A few years ago I made a custom electric guitar. It was pretty rough at first, the nut was not great so it fretted poorly towards the nut - always went sharp. I later filed it down, and went too far, so then it buzzed in the open positions. But as a practice guitar it is quiet unplugged and has a soft touch like a classical guitar. My Esteve classical hurts my head - I have been playing guitars at full fingerstyle tilt for so long that when my ears send the signal to my brain it just says "NO MORE! JUST STOP". So I could play with earplugs to drop the amplitude, or I could just play quieter (that's actually a good idea), instead I built an electric that feels like a classical and I play it unplugged.
I've been playing it so long I'm used to it. But every time I think about recording something with it, I can't bear the tone. It's just so, umm, electric. I don't understand and don't have an ear for electric guitar tone.
Recently I'd been playing "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" as a fingerstyle piece, on the electric. I decided to have a try recording again this time through an interface and with Reaper DAW with some VSTs. The tone was better! I fiddled around with pickup and tone selection, ending up with neck only and tone about 3. So super mellow. But I then cranked the mid-high in EQ. I guess that means I could have backed off the EQ and rolled off the tone...but I'm thinking that I sculpted the tone in software in a much more complicated way than the simple RC analogue lowpass filter that is a tone knob.
So I didn't despise the sound, and it was Capo 3 so the nut buzz was masked - yes, I did tune at Capo 3 to account for any Capo-sharpened-my-bass-notes issues.
This got me thinking!
- I like the feel of the guitar almost as much as I like the feel of nylon.
- I can buy parts and do some alterations to the guitar so keep going down the path I discovered.
- I'm sure I can get a pedal to do the EQ and the reverb so I don't have to play through a laptop.
I spitballed ideas with ChatGPT 4.5 and since I'm a total engineer and I take everything back to first principles, the plan I came up with seemed to make engineering sense. ChatGPT is a little too excited and encouraging and desperate to please, so you have to kinda work past that, so I tried to keep to the fundamentals of what the plan would result in. Ever since my great ChatGPT debacle I am quite wary of the LLMs. But they are great to hash out ideas with, because they know the entire internet. This is what I came up with:
- Get some new pickups. I was amazed with Wilkinson pickups when I did the bass build for the daughter (still working on the build video), they rivalled the Seymour Duncan for 1/6th the price. Shhh, don't tell Dunc I said that. I did make a long tedious video about it here.
- ChatGPT talked me out of a single neck humbucker. Because I play right up on the fretboard, the tone is already super mellow, and a humbucker will darken/smooth the tone rather than brighten it.
- I don't want a bridge pickup. They just sound nasty for fingerstyle. But a middle pickup could be a nice touch, especially if it is reverse wound reverse polarity, because it will reduce hum, and add a bit of extra sparkle because it's going to pick up more harmonics than the primarily fundamentals of the neck pickup.
- If I'm only going to have a neck and a middle, ChatGPT suggests a pot to blend the pickups. I had never really thought about this, but there is a thing called an MN pot which has two gangs, one reverse to the other, and it is logarithmic, which is better suited to volume, then there will be a middle point where both have the same resistance applied. So basically, a pot that means you can be just neck, just middle, or an infinite blend in between :-)
- I don't think I've ever used a tremolo in my life. I will convert this to a hardtail. Which means I will fill the back cavity and the front, and I reckon I will even fill the bridge pickup area to give this thing even more stability.
- Wood mounted pickups. I'm not a fan of this whole pickup-mounted-to-the-pickguard, to me it seems lazy. I did wood mounted pickup on the bass build - it's not hard, just fiddlier.
- Position of middle pickup - I think I will push that back a touch. The pickups are placed in spots they capture the best flavour of harmonics...moving closer to the bridge should pick up brighter harmonics. If I'm blending, I want to be able to blend in a decent amount of brightness. Perhaps I will find I only ever want the neck pickup...I don't know! But I know I will never want a bridge pickup :-)
- There will be a blending pot, so I will also want a master volume pot. MN500k for the blend, and A500k for the master volume. 500k is brighter than 250k. I don't want a tone knob. I will look after EQ in the effects pedal. And I don't need a pickup selector switch!
- Shield the whole cavity. I already have a roll of copper from the last build (note to self - make sure to ground the shield...)
- A pickguard blank. I think I will go olde school white pearl, with white pickups and knobs. I think that looks traditional with the Candy Apple Red colour!
- I might need to repaint. I'm not too frightened of paint guitar bodies anymore, I have done one. I know what mistakes I made :-) I would like to avoid repainting, but I will definitely need to do something to the back, maybe just a black undercoat. I think all the mods I'm making on the front will be hidden by the pickguard.
- A fret grind and re-crown. The frets are SOOO high! Every time I fret a string, especially the low string, I bend it. And it has 2.6mm wide frets - I'm used to 1.9mm frets on classicals which are more immune to bending just through fretting. I want this thing to intonate nicely - I want to be able to put a Capo on and not have to re-tune for the Capo!
So all these things have a goal of making this guitar an acoustic fingerpicker's delight - with a warm but still sparkly tone, as good as I can get it. The body is a cheap Peavey, it's solid wood at least, maybe Basswood? I will probably block it up with Tassie oak which Bunnings have plenty of, and a bit of filler in the trickier spaces!
Experimental as anything! Watch this space! Here's some pictures!
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