curtisa

Making the 12th fret the perpendicular distributes the amount of 'splay' the nut and bridge have equally from end to end, but because the fret spacing reduces as you go up the neck the degree of 'splay' of the playable portion of the strings is unequal (as you've noticed with the 22nd fret having minimal tilt when experimenting with fretfind2D). Possibly not such a bad thing on a singlecut body shape as utilising the lowest strings on the highest positions is naturally difficult even when the frets are conventionally laid out; it would be even worse if the amount of tilt on the upper frets effectively 'buries' the bass-end of the frets further out of reach into the body. Making the 7th fret the perpendicular has the effect of distributing the degree of tilt equally between nut and 24th (7th fret is the midpoint of the fretboard when considering only the lineal distance of the whole neck), but will tilt the bridge more severely. Using a Tune-o-matic tailpiece could actually be beneficial here as you're not bound to some kind of custom or hard-to-get hardware solution for the bridge. Although be aware that the more you tilt the tailpiece around the narrower you're effectively making the string spacing. Angling the pickups is not mandatory to suit the angle at the bridge if you don't want it to be. There is some tonal change from leaving the pickups perpendicular and the bridge angled back, particularly at the bridge position, but personally I prefer to embrace this change in my multiscale builds as just another flavour of the same thing. For reference have a look at some of Strandberg's instruments which have a mixture of angled and slanted pickups, although for the most part their guitars that utilise bar or blade-style pole pieces are the only ones that will get angled pickups. There may be tonal reasons for this (the individual pairs of pole pieces on a regular humbucker for example will end up slightly out of alignment for each string which might change ...something... detrimentally for tone?), but I'm willing to bet it's largely done for aesthetic reasons due to the fact that regular humbuckers with exposed slug-style polepieces look a bit cock-eyed. That's normally dealt with by using a compound scarf joint, where the 'ramp' of the neck piece is done at the same angle as the nut. The headstock piece just gets attached conventionally as you would for a regular scarf jointed neck, but because the joint tilts away at a slight downward angle the headstock twists in sympathy with the projected angle of the strings as they deflect away from the nut towards the tuners. The ghetto method of doing it with ye olde router-planer is something like this: You can use a perpendicular scarf joint if you wish, but as you've noted it looks kinda clunky with a triangular dead area behind the treble side of the nut where all the angled pieces need to kinda 'null' each other out before allowing the strings to spear off towards the tuners. I personally find this: ...too be a much more elegant solution than this:

I'd like to claim it as one of mine, but it's actually a Monty Python reference. You say 'winging it'. I say 'keepin' it jazz, man'. I'd heartily recommend testing it first if you can. I've had dark bits of timber with darker features in the grain pattern just turn ugly shades of brown with the application of danish oil, which was extremely disappointing at the time. I'd hate for that exemplary piece of ebony to go the same way. I suppose in the sprit of winging it, if you make a mistake once, it's a mistake. If you make the same mistake twice, it's jazz. Repetition legitimises. *sigh* I miss my Titanic...

I know I haven't piped up on this build much recently, but can I just say this is the first time I've been on television? Looks pretty spectacular, Andy Have you got a '11 secret herbs and spices' plan in mind for how it will be finished? I'd be nervous that so much dark timber would end up just looking like eighty shades of murky brown if any old varnish or oil was applied

I think the issue is more that the Hot Rails pickup shape, with its skinny bobbins sitting side by side, makes the corners of the pickup closer to a rectangular profile which naturally struggles to fit through the semi-circular ends of the mounting window in the Tele baseplate: Although why that problem appears to be only on the MIM bridge plate is a bit odd. Is the MIM string spacing slightly narrower than the USA version, and hence has a slightly narrower bridge pickup with a slightly shorter mounting hole to match perhaps?

