darren wilson

Here we go again!

Neat. Just like an old Carvin Ultra V. If it were mine, i'd put the jack in a less obvious place, either recessed into the edge or the back.

The guitar is gorgeous, but the gigantic "STEW MADE" logo between the pickups might be a bit of a turnoff. It certainly would be for me.

Jim Soloway raves about Jason Lollar Imperial humbuckers.

I think the Duncan '59 sounds really great in series and parallel modes. I prefer parallel to split, because it still gives you a bit of that single-coil 'glassy' sound, but it remains humbucking.

I think he used a piezo bridge so you wouldn't have a magnetic pickup routed into Homer's eyeball or forehead.

Looks great, Brian! I'd like to see pics of your modified body, too.

Wiring it to the EMGs is pretty clever. Nice work!

You should hook up the fiber to a colour-changing LED array so the user can select their own colour!

It would look better, in my opinion, if you direct-mounted the neck pickup instead of adding that huge mounting plate. Sweet top, though!

http://www.dvforge.com/plug.shtml

http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/garageband_cables/

They're advertised as Mac products, but i don't see why they wouldn't work in any environment.

With a slight re-contouring of the headstock, you could have something that still looks good and fits with the body.

Also, for what it's worth, i think it makes the headstock look cleaner if the tuners are angled so the buttons are in a flowing line that's parallel to the edge of the headstock, rather than "stairstep" style.

Dark text on a white background is a good rule for print-based design where you're dealing with light reflecting off a surface.

But when designing for media that use light emitting from the source, the rules are different, and a lot of people don't recognize this. How many TV shows or films do you see that have their credits rolling up the screen in black text on a white background? Web design is no different, really. A bright white background tends to "glow" which can infringe on the letterforms, making legibility and readability suffer. The contrast is too great.

I would suggest that people who think black-on-white is more readable in on-screen are just psychologically more comfortable with it because they are more comfortable reading ink on paper. But from an optical standpoint, it isn't always the best choice for a transmitted-light application.

Ideally, you should have worked out your string and tuner placement while you were designing your headstock, so you could get a headstock shape that works with the tuner placement required for straight string pull from the nut to the tuners. Now you have to make the function follow the form.

The Steinberger tuners are definitely a good option, since they don't have to follow the edge of the headstock the way regular tuners do. You can now get them in chrome and gold as well as black, so they won't look too out of place with your (satin) chrome bridge.

The more i see of the GT-8, the more i'm impressed. I'm a GT-6 player, and i love that box, but it does have its shortcomings. The GT-8 addresses a lot of the 6's weaknesses, and adds some really cool new features. I wish i could afford to upgrade!

Only you can truly make that call. Personally, i think the GT-8 looks like a HOT piece of gear. If you're already getting rid of your 7-string, i would ditch the ME-50 and get the GT-8 and the SZ.

The SZ and the RG are very different guitars... why are you debating one or the other?

I don't speak for Brian or the moderators, but i don't think selling unauthorized rub-downs of boutique guitar makers' logos is something we want Project Guitar to be known for.

Both you and Project Guitar could get into serious legal trouble for selling decals or rub-downs of logos you are not legally entitled to distribute.

Hmm... where have i seen body scallops like those before... ?

Wow... coming together very nicely! It's a shame those square inlays on the neck really spoil the flowing lines of the rest of the guitar (to my eye, anyway).

How far away would you estimate completion is? I'm DYING to see the finished guitar!

Google works wonders, as does the search function here.

Lee Valley Tools has a great selection of spokeshaves.

I kind of have ethical issues with putting "Ibanez USA Custom" on a guitar you built yourself, but that's your perogative.

And the Ibanez Custom Shop has never been open to the public. They still have a custom shop in Los Angeles for making artists' instruments, but the only way to get one of those is to either become an Ibanez endorsed artist or buy one second hand.

I did some custom lettering for a client based on the Ibanez "j-custom" script, and i just ended up buying the Laser font from fontshop.com. It was only $32 so it didn't break the bank.

I started out typesetting it on fontshop.com using their sample generator, then tweaking the images in Photoshop and then tracing paths for export to Illustrator, but after wasting far too much time on it, i decided that it made no sense for me to spend that much time (time is money!) trying to work around buying the font, so i just bought it and the job was done far more quickly.

What did the switching do in that diagram? It looked like it would switch in a tone capacitor in certain positions. You might need a completely different wiring schematic to do what you want.

If the ebony's stripes are light enough, you could try staining it red, but i don't know how well ebony would hold a stain.

The best virus protection i've ever used is here.