biliousfrog

thanks for the info, I'll check out Amazon. Trouble is, I always end up spending a fortune on books when I go there...gulp!

I had a look on "the bay" for jointer planes & found a selection of cheapie's such as: http://search.ebay.co.uk/search/search.dll...ntrypage=search Anyone got one of these? How do they compare with a Stanley or similar? Are they worth £30 or not? I'm toying with getting one & will probably go for a secondhand one but if these cheap ones are ok I might just go for one of them as it will not get much heavy use.

he's got a bunch of cool basses, the pac-man one is really neat

did you actually read the link you just posted? It says that Simms chromed it, ie. it is actually chrome... but because of it being a rush job it went wrong & bubbled in places. A recent thread in the finishing section linked to a paint company (Alsa I think) that has a chrome effect spray. It isn't paint as such, rather some fine metal powder suspended in laquer or something. It seems to do a very good job if the online videos are anything to go by but it's very expensive.

you want to look up hooglebug, he made a purple "mattocaster" which is in his avatar

I've always found H-C to be very helpful but you have to actually read through the reviews & understand that they are only opinions. There's always a lot of unexperienced musicians who use the pages as a place to list their whole gear history (or lack of) & list their favourite bands etc. There's also people that have bought a good/bad product from X company & then proceed to write about it in every single section of that manufacturer's product line affecting the final scores. But, with the popularity of ebay, I've found it extremely useful to find out some of the history of a product & how reliable it is. Of course every company will produce an occasional dog but if a product has say, 50 reviews & they all seem to say very similar things, you can get a good idea of what it's like. Without H-C I would never have considered buying any of the Zoom OD/Distortion/Fuzz pedals or my Charvel acoustic or my Laney amp or some of my other FX pedals. I'm not saying that this particular guitar is bad, just that the guitar that I considered had several terrible reviews including fat neck that twists after a few weeks, poor finish, lifting frets, poor binding, noisey pickups....etc. There might be hundreds of very happy customers who didn't bother to submit a review & maybe if they did I would have bought one.

They're cropping up a lot on ebay in the UK at the moment, I was tempted by one of the Floyd loaded super strats as it seemed cheaper than the sum of it's parts...but then I looked them up on Harmony Central

sounds like a cool project. I'd recommend getting everything in writing first, know exactly what he wants & get each stage signed off, & if possible paid for, before moving onto the next. For animation work I'll make a quote based on what information I'm given & then any extra work is charged at an hourly rate. I make sure that each stage is physically signed off & paid for before moving on which tends to make the client think a bit before making any random changes. As an example, you could have ruined the build already by curving over the edges when the client then decides that he wants a flat front. If he'd already signed off the design & paid for the work involved he'd be less inclined to redesign it later on.

There's walkthrough pics of at least three of the builds in the guitars section, there's videos of him playing them & showcasing the different sounds.

the blue burst is yummy! I especially like the blue fade on the edges, looks like a gas flame with that nice figuring. Initially I thought that the inlay was upside-down but I like it now that I've seen it close up. Excellent work as usual

If someone from your school took it I'm sure that they'll soon get found out. There's not really much advice to give, buy some tools, ask about using the college woodshops or enroll on a guitar building course. I doubt that this was your ONLY chance to build a guitar. If you want to make another then do it, you'll find a way. If you haven't already, get a job & buy some basic tools. Even if you only work a few hours a week you could save to buy a jigsaw, then a drill, then a plane, then some sandpaper... & whilst you're waiting to buy the next tool you can become proficient in the previous. There's very few members on here with a fully equiped luthiers workshop & when you have a mortgage, family, bills to pay etc. you make do with what you have. A skilled craftsman with a chisel will always make a better job than an ameteur with a workshop...It's not what you have, it's how you use them.

I like the shape, Vintage have a slightly modified LP shape like that but not as nice. My only comment is concerning the selector switch location. I have a strat type guitar with the switch there & I find that it gets in the way if I want to to some tapping. Les Paul's seem a bit further away & aren't as much of a problem...just something to consider.

I can't say with any authority but I would imagine that simply by sending the signal through any type of component, especially a tone pot, you're going to create some resistence....therefore a "no load" pot isn't possible. The only way to have no load is by not loading the signal with anything. I also doubt that you could have a concentric pot & a TBX because the TBX is two stacked pots & so is a concentric one. You'd need to somehow replace the bottom pot of the concentric pot with the TBX...which, even if you managed to do it, would create three stacked pots...which would be too deep for some cavities. I might be completely wrong, hopefully someone with more experience can offer more advice. Personally I can't see how it would be possible. The TBX on it's own should offer enough treble or an easier alternative would be to have a tone control bypass switch.

depends, a lot of high-end manufaturers now are binding with the same wood as the fingerboard...I originally noticed it on Myka's guitars but guitar buyer magazine shows that Framus & Blade are also doing it, even on the low priced Blade Delta Standard. On plain figured woods like rosewood & ebony the join in woods is almost unnoticable. As for filling them, either filler or wood dust...wood dust will be less noticable.

just stumbled across this guy, http://www.guitaristjeffmiller.com/index.htm The figure on the purple double-cut is awesome (shame about the inlays though)...also check out the videos of him demoing them, he's a pretty nifty player too.

For a belly cut I drew depth lines on the back & sides, used a pillar drill set at certain depths & followed the contour lines creating a set of steps. I then went at it with a surform, rasps & finally a sanding drum in a cordless drill. I got the idea from a luthier making archtops, carving inside & out. I'm sure that the grinder does things quicker but I don't have the space for making such a mess so I go old-school. I also enjoy some "proper" woodworking occasionally, it feels so much more rewarding to have sore hands & a nicely carved piece of wood.

hey, black wasn't on the list! Although I don't mind the PRS guitars with black backs I wanted to leave the sapele quite natural. I've got some brown-black & red-brown stain to enhance the ribbon figure but other than that I wanted it natural. I'm also using Rustin's plastic so I don't think that it can go over other paints.

