curtisa

Not at all. Classical guitars do have compensated saddles, it's just that the compensation applied tends to be an average lengthening of the overall scale length by an equal amount. 2-3mm extra is common. The amount of compensation deviation between each string is much smaller too, which is why a perpendicular saddle is more acceptable on a nylon-strung guitar. An independently compensated 3rd string is also not entirely unheard of either. But again, the amount of compensation required because of loss of vibrating length at the absolute ends of the string due to stiffness is far outweighed by the compensation required to offset bending/sharpening of the string when depressed. Nylon-strung instruments are just less affected by this phenomena compared to steel-strung counterparts.

Companies like Ibanez, Jackson, PRS etc are already tooled up to do angled headstocks. They don't have to change anything in the way of their production line to transition from non-locking to locking nuts. While there are a few notable deviations from their standard fare (the Ibanez JS has the Fender-esque flat stepback, but what Joe wants Joe gets?), they have their methods already well established in the chain of production. There are still benefits to an angled headstock over a flat stepback - the headstock can be made from a different piece for strength or contrast, you can do interesting things with the transition between neck and headstock, the neck blank can be shorter etc. The whole scarf cut and glue-up process at that kind of level is largely automated, so the extra work over a Fender-style neck is probably trivial. Adding the necessary cuts to mount a lock nut is nothing more than a different bit of CNC code.

Locking nuts are installed on Fender necks with their standard flat stepdown headstock all the time. There's no back angle going on there. If you mean, 'why not just have a flat extension to the neck with zero angle or stepdown behind the locknut to mount the tuners on?' , you still need some negative angle behind the nut to aid in tuning once the nut is clamped down. A string retainer bar behind the nut may be required where there isn't enough natural back angle as the strings pass over the clamping faces of the nut, otherwise the strings get pulled sharp as you tighten down the nut. A headstock with zero angle behind the nut also invites buzzing at the nut and Floyd Rose style locking nuts are no different, whether they're clamped shut or not. If there's not enough downward pressure on the leading face of the nut slots the strings can get sitar-style open string buzz. You'll also notice that the clamping faces on a locking nut are also angled backwards. That's partly to get the strings pointing in the right direction as they head towards the tuners, but it's also to guarantee that there's downforce applied to the leading edges of the nut slots. Take the string retainer bar on your Jem off and try tuning it unlocked, then lock the nut down. It's no fun at all trying to guess how much tuning offset you need to dial into a doublelocking tremolo before the nut is locked, only to have to try and compensate for it at the fine tuners because everything has pulled sharp. Ask me how I know Headless guitars fitted with any kind of nut, string clamp or zero fret still need that downward string pressure at the string landing point to prevent things like buzz. There will be that negative angle, whether it's visible or not.

That's not the primary reason compensation is applied, although it does contribute to the overall requirement to do so. The main reason is that depressing the string to the fret bends the string, thus raising the pitch. The compensation required to offset this bend/pitch rise is to make the string length slightly longer, so the saddle has to move further away from the nut.

That might depend a bit on what spread of scale lengths and string gauges you're planning to cater for. Thicker strings tuned low on long scale lengths will need more compensation than skinny strings tuned high over short scale lengths. If in doubt just follow in the steps of others. A range of 10-12mm is generally as much as you can get from a Strat bridge and most of their derivatives, and is probably a good bracket to aim for. The range of intonation adjustment should never ever ever everevereverever etc take you less than the scale length. Compensation is always, without exception, an increasing of string length. The saddle will only ever need to go more further away or less further away from the nut. A guitar that wants to intonate by compensating less than the scale length is...well...broken

BBC IPlayer only works for UK residents, but there are some paint products floating around that claim to have similar "light sucking" qualities. I think one if them is called Black 3.0 or something (sounds like a Lynx deodorant)? Dunno if they're particularly hard wearing, or if sealing them under a clearcoat might ruin the effect? But I agree, it would certainly be eye catching to (not) see

Gotcha. I just saw the pencil outlines you'd added to the body and saw two pickups drawn on there. My comment was meant to be more general though - watch out for sneaky things like pickups that require extra depth routed for the mounting ears or the magnetic slugs poking out the back of the baseplate, or neck mounting screws being too long.