FWIW, that same shot before and after: So while the black background is mostly black-ish, it's still a fairly clean base to work with; no wrinkles, no fluff, no creases. There's a slight puckering visible where the lower horn is resting against the sofa seat, and a little at the top of the image above the upper waist of the body. But these get largely hidden with a little use of some contrast reduction after the shot is taken. You can see the underside of the roll of fabric at the extreme top of the original shot which was resting on top of the couch at the time and the whole thing is a little crooked, but these can be corrected later on by cropping and rotating respectively. The slight orange cast is still present in the orgininal shot and I really should have corrected this at the time, but I got lazy. I don't have any lights in use, just natural daylight filtered through the window blinds in the house which probably accounts for the orange tinge. That's probably not such a bad idea if you're really wanting to do that 'dead-on' full instrument shot. If you can devise some way of shooting the guitar from above looking straight down with minimal shadows you'd probably get that 'guitar floating in inky black space' look with minimal fuss and no risk of the guitar falling from a some kind of jig or suspended thread. Just don't drop the camera

The black muslin looks better than the basket-weave pattern you used on your blue Tele. My thoughts: The eye tends to get drawn to the highlights created in the backing sheet where it's been creased while sitting folded up. The organic, crumpled look is fine if that's what you're going for, but the 'shirt just removed from the packet' look might not be. First three shots of the Hamer show it off the most. You could always deliberately over-crumple the muslin to make it obvious that the background is meant to be a bit of a soft feature in the shot, like the guitar is resting on a sea of fabric. Trying to stretch it taut but accidentally leaving creases in it is problematic, as it tends to look a bit staged. The Jem shots are better in this intance. Strong shadowing on the background suggests you need more indirect or diffuse light when taking the shots. Try aiming the lighting panels to the ceiling rather than pointing them at the guitar, so that the light is diffusely reflected off the white ceiling paint rather than blasting at full intensity towards the instrument. Paradoxically, I actually think the lighting in some of the Tele shots was slightly better, as there's some natural darkening to the left/right edges of the frame that adds some character to the pictures: The composition of Hamer #3 is a bit odd with the strap occupying a good third of the image, pushing the guitar too far to the right. The issue also gets amplified by the narrow cropping applied to the top and bottom of the image. Don't be afraid to use more of the native 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratio of the camera. That can mean angling the shot so that the guitar fits diagonally from corner to corner to minimse the amount of apparent dead space around the instrument, such as the 2nd Hamer and 2nd Jem pics. Guitars are notoriously long and skinny objects to photograph, so you may as well try to position them so that they use as much of the viewport as possible. There's some overblowing of the whites going on in some of the shots (the 4th Hamer pic of the headstock, 1st Jem pic etc), which results in loss of detail on the brighter parts of the instrument. Maybe also another clue that there's still a bit too much bright/direct lighting, or maybe the camera has some kind of autoexposure correction feature that needs to be turned off? Some dialling back of the contrast using image manipulation after the fact can help tame it a bit, but if you can control it at the source it will make your life easier. The angled shots looking down the neck (Hamer #5, Jem #3) make for more interesting staging than the square-on shots, but because the focus is on the headstock in the foreground the camera's depth of field needs to be much greater to ensure the body towards the back remains (more) in focus. It can be a deliberate choice to force focus on a feature on a guitar up close and leave the rest of it blurry, but care needs to be taken to ensure it looks like a deliberate choice. The depth-of-field blur effect may be slightly easier to control if you take a few steps back from the guitar and use the optical zoom to get back in close again. I'm pretty sure that's how I got this one: Don't be afraid to use some really up close and personal angles with odd positions. Guitars have all sorts of interesting features to catch the eye. One or two square-on shots are fine if you want to give the viewer an idea of what the instrument looks like, but there's so much more you can do to convey to the viewer how it feels: Use a tripod wherever you can. Yes, it's clunky, takes longer to set up and gets in the way all the time, but it guarantees your shots will be motion blur-free. I'll even go to the trouble of setting up the delay timer on the camera so my hands are nowhere near the shutter when it goes off. This can be even more important if your lighting situation forces you to use long exposure times or low ISO settings, where the camera must remain motionless when taking the shot. If your camera allows for it use the preview screen's zoom function before every shot to blow up the image as much as possible to set the manual focus to ensure it's as crisp as you can make it. Watch out for dust specs and pet hair on the black muslin. Black tends to show it up really easily, especially in the close-up shots. Keep one of those magic lint brushes handy or invest some time in Photoshop to airbrush them out afterwards.

Thankyou. The black fabric gets it 90% there. The last 10% is to use a colour curve intensity filter that pushes the black tones further back. That particular photo has a bit too much of an orange cast to it, but the 'invisibility' of the background seems to have worked OK. I just visited a fabric/craft supplies store and bought a few metres of black cotton on a roll about 6ft wide. Maybe $20 all up?