Right then...Here's the second attempt at my blue single cut. I feel confident enough now to make my own neck for this & almost everything is ready to go so I figured, it must be time for a proper WIP. The specs have changed a little from when I first started work on this but it will look almost identical... Body: 2" hollowed sapele, 3/4" rippled sycamore top (possibly 1/8" flamed maple back?), curvey dot soundholes. Neck: 3 piece sonokeling (rosewood), rosewood fingerboard with matching rosewood binding in a Myka stylee. 25" scale. Electronics: 2x Lace P90's, Ghost Piezo preamp & quick switch. Hardware: Tonepros/Graphtech wrapover bridge with Piezo saddles, Graphtech nut, schaller straplocks, jumbo fretwire. So far I've got the sycamore & sapele joined & ready to thickness & the body & neck jigs cut out. I'm still a little unsure what to do with the back of the body. Originally I had some very nicely figured maple that I was going to use for the front but it is too shallow for a carve top which is why I got some sycamore instead (plus I wanted to be a little different). So I now don't know whether to: A. have the back just flat with a rounded over edge B. have a tummy cut which will need to be copied into the inside of the hollowed body C. hollow out the entire body leaving just a rim round the edge & using the flamed maple on the back which would look quite similar to the front a'la 335. Any suggestions?

Can you reposition the wah in relation to the distortion circuit? Some people use the wah before any overdrive pedals, some use it after. I have the original Pod Pro, I can adjust a lot of the settings via my PC which aren't accessable via the unit alone...you might be able to do the same?

Well, looks like you've got the most obvious answers I'll give you an alternative...buy another? I don't know what model you have but I've seen Behringer strat copies for £99 & probably less. You can spend money improving what you have or use it to get a whole new guitar. Intonation adjustments won't cost you anything & a finish makeover can be done very cheaply but new electronics will cost money. You need to weigh up whether cheap components will be any better than what you have, do you install expensive pickups or do you just buy a whole new guitar?

it's quite hard to see it with all the water on it...if that is water or is it the finish? People usually put a little water on unfinished, figured woods to enhance the pattern in the wood, it doesnt do anything on painted wood...apart from make the finish look like it's bubbling up. You're still using images that are far too large. They shouldn't be any larger than 640x480, they get automatically reduced on the forums to fit but each thread viewer still has to download the fullsize image before the forum software reduces it.

I think you're right Wez, I can't find what I was looking for but I think that I was getting mixed up with something else. I quite like coil taps on high output humbuckers (18k+) because the difference between the two sounds is more noticeable but I can't see why I'd want to have a sound inbetween...but maybe if I'd tried one I would think differently?

There's little demand because bass tends to be a solid backing instrument rather than a solo instrument. There are obvious exceptions such as Wooten & Claypool but it would be unlikely that even they would use a whammy on a regular basis.

I seem to recall reading that the T-60 had a specially designed pot for that but I can't be 100% sure. I'll look through my guitar leccy for musicians book when I get home as I'm sure that I read it in there

The phasing effect was originally produced by simply copying the sound onto two analogue tape decks and mixing them together. One tape was run slightly faster than the other, so that one copy of the sound would overtake the other, resulting in a rising then falling effect caused by wave interference. DJs can achieve the same effect by playing two copies of the same record from the same point at the same time. However, as more practical solid-state electronics and latterly software were used to re-create an approximation of the unwieldy tape-flanging set-up, the term Phasing more specifically refers to a swept comb-filtering effect where there is no linear harmonic relationship between the teeth of the comb (compare this with flanging, where the teeth of the comb-filter are spaced along the frequency spectrum in a linear harmonic series). A flanger is a subtype of phaser in which the notches are uniformly spaced. In this case, the notches are created by mixing the signal with a delayed version of a signal. Flangers tend to sound more natural, like the "jet plane whoosh" effect, whereas phasers tend to sound more unnatural. The electronic phasing effect is created by splitting an audio signal into two, electronically shifting the phase of one signal (usually by passing it through an all-pass filter), and then recombining the two signals. The all-pass filter passes all frequencies unchanged in amplitude, but has a frequency-dependent, non-linear effect on the phase of each frequency. The result is a signal whose overall spectrum is shifted by various amounts at each frequency. For example, the phase of a frequency at the low end of the spectrum may be shifted by 1/4 of a wavelength, while a frequency at the high end of the spectrum may be shifted by 3/4 of a wavelength. Traditional electronic phasers use a series of variable all-pass phase-shift networks which alter the phases of the different frequency components in the signal . These networks do not alter the sound themselves (human ears are not very responsive to phase differences), but they yield constructive and destructive interference when mixed back with the dry (unprocessed) signal. Additionally, the output can be fed back to the input to create a more intense effect. Most modern phasers are a part of a digital signal processor, often trying to emulate analog phasers. Phasers are mostly found as plugins for sound editing software, as a part of a monolithic rackmount sound effect unit, or as "stompbox" guitar effects. When the filtered and non-filtered signals are recombined, the phase differences between them now cause peaks and notches of reinforcement and cancellation along the frequency spectrum (the so-called comb filter pattern). The degree of phase shift is periodically modulated (usually using an LFO), causing the peaks and notches to 'sweep' up and down the frequency spectrum, producing the characteristic rolling timbral changes of the phasing effect. A stereo phaser is usually two identical phasers modulated by a quadrature signal; the output of the oscillators for the left and right channels are a quarter-wave out of phase. (thanks to wikipedia ) Also: http://www.harmony-central.com/Effects/Art...Phase_Shifting/