GuitarMaestro

Hmm...I REALLY need a method to avoid massive tearout with a curly maple neck blank I have here. If I try to plane it i get holes ripped out that are like 2-3mm deep. Are you sure your method is a good idea though? The water might cause the blank to change shape which will result in a piece of wood that is not really flat after it has dried again. Is this not a problem?

Deleted my original post. Dont want this to end in a flame war. I have send the mods a pm with my opinion. That said I dont think you have any reason to apologize....

Wow...looks awesome. If you built that guitar from scratch you have ALOT of respect from me. Great work. Even if you only did the finish. Only thing I dont like at all is the headstock....but I guess you wanted it to be all original or just dig that headstock. Congrats again!

I Still have the Body but It got set Aside because I wanted to get the Impaler design worked out And than I started the Brutalizer design, So I lost interest in the thing

Okay....seems you are more interested in the brutal designs than me. There is nothing wrong with them and I mainly play listen to and play metal. But I also play alot of Jazz. I just dont like it when a guitar looks like you could only play one style of music on it. This goes for extreme metal guitars as well as for jazz boxes.

That's the reason I like the Sentinel so much. It looks very uncommon and radical but still versatile somehow....

Sounds like a good plan....could not know about that...hehe....good luck!

I would DEFINATELY NOT build the Gretsch! Guitars are there for playing and in the best case enhancing your ability to play and inspire you to break out of the stuff you usually play. If you have no floyd-guitar I bet having one will inspire your playing way more than another guitar in the style you already have more than 10.

Would have bin ausumn with 31/36 frets. But that doesnt make it any less cooler and original.

More then 24 frets make no sense at all with the scale he used. You wont be able to fret them because the distances become way to small. I mean 26 frets maybe but anything more than that makes no sense at all....

@Matt: What happened to your Sentinel design? I liked that very much....more than the Impaler shape....dont get me wrong: The Impaler looks like an awesome guitar, just not really my taste....

Awesome guitar although the Warlock shape is not one of my favorites!

I especially like the neck alot....looks very clean and inviting to play with the nice binding and cool inlays! Definately a GOTM canditate I would say!!!!

That guitar looks VERY cool....excellent design and great execution! Congrats! Cant wait to see it finished. One question: A couple of pages ago you mentioned using a laser for checking the alignment of parts. This seems like a cool idea, however I cannot really get what kind of laser you use from the pictures. It seems like this unit more or less generates a "laser-plane" and not only a ray. How is this unit called and where did you buy it?

@wes:

I wanted to throw this out there, would the stain have any funny effects on the coloration in the maple. The maple already has some colors in it which are cool but would a stain change those areas possibly, like darken or blacken them or would it make no difference?

Usually the stain enhances the figure but evens out the different colors in the wood. Drak's rawhide guitar is a good example of this: Before staining it had different colors, now it's quite uniform in color: different shades of red, but the original colors are not visible anymore. This is not meant as a critique. I dont doubt that godin's guitar will look great after staining, but you can always build another one with a more "common" piece of maple and stain that. Why waste the colors of such a unique piece?

Nice flowing body shape. Not my cup of tee but good anyway. The top is absolutely awesome beyond belief....man am I jealous....dont listen to them....stainnig such a special top would be sacrilegous. I have seen and worked with alot of quilted maple tops and never seen something that special like these orange areas....dont ruin it's natural color!!!!

On lookers that witnessed the spectacle said it was almost like a moth was being drawn to numerous flames and could not decide which to go to.

P.s.: Excellent guitar so far, but I will post my judgment when its done!

Is there a reason for my guitar having wider and taller frets then a normal 6 string? I know there are tutorials on fretting and fret leveling etc - but how hard is this to do for some 1 like me? Thanks again Michael

Different companies use different fretwire....it's just a matter of taste....I bet your frets are perfecly okay, but need a proper levelling....properly levelling frets is nealry considered an art form, but is not impossible if you are willing to put in the work and patience, however it's really no easy task. I recommend letting a pro do it....but did you try improving the action by adjusting the bridge yet?

This is the best looking guitar I see in here since a VERY long time in my opinion. It's the first time I see a custom body shape here that makes want to steal the idea(no fear I wont do that....hehe). The finish looks very cool as well. Sure there are some small details I dont really like....ie the cavity covers, but the basic design is a classic. Did you invent that shape?

