lightbulbjim

Point being, you can build an electric guitar out of almost anything and make it work.

this is true - i made both a bass and a guitar our of 5mm marine grade aluminium plate glued to a hardwood frame (no idea what the wood is - it was actually an old shelf) and the both sound awesome.

also on the subject of danelectros - a friend of mine has a danelectro longhorn bass, and it's horrible to play i think. basses need to be solid in my opinion, or at least only have chambers in the wings. this thing is incredibly tinny and twangy sounding, no depth or "oomph" at all. and add to the fact that it has a WOODEN bridge saddle (that's right - one saddle that runs under all the strings so you can't adjust the intonation of each string individually at all) so there's no sustain to speak of at all.

I built a bass with effects modules in it, it's got a distortion and phaser module. All I did was get the pedals, pull the guts out of them, and hardwire it all together inside the guitar. Oh and it's got a preamp too. Easy to do (once you figure out your grounding haha), and it just takes four nine volt batteries wired in parallel to power everything, and I expect the batteries to last a couple of years at least. Click herefor pictures and stuff.

Matt Bellamy of Muse has guitars with built-in effects, that is sortof along the same lines innit?

Matt uses a Rocktron All-Access pedalboard for controling most of his effects, and then he has some analog effects in his guitars (Z-Vex Fuzz factory, Wah Probe, and MXR Phase 90). Two of his guitars also have a midi strip controller on them that he can assign to any midi effect parameter (normally Digitech Whammy) on the fly (no forums). See here for more info.

Anyone heard of Godin guitars? Now there are some shmick pieces of work! My equally-tied-for-first other favourite would have to be Warrior.

Hey if you're going for more than one neck, what about this?!?! -

More info here.

HOLLOW that bubinga. The guit will still weigh a TON, maybe more.

Yeh, but maybe it's better weighing a ton than having a really light body with a really heavy neck? It would be all unbalanced, if you let go of it and let it hang by the strap the headstock would be pointing towards the ground. I dunno though, try it and see.

Also, something to watch out for, I was thinking of building an aluminium neck for my bass, but I heard there's lots of problems with tuning stability so I gave it a miss this time round. I still lose a bit of stability with the aluminium body, but it's not nearly as bad. The problem with it is, when the aluminium heats up it expands, and when it cools it contracts, enough to be a problem. I don't know about stainless, you'd have to do some research to find out if it's going to worry you or not, but just something to keep in mind especially on a neck.

well, i voted from scratch even though the only guitar i've built so far was a bass using a neck i already had lying around. but in my defense that was the first one, and i didn't want to go to all the trouble of building a neck if the thing didn't work. my next one and all subsequent ones are going to have neck-through bodies made entirely by myself.

yes, believe it or not it's in the "announcements and test area" section. here's the link.

I think the only thing stranger that I've seen, aside from a built-in Roland midi pickup, was a midi pedal built into in the guitar.

How about a guitar with a Z-Fex Fuzz Factory, a MXR Phase 90, a Z-fex Wah Probe, Digitech Whammy, Roland GK-2 MIDI Pickup AND controller board, Graphtech acoustic Ghost saddles and Fernandes Sustainiac ALL IN THE ONE GUITAR? Yes, it does exist, it's one of the guitars I got inspiration for mine from. Check it out here.

I was looking at building a set of bass cabs for my (future!) stack, but like many others I found it to be more expensive than just buying them. I was looking at building a 2x15 and a 4x10, but it turns out that for not much more than the price of the 2x15 I could just buy 2 4x10s. Yeah, sure they'd be budget ones, but there's no guaruntee that anything I build will sound any good.

But if you do want to build cabs, the hardest part is definitely the tuning, and I recommend WinISD to help you with this. It's a small freeware program that is very easy to use, you input the characteristics of the speaker drive you want to use, how many you're using etc and what type of cab it's going to be, and it tells you what sort of volume (speaker box space), port length etc you need for different frequency responses. It also has an excellent help file that explains eveything, and it is worth reading thouroughly because there are some hidden features and stuff.

You can download WinISD here.

hehe - i'm thinking of putting the sender unit from a wireless system in my next one (normal out put as well of course). just less hassle, pick it up, flick a switch and play.

I heard of a guy doing what jener8tionx said, and just using very light wire for the bridge grounding. It's a similar sort of concept to the fuse really, I don't know what would be the advantages/disadvantages between the two.

18 here.

Hehe ok I'll put up my new toy in here, even though it's very rough compared to the beautiful work other people are doing - but hey! Anyways, I just finished it the other day, it's an aluminium and timber bass with the innards of a distortion pedal and a phaser pedal built into it - the results can be very noisy . So yeh, I'll see if I can get a picture here, and there's some more info and photos here.

Cheers. I might head over to the newbie area actually and introduce myself....

I just finished my bass the other day. It's fairly rough as it's a prototype really, in fact it's the first guitar I've ever built (hence I didn't even attempt the neck this time). There's some info and photos here.