ElysianGuitars

You've got me thinking. How about this - the wood vibrates from the energy imparted by the vibrating strings. Since the pickup is solidly mounted, it too must vibrate. So as well as the strings vibrating above the pickup in the magnetic field, the pickup itself is also vibrating, i.e. moving relative to the strings - hence the wood/pickup vibration produces additional signal, and the amount and type of harmonics etc will be very much effected by the wood type and shape and resonances. I do, and I am getting better at it each time As long as I don't slip... but if the body vibrating vibrates the pickups, why would it vibrate more direct mounted than it would ring mounted? you'd think itd have more freedom to vibrate as you say when its mounted in a ring, as opposed to direct mounted(which generally has some kind of foam underneat between the body and pickup.)

thoughts on this subject are all over the place and vary quite vastly. i'll give you my take on direct mounting, and why it doesn't effect the tone. pickups are electromagnetic in nature, they pick up variations in the magnetic field. wood is not metal, it does not effect a magnetic field, so i feel mounting directly does not effect the tone, because there is no added variation in the magnetic field. things that effect tone significantly are things like what kind of frets are used, what kind of strings are used, anything that could percievably effect the magnetic field. wood is organic, its not going to do that. but my theory also opens up another can of worms, which i also have a theory on, which is, why do different body woods effect tone? and i think the answer to that is all in the strings. different woods will accentuate different frequency resonation in the strings, so the wood actually effects the way the string vibrates, which is what is picked up by the guitars pickups... again, its all theory, and just my thoughts on this, other people swear that direct mounting pickups has a tonal effect, and they are certainly entitled to their opinion. by the way, make templates, and use template bits to route your cavities, then you don't have to worry about if your cavities were neat enough for it, cause they'd be just like your template.

scalloped the cutaways, but blended them to make them look like extended roundover bevels, and carved the back side of the lower horn.

this has gone far too long without an update(damn hurricanes causing rain here), here we go further proof you don't need to make the horns look retarded(ala the rusty cooley dean) to have great upper fret access. i recarved that this morning, and i think it looks great. i'm gonna do a little more work on them, i'm thinking of doing a scallop in the cutaways, that'll come later today.

pictures?

wouldn't be a big deal if the pickups were direct mounted

Which is what I said in the first paragraph. That was the original inspiration, but I wasn't fond of their lines. The bass side of the body meets the neck too low on the FB. The whole top left side of their body looks squished to me. I had the top of the left side meet up in the same place as a LP. The angle of that edge is paralell with the inside of the trebel horn. The thought process in it was to take the top of an Explorer, the bottom of a LP, and balance them out. I wanted the sleek roundness of both models, but still have some angles to it. Yea, they did a curvier version. WesV does a similar one too (can't remember the name - sorry!) I don't know yet. I might try and sell it, I might not. Eventually, you WILL see one of these things get finished, but I can't say when. I don't know if I'll be comfortable selling this one because if ONE cosmetic glitch: the recesses for the knobs aren't 100% centered. I know what I did wrong, so it'll NEVER happen again, but it's still off just a hair on a couple. Maybe I can flatten out the whole thing... i really don't see the difference, it looks exactly the same to the link posted in the post above mine... to call it a new body design is a bit of a misnomer, as yours basically taking credit for dean's design...

looks like a dean

being neck heavy, when playing on stage it'll neck dive towards the ground...

matt, the king of suspense

one of my friends at roberto-venn made a really killer baritone 12 string, tuned it to B, it sounded amazing. wanna say it was 28" scale

you really should try wearing 7 pairs a week

oh how i love setbacks. the KTM9 didn't bond to my color coat(maybe its not compatible with polyurethane based car paints, or maybe it was because the car paint was over 2 years old, who knows), so when i went to sand it flat, it peeled right off the color coat, so i'm stripping the whole guitar down, and i'll wait till the stewmac finish gets in. pretty much at a standstill on my 2 projects until i get my finishing supplies in now.

i didn't know that, thats pretty cool. i just spray guitars, i've just had one customer request a satin finish, which is why i'd need some of that.

i love your design, as well as the original poster's... the horn extending to the 12th fret is something i've designed into a few drawings i've done, imo its necissary for a 7 or 8 string.

its priced about the same, though the target coating has a satin option, which i don't think i saw on stewmac.

i like the touch up gun stewmac sells on their site, even though its not gravity feed, i used it at roberto-venn, and its magical.

I'm sure I'm not the only one that's curious to hear how it performs. Please let us know. i'm hoping its comparable to the ktm9, only better. i'm finding the ktm9 is a lot easier to get runs in than the nitro i'm used to... i'm really curious as to why its so much cheaper than the ktm9

i just ordered a whole gallon of the stewmac waterbased finish

the body kinda looks like a duckhead

http://www.lowes.com/lowes/lkn?action=prod...&lpage=none thats the exact gun i'm using. like i said though, i need to get a detail gun so i can do bursts in the future.

what do you mean? like what kind of spraygun? or what kind of finish? i'm using a Kobalt spraygun(the type with the metal cup, need to get a detail gun soon), and i'm using KTM9 water based finish.

auto paint, polyurethane based, its some hotrod color i bought when i lived in arizona and haven't used until now.

http://www.elysian-online.com/YamahaProjec...haProject22.JPG color coat is down, and 1 coat of ktm9 thus far. got about 4 more today, then tomorrow i'm gonna sand it down with 320 and 400 and give it 4 more coats. then its a week cure time, and i'll wet sand and buff it. the RGA7 project is what i'll work on in the downtime, its gonna be lacquered soon i figure. can see a few runs on the backside, still working on my spray technique, ktm9 is a little runny compared to the lacquer and urethane i'm used to.

sprayed the color coat this morning, and now i'm working on building up the KTM9 coats. the neck should be on its final coat in about an hour.