Some questions:

1. Was the finish sprayed from a can or via a real gun? Can you really not remeber the brand?

2. Did you build the neck? Looks like it's taken from another guitar....

Basically my schecter suffers from having an uneven action, where the strings are quite some distance from the fret board at the the 20th fret and far too close at the 1st fret. Ive looked at the neck time and time again and it appears to have a

slight bow in it which causes this. Altho Iam starting to wonder if this bow is just some trick on the eye and the neck is really straight as I have adjusted the truss rod and been unable to resolve this. Originally I thought the action problem was due to the neck joint being slightly uneven and tried to shim it accordingly....

BUT this went from band to worse, it didnt solve the issue and now I have some ever so slight movement of the neck in the joint and it wont tighten anymore.

So I was thinking gettng a new neck and hoping for the best!

Before wasting money on a new neck you should check the old neck properly first!!!! Take a straightedge to check if it is possible to adjust the neck to be flat and to check what influences turning the trussrod has on the neck. Then you know if the rod is still working. If thats the case and you can get the neck to be flat, you have to set the bridge height correctly. If that still does not help you either have a nut with slots that run too deep or you need a fret levelling. In any case it would be a good idea to read the tutorials on the main page that deal with properly setting up the action and intonation of a guitar.

Thanks....good to know....I'll probably build a new 7 strings if ever I want to use EMG's. For this guitar it would not work: I would have to rerout the PU cavities, route out a Battery/Electronic cavity, etc.

Thanks for your answers again!

i am starting to think that the mahogany,alder combination is "the sh*t" so to speak...i never see that combo in guitars,but in mine,even with only the 1" strip in the middle of my necks,it really brings the sound together.

Sounds interesting...I never heard of a guitar with this combination of woods. I am definately interested how your next guitar will sound....are you already building?

yeah...the 81/7 is indeed a snappier bridge pup than the tone zone...although i do like the tone zone,but it is a warm pickup,which when combined with limba could very well make the tone too warm...or "mushy" as you say.try the neck first.

unfortunately,i know of no single coil seven string emg...but they do custom orders at guitarpartsdepot...

Is the EMG 81/7 splittable? If not a middle pickup would not makes much sense at all for me. Currently the neck and brigde pu gets split for all combinations where the middle PU is active....

Well, quite. Also, I'm a bit vague on this whole 'curly vs flamed vs tiger stripe vs quilt' thing. I thought 'curly' was a generic term, much like 'figured', whereas things like quilt, flamed and tiger-stripe (subset of flamed) refer the the kind of figure in particular, none of it really clarifying what wood we're talking about. But maybe that's just my problem.

Well I am from Germany and not native speaker, but in all books and internet sites I read maple was classified into three categories:

1. Regular unfigured maple

2. Quilted Maple

3. flamed = curly = tiger-stripe = the stuff I used on that neck

Nah, in that case, probably won't improve things much. But, if it were me, I'd do it anyway. Reason: wood is plastic. It creeps over time under tension, and eventually gets 'set' there. It deforms. Takes years and years, mind you, but deform it does. CF springs back to 'straight'. This said, plenty of guitars out there without them that are fine. I just like to see it as cheap long-term insurance.

Thats definately true....maybe I'll add some rods just for additional safety against warping....

Oh, and NICE guitar :-)

Thanks alot!!!!

Okay...I will finish this neck then (with slow progress -> not much time) and let you know how it turns out!

@Everybody who does not know what guitar I am talking about look here

@Mattia:

Curly (as in flamed, anyway) maple is fairly common in necks (I've got a couple made of striped hard maple), but I've rarely if ever seen quilt used in necks, which is what I think you mean.

I am talking about curly maple and NOT quilted maple. Quilted Maple would be way to unstable in my expirience....

Re: tone, I'd blame the body and the neck, I guess. A 5mm cap isn't going to do much to affect the 'mahogany family' warm, middly tone you'll get out of a limba body. Thicker top, LP style, might have more snap to it, but yeah, a new neck might be the way to go here.

You're definately right here: It's probably not thick enough, but altering the body is not possible anymore unfortunately!

CF is good beause it's consistent. And yes, I do have bubinga, and I know it's stiff as heck. Thing is, it's only part of the neck. The CF provides an even stiffness along, and is flexible enough that it shouldn't make a neck too stiff. Gone are any potential dead spots, and you've got a slight additional amount of stiffness if your neck needs it.

I am not against CF rods. But the two Bubinga stripes are 8mm each which is quite massive, I doubt that CF Rods would made it stiffer. Especially because I would have to route part of the channels for it out of the Bubinga stripes and I suspect this might even make the neck weaker. Youre sure it would be an improvement?

@Godin: Great to hear....I hope it was just the piece....

Thanks for the answers!