I'm a fan of skinnier-than-usual guitars too, but I will say to take care with your planning when using such thin pieces for your body. When you get that thin you start limiting what you can get away with inside the electronics cavity. A right angle Switchcraft 3-way toggle switch for example is 22mm tall from the shoulder of the mounting post the the bottom of the switch frame, which sounds OK inside a 30mm body. But you lose some of that depth if you want to recess the back coverplate into the body (2-3mm?) plus the thickness of the front cavity wall where the switch collar pokes through (3-4mm?). That only leaves barely enough clearance inside the cavity for the switch to fit inside without bottoming out on the rear cover. You'd never get a blade-style switch or push-pull pots to fit inside either.

Good to have you here The forum doesn't accept BBCode links, so you need to post the raw HTTP link instead. So your original link: ,,,needs to have all the [img] and [url] tags deleted and be abbreviated to: If the forum software can resolve the link the image should display automatically: Or you can just upload your images directly to your posts. Don't sweat the server overhead; we have that largely covered by the charitable nature of our members via Patreon.

Tapped humbuckers tend to have a sound that approximates that of a genuine single coil; they have singlecoil-ness for want of a better term. I have tapped humbucker options on most of my guitars and find them an excellent tonal expander to a plain humbucker-equipped instrument Treat them more as an additional colour to play with than a genuine substitute for a Strat or Tele and you can't go wrong.

No hard and fast rules to guitar making (other than perhaps tradition). It shouldn't 'hurt' anything to make a guitar out of two sandwiches of the same thickness of timber. You could even look at it the other way around if you wanted and make an unusually thin guitar using a single layer of 36mm Ash. Provided you plan for the required depth of all the components (pickups, pots, switches, neck pocket etc) there's nothing saying you can't go thinner than the 'typical' thicknesses used by the big name manufacturers. I think one of our long time members @RestorationAD used to routinely make his guitars 32mm thick and claimed they could hold their own against anything made by Fender, Gibson etc. Some of his threads are pinned in the 'In Progress' section of the forum if you're looking for inspiration.

Mount the switch some kind of subframe and attach that to the inside of the cavity. That would also work for the Gibson-style switch as well.

This one? https://www.gitarrebassbau.de/viewtopic.php?t=6

But @Nicco is unsure whether he could do so, hence my suggestion to take on your idea and modify it slightly in such a way that he could avoid any uncertainty he might have regarding executing such a cut.

If you go that route the slice that you laminate the veneer to doesn't even need to come from the same piece of wood as the body. If the join is hidden with binding you could get away with using just about anything as the 'top', and save the worry of trying to accurately remove the top face of the body on the bandsaw.

How about laminating your veneer to a plate of 5mm-ish blackwood, and using that to cap off the hollowed out blackwood body as if you were using an equivalent thickness top cap? If you have access to a decent bandsaw you could even slice off the blackwood cap from the same piece used for the body blank, and the join where the two pieces are married together again would be pretty unobtrusive. A similar technique is used to make bandsaw boxes, albeit on a much smaller scale.

As per my previous comment regarding the Babicz Telecaster bridge, you could shift the locking screws slightly to one side to allow you to get a wrench on to the bolt head without the strings being in the way. Action adjustability is still a limitation. Shimming is fine as an option, but you have to have a stash of shim material handy to use in the first place, which a lot of people wouldn't necessarily. And removing material to get things lower is somewhat permanent and destructive too. What about having your baseplate resting on a separate sub-assembly that can be raised and lowered using a pair of grub screws at the forward-most corners? At least that way you could get back some degree of coarse adjustability for the whole bridge assembly.

Loosening the saddle lock screws to adjust the intonation on the Babicz bridge doesn't take much time in comparison to the process of setting the intonation overall though. And once intonation is set you generally don't need to go back and fiddle with it again on a regular basis. The Babicz design is also well thought out in that they position the locking screw for each saddle slightly offset from the string path so you can get an allen wrench in to undo it without slackening off the string first. Can't do that on a Floyd Rose for example.

