great thing about guitar making is we can make these kind of changes. Getting the right pickups for a guitar really does unlock an amazing array of tones and I don't think you can go too far wrong with the one's you are considering. That's right that I have recently made a guitar that looks very similar to an old Gibson model but sounds nothing like it and It's great to see you and others embrace the opportunity that there are so many different ways to transform the disturbances in a magnetic field into beautiful noise. I have put a few examples under of different processors, a tube preamp, a solid state preamp, an all tube amp and a couple of VST plugin amp emulations. And these are just examples of the gazillions that you could plug these guitars into and sound incredible. You are on the downhill run now and close to that amazing feeling that every guitar maker gets when they put strings on their latest piece of art for the first time and connect it to amplification.

I think in this vid, the ADA is being used to generate the overdrive and the Axe Fx is just supplying the delay.

That Lynch tone was fantastic, but then again so was the EVH-type sound from that pedal. Playing an ESP Lynch model or a Suhr is bound to put out some top shelf tone from the outset though! "Proper" Japanese-made ESPs do have a grade change over LTDs. Not sure about where "E-II" sits in that these days, however I'm certain that the core production won't be compromised by the brand differentiation/proliferation. We don't really talk too much here about guitars in the production side of things, likely because as builders we're blowing all our money on tools and wood rather than on guitars.  Whilst I haven't taken the time (or had the opportunity) to demo modern production ESPs against the mid or "potentially" mid-upper ranges by ESP, I think that if I were in a position to buy an off-the-shelf guitar, it would be an ESP even if they cost significantly more than an E-II or whatever. I'd hate to be disappointed by a guitar I bought, since I reserve that feeling for ones I build instead....

It'll be a curious matchup when the two are completed, even though I imagine that Invaders will be done well in advance of Pearly. Invaders having the laminated Maple/Bubinga neck and Ebony board with normal frets, Pearly being single-piece Maple, Maple board and jumbo frets, Invaders being EMG, Pearly being passive with an active driver. There should in principle be a deep difference. I'd have loved to have been able to put together a neck profile carving jig so that each neck were identical in cross-section, so there will be minor differences between the two....unless I decide to make the different by choice. There'll be a lot to take away from these two. I'm already loving the functionality and look of the heel relief. Something a little unique, even though I picked up the idea from a Japanese-only ESP design, their "star cut" heel relief:
https://espguitars.co.jp/custommade/1653/

I absolutely had to oil that fingerboard, @Andyjr1515; even though the original idea was to go with a more colourless oil or even a clearcoat, the presentation of the Birdseye pretty much demanded that I do something that brought it to the fore. I'm disappointed in how poorly the Maple inlaid (or in fact, how I inlaid it, but let's not beat myself up TOO much) however this is just what it is. From a couple of metres away, it looks fine, albeit with differing light flash between the pieces. Amongst polished gold EVO wire though, it will be background information between the Maple board and the frets.

Hey, I just thought that I better @ Brett in here at some point closer to the completion of Pearly. He'll absolutely HATE that gold. I better get a move on to complete her before he notices this thread I guess.

No doing any neck dive bends with that! A lot of Vs have "Tele" style long thin routs, so it's the right move.

I've not thought about that aspect at any depth, but I know why you're wondering. Each guitar needs to have its own voice and what it wants to be, which is always one of the coolest things about individual guitars. I miss old school music stores where you'd have several examples of the same guitar in stock....A/Bing two otherwise identical guitars yielded different personalities, even if subtly. I was interested in how you might perceive this in your Marauder project of course.

Pearly and Invaders will be somewhat different to each other for many reasons. The EMGs in Invaders will produce a consistent and predictable instrument, with EMGs being good at what they do and nothing else. A one trick pony of sorts, hopefully not the "Zakk Wylde pinching the same rabbit out of the hat night after night" though. Noiseless, on the compressed side and "easy" in some ways. FWIW I might end up installing a couple of EMG 81s since buying the KH-BBs are a financial consideration that doesn't work too well for me right now. Just replaced a load of computer equipment and I'm feeling more than a little raw because of that.

The exact pickup choice for Pearly is still somewhat in flux for similar reasons. Invaders can be completed as all the parts are on the table, Pearly still needs some buying in. I'd like to think that I could afford a Bare Knuckle set in there, something old school, "tubular" and finger sensitive in the neck like a Mule, and a complimentary hot pickup in the bridge. A Riff Raff would work nicely, however a ceramic Nailbomb might require the neck pickup to pick up the output a little. The reasons for those are their tendency towards growly detailed low mid roar. The sort of thing that makes old Marshalls big, broad and warm but not dark and indistinct. Break on the wah, find the sweet spots, notes have timbre rather than just bland "peakiness" and start to speak with personality. I wire my tone pots so they act only on the neck pickup, so I always have a nice rhythm option on the bridge and straight into a set tone adjustment for the neck. This is the guitar that I want to have the most personality in, the one that you can make sing and know which notes take hold and sustain.

Pearly will still be active, but differently to Invaders. I want to avoid the negatives of what EMG "activeness" does and leverage the transparent noise cancellation from my 18v differential preamps (agh, that reminds me....I'll have to bore out the jack socket hole now....) but I haven't decided how exactly I want to run it. One option is to place it downstream of the pickups after the switch but upstream of the volume and tone controls. This does mean that the tone becomes a master control, which is less than ideal unless it is wired to the neck pickup prior to it hitting the switch. A very non-standard configuration, which is a rarity. The volume would then just act as a master downstream of the preamp. The other option is to run the preamp as a line driver after the whole passive circuit. The apparent differences would be noise and some degree of tonal difference in how passive controls load and interact with the pickups. Both options have their pros and cons. Since I'm just awkward, I might go for the most complicated solution to a problem that might not exist.

I've been running modelling amps for almost a decade now I think. Maybe more. I just don't have a situation that is amenable to running the amps that I used to (2x Marshall JCM800 2203s, Peavey Mk1 5150 over a straight and a slanted Marshall 1960A 4x12 full stack) and modelling is so much better for going straight to the DAW. My regular "straight" models in that respect are the Friedman HBE100, Soldano SLO, Plexi, ENGL Fireball, etc. I have also compiled a library of IRs to do more or less a "tone model" to mould amps into the sound of others using some Melda plugins to analyse a recorded example and produce an IR for that purpose. My Metallica "....and Justice For All" tone is unnervingly good, along with a few other examples that sound more like the original than the originals such as my various Satriani, Mick Mars, EVH, Brian May, Jim Martin, various hair metal and speed/thrash tones.

Invaders will likely be standard Eb and Pearly standard D. This will be subject to change based on how the instruments feel and how they want to be played. I probably won't be the one calling the shots, let's put it that way!

A tap at either end seats the fret. No need to hammer it all the way in when pressing....

I press frets using a modified Bessey GH20 clamp with a cheap fret press insert epoxied to the shoe. Even though the brass caul matches the radius, I clamp centre, then a quarter in from each end, then the centre again at full pressure. This seats the frets nicely, and these clamps don't develop enough pressure to crush the fret into the wood unless you really try. Do not do this.