@All:

Concerning the body: It is a black limba body with 5mm quilted maple top. The pickup is a DiMarzio Tone Zone 7 in the bridge and a Air Norton 7 at the neck and a Blaze 7 singelcoil in the middle. I am very happy with the tone of the bridge and middle pickup, especially for clean sounds. It's just that the bridge position distorted sounds to muddy and has not enough bite for what I like. The other positions sound more mellow than a Strat for example, but thats great for clean sounds. Youre definately right that the neck is not the only factor. But I wont redo the body and the pickups *should* be great. At least the 6 string version of the ToneZone is my favorite PU ever.

@mattia:

Why CF rods? Did you ever work with bubinga? It's CRAZY stuff....The CF rods I have are way easier to flex than the Bubinga stripes, especially because the stripes have the full neck thickness. Or do you think they will alter the sound? I dont think so....

@fryovanni:

Interesting that the the location the tree grows has so much influence. The Bigleaf I used was quatersawn and very stiff, it felt like hard maple. But the new neck I am currently building is red maple anyway....

@Wes:

You still remeber that guitar? COOL! I will definately try another bridge PU if I dont like the sound with the new neck. The sound clip you had was quite nice....

However doing alot of studio work and mixing/mastering I know that judging the sound by a soundclip is damn close to impossible....The amp and mic placement has a 10x bigger influence on the recorded sound than different guitars altogether in my opinion. But the soundclip definately hinted at a great PU.

I guess I'll just finish that neck know and if it doesn't change the sound enough, I'll experiment with different PU's.

Thanks everbody!

One thing I realized though: Does anyone use curly maple for necks? I sure dont know of many curly maple necks....maybe with good reason

Thanks alot for the replies. The last neck I built was made of two 8mm wide stripes of quatersawn Bubinga and 3 stripes of curly quatersawn western bigleaf maple topped with an ebony fingerboard. As you see I used only quatersawn wood AND selected the woods to result in a stiff neck in the end. However I am not really happy with the guitars sound. Not enough attack/bite and to mellow for my taste. I suspect it is the neck, but I cannot be sure. Therefore I started building a new neck with the same woods and dimensions except for using flat-sawn curly red maple for the maple parts. I was told that red maple has about the same properties as regular rock maple. The reason I started this thread was that I wonder if this will give me an improvement at all....what do you think? I don't want to alter the curly maple neck look of the guitar....

Thanks for your answers. The material I use is not soft in my opinion....I cannot make out a difference to standard hard maple. How do you check your neck pieces Frank? If you talk about the softness as the only factor I have to agree with mattia: what about mahagony and other softer but traditional neck woods?

The more I think and read about neck woods I wonder if the expensive figured woods I usually use may decrease sound quality. My usual neck material is curly red maple (a harder species than western bigleaf)....could it be that figure in the neck slows or negatively influences the travel of sound-waves in the neck, making th neck sound more mellow and having a slow attack? What about other types of figure? Birdseye? Quilt?

Yes, but if you want to build a neck do it....pratice makes perfect and maybe you'll at least get a playable neck....I just wanted to stress that as a beginner you will have a hard time making a better neck then the stock neck.

Commenting on the original question: It's a VERY bad idea in my opinion. Building and properly fretting a neck is quite difficult and to rival the quality of the B.C. Rich neck will need several completed necks. Not because that neck is so great, but because building a nice working neck is the most difficult aspect of building a guitar in my opinion. But if you want to do it for learning purposes....definately a good idea, although I recommend starting with a body....

maybe a lot of people had bad experiences when ordering custom stuff... I bet you it was because of either wrong wordage or wrong attitude while dealing with them. I haven't ordered that much from them, but everytime I talk on the phone with them I get a yes for and answer, granted sometimes that yes has a fee involved, but it's like everything in business...

At least in my case that's certainly not the reason. I usually discussed the stuff with Ken himself, and he should know. Sometimes I offered to pay a big additional fee....He always appologized and told me exact reasons why they could not do the things I listed in my last post. What is not possible with their standard CNC programs, they are simply not going to do, because it makes no sense in terms of money. I understand them: Would you rather sell 3 standard necks or one custom neck in the same time? Custom orders cost way more time than they yield money. I bet your custom options were minor enough to not cost them much time....

I'm talking about their bodies, not their necks --I'm sure their necks are pretty great.

But if all you're looking for is a telecaster body, buy the asian clone, sell off the parts you don't need....

It's not that easy.....a good guitar body is made of 1-2 pieces of well dried and selected wood. The cheaper the wood the worse usually....Price is not neccessarily a guarantee for a good body, but I bet the odds of getting a great sounding Warmoth body is way higher than getting a good sounding cheap Asian body. They have to cut corners somewhere....