ABM's 3256 bridge has a similar sort of look. Hipshot also make replacement bridges for some models of Ibanez units that share similar features too. Where do the strings lace through? The intonation lock screw would presumably get in the way of the thru-body string hole in certain positions? Do you need to consider some way to adjust the action too? Impossible to predict. I know a lot of people have opinions surrounding more mass at the bridge = better tone/sustain, but a lot of that tends to be subjective and really difficult to quantify. In an acoustic guitar there is a correlation between string-to-saddle angle and the sound produced, but that has a lot to do with getting the top 'moving' in reponse to the motion of the string. Too shallow an angle and the sound tends to be quite thin and lifeless. Too steep an angle has a detrimental effect on the top of the guitar, as the amount of downward pressure exerted on the saddle can deform and/or damage it over time - it might sound absolutely stunning until the top collapses. A solid body electric guitar however probably doesn't share these traits and limitations so much and you're more free to experiment as you wish, but I'd probably recommend at least *some* downward angle (maybe 15 degrees???), if only to stop the string from sliding laterally across the break point of the saddle under normal playing or minimising any chances of poor contact with the saddle leading to weak string response. I would point out that unless the string securing method somehow 'moves' with the intonation position of the saddle, the break angle will be different for each string depending on the intonation compensation position (think of a Strat bridge for example - the low E string might have a 45-ish degree angle behind the saddle whereas the high-E string might be 20-ish degrees). Another perspective to consider is that each string on a Floyd Rose pretty much passes through a 90 degree bend over the exact same distance. What that really means for a tonal comparison I have no idea, as the two bridges and how they're coupled to the body are completely different. You might want to have a look through this thread from about a year ago, in particular this post where I attempted to compare the difference between top loaded strings and thru-body strings, thereby changing the saddle break angle. There are some A-B recordings attached and some rudimentary sustain comparisons. There might be something in the steepness of the saddle break angle, but I don't know that I'd call it a night-and-day difference. Make of it what you will

Are their suggested matches based on how they look together or how they sound together? I guess you could look at it either way, but that's 100% something that will speak more to your personal tastes and the overall design goals of the build. If it were down to looks alone I'd swing towards 2x CCs. The El Rayo just looks like any other humbucker, whereas at least the CC has a sort of distinctive Art Nouveau edge to it that might unify the overall look if combined together as a pair.

The thread you refer to is asking a different question - "Should I inlay before applying the radius or after?" The mention of a router in that context is related to people asking how to use the router to cut the inlay pockets if the fretboard is already curved with a radius, rather than how to apply the radius in the first place. Yes - the router is not the way to remove excess material from brittle or very fine inlay material, and in that respect the router jig is most certainly not the best tool to add a radius to a fretboard if it has been inlaid first. Sanding is still the most appropriate method. I'd still suggest that a quality sanding block/beam is your best course of action here. IME the router radius jig tends to be a one-trick pony (and even then, only if the fretboard timber lends itself well to being machined in such a fashion), and you'd have to weigh up if the complexity of it in comparison to a radius block is worth the trade off to you. Early on I built such a jig for radiusing fretboards. It worked OK for material like plain maple or rosewood, but for anything more unforgiving like figured wood, or extremely dense or 'chippy' material, it made a complete mess of things. The surface finish coming off the jig also tended to be fairly rough, so I'd have to use the sanding radius block to clean up all the router marks, which immediately negated the purpose of the jig in the first place.

I'm a little late to this prehistoric party (aren't we all ) but I'm fascinated to see what territory this wanders through. My only knowledge of the Welsh crwth is via a long-forgotten book that was given to me by a family friend, 'The Art and Times of the Guitar' by Frederic V. Grunfeld. It only briefly mentions the crwth as being a descendant of the Greek cithara (kithara?), the name of which has an obvious etymological basis for the relatively modern word 'guitar '. Completely unrelated side note - your avatar reminds me a lot of Tim Hunkin. As a kid with more than a passing interest in how stuff worked his 'Secret Life Of Machines' TV series was mandatory viewing at home growing up in the late 80s. Carry on!

Even better! - we've got an updated version of the original tutorial here on the forums:

You wouldn't be tempted to just crank the tension up on the tremolo and deck the bridge instead, or blocking up the trem from behind? Doing a hardtail conversion isn't exactly a trivial operation and is irreversible once done. Getting the finished product to look neat can be tricky too, due to all the joins and interfacing edges of the plugs and existing body material expanding and contracting at different rates. Even using filler it's hard to hide any witness lines where the pieces meet. The usual method to blocking up a trem is to reduce and simplify the number of 'bits' that require plugging. That requires routing out the majority of the tremolo footprint to one oversized rectangular piece at the back and one on the front. There used to be a trem blocking tutorial on the old Projectguitar website. I wonder if I can find it...?

The shorter answer is probably: between the volume pot output and the Pignose amp input. Exactly how that needs to be done without knowing more about the PGG200 amp circuit, I couldn't say precisely. Some more pics would be helpful.