Pic on the couch with black sheet underneath/behind:

Don't get me wrong - I wasn't suggesting you should Photoshop it up, just noting that it's possible that's how it is done where money and time is no object. I personally can't be bothered with Photoshopping to fix/hide things in most of my shots; only when there is something badly wrong in an otherwise good pic. Another thing I've experimented with in the past is laying a black cotton sheet over the sofa and resting the guitar lengthways along the seat, so that it 'stands up' in the playing orientation. If the sheet is black and matte enough it doesn't tend to be so apparent that the guitar is resting on a soft surface.

I assume you mean you want the guitar to appear floating off the floor as if held by a piece of string from the headstock? I'm not entirely sure how that would be done by the pro's unless they use clear fishing line, specialist lighting tricks, a bit of Photoshop to hide the evidence or a combination of the three. If you mean how to raise the guitar off the floor while it's lying on its back, in the past I've just used a small, thick book to prop it up underneath the body and been careful to position it so that it wasn't visible in shot. Using non-reflective, dark backgrounds may also help disguise that the guitar is also not in contact with it when in fact it is actually (at least partially) resting on it. Maybe take a look at Google images for some ideas? I notice that a lot of artsy guitar shots actually take advantage of the fact that the guitar needs to lean against something in order to stay upright - a tree, barn door, old leather chair, car bumper etc. It tends to be the big name companies that go for the 'floating in space' look, which I'm willing to bet are largely created using judicious amounts of photo post-processing to erase any props, cradles and jigs after the shot was taken. They'd have the budget to expend on that kind of thing, so in their case there's probably no reason not to take advantage of it.

The issue with passive mixing is that it tends to be lossy, so unfortunately you'll be stuck with the summated output being significantly less than the individual signals you're trying to mix. The situation gets worse the more signals you want to mix together as each source cross-loads the other down. In passive mixers this is usually resolved by adding a recovery amp to the output of the mixer to make up for the loss. Guitar pickups have typically high source impedance so the effects are much worse than trying to passively mix, say a couple of synths or some pedals together. What about adding some kind of clean boost pedal to the output to bring it back up to a respectable level? The ideal solution would be to employ active mixing using an opamp in a virtual earth configuration, which would eliminate all the major issues with mixing the pickups. Based on your description of how you want each pickup to behave it sounds like you could probably adapt a left-centre-right mxer circuit. It's the sort of thing that could be done on a small bit of perf board using a single chip and a dozen or so resistors. Provided you're not averse to installing a 9V battery into the guitar and doing a little bit of custom circuitry maybe explore this as an idea? Have you tried just connecting one of your pickups directly to an amp (without going through any mixing) to see how it compares to a regular pickup?

Just looking at the picture you added to your diagram of the Gretsch control layout again, I think your best bet is to group your clusters of grounds near the controls that need them the most. Given that your controls are spread out across all corners of the guitar body, the suggested layout I provided above probably isn't the most efficient way of doing it. Rearranging the order of the grounds would give you a slightly more logical flow to them:

Essentially any time you see the ground symbol, all points connected to it must somehow find their way to each other. In guitar wiring there's nothing more special to it than that. Your only real hassle is to find a practical way to make all those grounds meet each other. You can bunch them all together and join them all at one common point if you want (the output jack, as you suggest), but it's going to get messy quickly. Another alternative is to group smaller clusters together and then join those clusters with a single jumpers, gradually working your way back to the output jack. You could conceivably do something like this if you wanted: Lots of different ways to skin the cat. Wiring diagrams were traditionally made to allow non-skilled labour working in factories to be able to produce a circuit that worked. The wiring guys didn't have to understand how the circuit functioned, just that wire colour 'x' went to point 'y', and that if you joined the dots together enough the product would operate as intended. Schematics on the other hand are created for people to understand how the circuit functions. Admittedly many wiring diagrams for guitars often blur the line between the two which doesn't help things (the use of the ground symbol in your diagram can be confusing, as unless you're aware of what ground is for it might not be obvious of the requirement to make sure they're all joined together somehow somewhere)

Looks good

Don't think we're talking about the same thing. I mean this: Should probably be like this:

Some Q's and thoughts for you. Bearing in mind the diagram is a bit blurry, even when blowing it up on my screen: Input-side filter caps in the LM3x7 regulators are normally connected across the input and ground. Connecting them to the midpoint of the voltage setting divider will reduce their effectiveness for input-side ripple filtering (I've got a feeling you'll probably also get worse output ripple as loading increases too). Although there are those whopping big caps on the outgoing sides of the bridge rectifier (10000uF and 2200uF? Too blurry...) which will swallow up most of the ripple. 2K variable pot on the voltage setter dividers for the two +/-24VDC sections give an effective adjustability range of 1.25V - 11.67V (asuming the R1's of each are 240 ohms - hard to make out), which won't be enough to get you to the +/-24VDC you're after. 5K variable resistors on the 12V, 9V and 5V sections gives an effective adjustability range of 1.25 - 27.29V. Is it possible the values of the variable resistors on the +/-24V and 12/9/5V sections have been swapped on your diagram? The 5, 9 and 12V regulators will be working up a bit of a sweat with 35V at their inputs. The 5V in particular will be having a hard time as it's trying to burn off significant amounts of power when supplying moderate load (eg, 35V input - 5V output = 30V. Multiply by say 300mA of load and the poor old thing will be cooking up 9W). Bank on a fairly substantial heatsink or maybe consider adding a chunky votage-dropping power resistor(s) on the input side to ease the burden on the regulators. Also note that the LM317 is specified for a max Vi -V0 differential of 40V. 30V as designed does appear to give you plenty of room to move, but if your input voltage rises too much and your 5V output voltage sags too much (or you have it set to a lower value using the 5K variable R) there's a chance you're going to exceed that rating.

*shrug* Hard to say. There's lots of different factors that might influence the decision that one guitar might be better than the other. Personally I think it's a little questionable that Chappers might make those comments towards the end about the finish being the magic that the Gibson had over the Epiphone. He knew it was a Gibson, which might have influenced his decision. He knew that nitro might have some mystique over poly, which might have influenced his decision. He was playing both through an amp which he was presumably familiar with, which might have influenced his decision. His playing had also warmed up a bit by that point in the video, which might have influenced his claim too. Maybe he could feel the vibrational difference under his fretting hand. Then again, maybe he's dribbling shit I genuinely thought for a second at the point where The Captain was announcing that, '...it's probably not the decision the people wanted to hear...' that they would announce the Epi was the better of the two. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the Rob Chapman channel is (was?) also a vehicle for selling guitars on behalf of the Andertons store. It's kinda not surprising that the outcome was that the Gibson was better. Maybe it genuinely was the better of the two, but there's enough doubt in my mind to question the impartiality of the guys holding the guitars and hence, their claims. Many years ago I bought a Fender Newporter acoustic guitar, solely because I wanted to impress my peers with the knowledge I had a guitar with 'Fender' stamped on the headstock (a rarity back then at my age where I grew up), even if it was made in Korea with a plywood top. That was despite my knowledge that many other acoustics I'd tried while shopping at the same time sounded better and had better specs for the same price. I regretted it for many years afterwards. Brand prestige can have weird effects on buyers.

Not at all. I can clearly hear a difference when they're being played side by side. But that's not that surprising, as almost nothing in the two examples in that video are the same. I'm not even sure what switching is meant to prove anyway, as Chappers isn't playing the same things on both guitars each time. Re: the Epi sounding bad vs the Gibson sounding good. I don't really hear it sounding one way or the other; it's just two different flavours of humbucker-equipped guitar. It has different characteristics that I might be able to isolate and identify if I listen closely enough, but undoubtedly they'd take on completely different angles played through a different setup. Without it being in my hands plugged into my rig I don't think I can make a judgement on whether or not it tickles my eardrums. Unlike an acoustic instrument an electric guitar should never be assessed solely by it's own qualities. At a basic level it's only a small stage in a substantially larger signal chain. It's not much good if you don't plug it in.

