darren wilson

Interesting. It looks like the back of the neck heel is carved in a "V" shape, and the neck pocket has a mirror-image "V" shape. Very clever. Valley Arts used to do a bolt-on neck joint that only required ONE bolt. I think they used brass dovetail inserts, if memory serves correctly. I like the look of the new Atom design from Anderson. It's nice to see them starting to do original designs instead of just Strats and Teles.

The only one who knows how to "make" quilted maple is good ol' Mother Nature.

If you want your photos to last, you're going to need to use archival-quality inks, paper and glue. A clearcoat that filters UV would also be a good idea. If you don't take these steps, you can count on the pigments fading and the paper yellowing as it's exposed to light. Unless you want that sun-faded effect, that is.

You can use a shallow neck pocket so the neck sits up a bit higher above the face of the body, or you could angle the neck pocket, so the strings are higher above the bridge location. Another option is to recess the bridge slightly into the body.

I would at least put a few coats of tung oil on it to keep the dampness out of the wood. Tung oiled wood feels even better than raw wood, in my opinion, and will give it some protection.

There's one feature i require in every PC i buy... a shiny apple logo on the front. On a serious note, though, definitely get as much RAM as you can afford, and definitely go 7200RPM or higher on your drives. For external drives, consider FireWire 400 or 800. You definitely want to keep your OS scratch disk separate from where you want to write your audio.

Yeah... generally a good idea to play the amp first, and THEN decide if you want to buy it or not.

I think this is the toughest competition i've seen yet... There are three guitars on there that i would LOVE to own personally. I love the JS6 copy, mainly because i love the JS6. But for originality, i'm really torn between the fatboy and bassman's hybrid fretless. Ultimately, i voted for the Hitone Fatboy. It was all the details that got me... little things like the headstock logo and the production label inside, and the fact that he's launched a whole Web site for his venture into guitar building. I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff, and of course, i have to support another fellow graphic designer with dreams of being a luthier. Great work, everyone!

Blue with lightning bolts. There can be no other.

Yeah, it looks like "Enable email notification of replies" on the Fast Reply panel is enabled by default. This wasn't the case a couple of days ago, so i wonder if there's a bug on the board that caused it to be enabled by default?

Is that going to be a bass or a guitar? If you're intending for this to be a bass, you might want to check your proportions. Bass bridge/tailpiece units are usually located at the very rear butt-end of the body, just because of the scale length involved. It looks like you're taking Firebird guitar proportions and making a bass out of it... where you've got the bridge positioned, it looks like it's going to be huge and tail-heavy.

A humbucker is just another kind of pickup. It's the equivalent of having two single coil pickups wired in series, with their electrical phase reversed to cut 60-cycle hum. You can put whatever kind of pickup(s) you want on your project guitar. But if you want it to be wired like a Les Paul, yes, two humbuckers, a three-way selector and a volume and tone control for each pickup. StewMac sells a complete wiring kit for a Les Paul that includes everything you'll need, except for the pickups themselves.

Any pickup, including EMGs, just "hears" the vibration of the string, which is made up of the fundamental and the overtones. Body and neck woods do have a distinct effect on the vibrating string. Certain overtones are absorbed or cancelled out by the various resonant peaks and valleys in different wood densities, which is why different woods (and even different planks of the same species) impart a different sonic "character" on the sound of the vibrating string. To suggest that EMGs completely negate the effect of the wood on the vibrating string is just nonsense.

How many of us can actually sit down and listen to a recorded (or live) amplified guitar sound and identify what wood the guitar is made of? Show of hands?

http://www.racerxband.com/audio/scarified.mp3

I had to do some serious sleuthin' but i found them: http://www.abm-mueller.com/

Heh. I remember getting an old Guitar Player magazine that had this song on the "soundpage" floppy record they used to bind into the magazine. Okay, i'm officially "old".

You don't need sunshine. Just daylight.

Hint: Don't aim the lights directly at it, and turn off your camera flash. Take it outside and take pictures of it upright (not with the face of the guitar facing the sky) and you'll get the wood grain showing up a bit better. Is it just the angle of the photos, or is the centre lamination on the neck not actually centred? It looks like it's a little toward the treble side when looking at it in relation to the middle string. I like wood-covered pickups, but mainly when they are finished to match the body.

I guess it all depends on what kind of sound you're going for. Mike Mushok's signature Ibanez model is almost all mahogany, but his tone tends to be on the darker side. Personally, i'd rather go for wood that has a more "open" and "airy" sound with balanced tonal response and even string dynamics, and if i want a darker sound, i can roll off some of the highs. It's easier to take away sound than it is to try and dial it back in if it's missing.

That looks killer in its finished form, Jeremy! Are those just little lens flares, or did you put a reverse Nightswan "wave" of inlay dots on the fretboard?

Custom Shop Parts has a similar bridge, only with adjustable intonation. I do like the simplicity and elegance of that PRS bridge, though.

Expensive wood doesn't necessarily make it sound better. It usually just means it's rare, endangered, or has to be shipped halfway around the world. If you want to go exotic, go for it, by all means, but don't buy expensive wood thinking it's necessarily going to give you better tone. There are exotic variations of a lot of "common" woods. Ash is available in figured varieties, and there's a stunning Japanese variety called tamo that's quite incredible to look at... dunno how it sounds, but if it's in the same family, it's probably close to some kind of Ash sound. Rosewood is difficult to work because it's so dense. It's a very, very hard wood, and also very heavy. Another wood i think would be good for downtuning is black walnut. You see it used on a lot of exotic basses, but it isn't as popular on guitars for some reason. There are also some beautiful burled or flamed walnut varieties. (such as Claro walnut, which is native to southern California)

http://www.fender.com/products/show.php?partno=0259400 http://www.americanmusical.com/item--i-JAC-2900102-503.html http://www.chandlerguitars.com/baritone.html

The problem is if you go for a "warm" sounding wood, you run the risk of losing articulation and clarity on the low notes. Alder and Swamp Ash are definitely bright-sounding woods for standard tuning, but when you drop down to B or A, that brightness turns into a well-articulated growl.