Everything is different. They're different instruments with different pickups and hardware played by different people through different amps. If the implication is that the tonal difference is down to just the finish in this case, that's massively jumping the gun. Welllll, acoustic instruments, perhaps. But electric? And just the neck? The grain of salt that must be considered with things like that is that the human ear and mind is notoriously bad at 'remembering' the timbre of a sound given enough time between hearing that sound twice. Some studies indicate that it can be as small a handful of seconds. Refinishing a guitar is naturally going to take days to weeks, so making a judgement call on whether removing/changing the finish affected the sound is fraught with unknowns and unreliabilities, made all the more variable owing to natural inconsistencies of the person using the instrument to assess the change. FWIW I'm not suggesting that the finish does or does not make the world of difference in sound. For all I know it could. But in the absence of real data I'm sceptical that it must be automatically assumed that it does. Chappers' preference as to how good the guitar sounded could have instantly been swayed the moment he felt how glossy the neck felt in his hand, throwing any real objectivity he might have had straight out the window. If he's the sort of guy who doesn't like the feel of gloss poly he might subconsciously draw conclusions as to how the guitar sounds before he even plugs it in ('this neck feels quite sticky and grippy, I bet it doesn't resonate well...').

Have a look at the driver circuit used by Fender for their reverb stages (such as in the Fender Twin Reverb). The cathode resistor used in them is much higher, and the two halves of the 12AT7 are in parallel as per your thoughts on possible changes to the topology. If you're exploring the idea of using both halves of the 12AT7 as the output driver another option is to configure it for push-pull configuration. The Firefly project used as 12AU7 in push-pull for sub-1 watt output. You could probably sub in the 12AT7 and it would be happy enough to work OK.

Have you tried out the amp side of things yet? 20K effective plate resistor with a 130R cathode R on a 12AT7 at 200-ish volts has the tube pretty much hard on the end stops. I would've thought any overdrive you'd be getting would be pretty 'farty' sounding. Bear in mind that boosting the plate voltage up using a DC-DC converter still makes it a power-hungry circuit on batteries. All you're effectively doing is selecting 4th gear on the gearbox instead of 1st.

Yes, it's odd. But it does 'work', even if it has the side effects you've found. And by and large it a0ppears to be typical across multiple wiring diagrams for the Jaguar that I've looked at, so I guess it's just the way Fender chose to do it for whatever reason they had at the time. I would point out that there does seem to be one other variant floating around that shows an extra 56k resistor strapped across the top two terminals of the pot (where you have the red and yellow wires shown in your post). See here for example. This would lessen the effect of the tone pot slugging the output level as it's wound down at the expense of making the tone control less responsive overall. You could try it out and see if it makes the circuit behave a little better. Or you could always say 'to hell with historical accuracy' and just wire the tone pot in a conventional two-terminal arrangement (who uses a stinking tone pot anyway..?)

A softer board might initially grab a fret OK, but it's unlikely to hold it properly under regular playing conditions or seasonal changes. There's a good chance the frets may start lifting and getting high spots after a year or two of playing. The other thing I'd be concerned about is the way a softer board will wear in between each fret from finger pressure pushing the strings against the timber.

Then I'd suggest it's too soft to be used reliably as a fretboard - sorry The 'tiger' bit of tiger myrtle is a kind of fungal attack that happens to the tree as it grows, not unlike spalted maple. It's quite a striking visual effect to look at, but IME it leaves the timber much softer than normal. A clear piece of Tas myrtle is not dissimilar to maple in terms of strength and hardness, but the tiger variant needs to be used more carefully and selectively. You could possibly try flooding the whole fretboard with some kind of hardening agent (maybe CA or water thin epoxy?) but it's going to be messy and a bit of a stab in the dark as to whether it will work successfully. Do you have any offcuts you can experiment with?

Unless the nut is extremely high to begin with it probably doesn't make a great deal of difference. Certainly nothing that can't be adjusted out at the bridge anyway. At a pinch I'd suggest resting the straightedge on the frets only might be preferable as the neck will have a tendency to bend forward under string tension, plus you need inherent clearance between the strings and frets to avoid buzzing, and this will have the combined effect of effectivey increasing the strung-up action higher than the straightedge may initially indicate. You'll need a way to control the action, either positive or negative, so the more leeway you can give yourself to control it at the bridge the better. Raising a Tune-o-matic to increase the action once the guitar is strung up is generally pretty easy. Lowering it will be limited by whatever minimum clearance you have left underneath it, and this is probably where it's more critical to plan out the initial neck angle to begin with. If this is going to be a Telecaster in the 'traditional' sense (ie, with a pickguard and bolt-on neck construction), you could always add a tapered shim to the neck pocket to fine tune any required neck angle after the fact. They can generally be made to be look pretty unobtrusive to the casual eye.