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Creativity / Homemade Guitar
« on: November 22, 2014, 02:49:09 AM »
I'm currently in the planning stages of redesigning a guitar. I have a $40 Chinese mini-bodied normal sized neck strat that I got from a catalog around 10 years ago. It plays really well considering it was $40, the frets are nice, and the neck isn't warped even though there is no truss rod. I'm modifying it because it has a bigass speaker on the front that sounds like stuff. I want to take it out and put a chunk of pine or something in the hole, move the volume knob a little bit, and turn the on/off switch into a killswitch and put it on the top like a les paul's pickup selector. It only has one pickup in the neck position, but I'm leaving it there because I like the tone of a neck pickup (bridge position is too trebley unless you use distortion all the time), and because I don't want to route out another slot for it to fit into.
I'm not doing a job like the idiots on youtube do when they mod a guitar (painting it with the hardware still in, not taping things off, etc), I'm going to spend time on this to make it look nice. Paint a cool design on it, put a few coats of lacquer on it, wetsand it to remove the orange peel texture, then buff it by hand to make it shine like a mirror.
It currently has 2 jacks, one output and one input to play stuff through the built in speaker I suppose, one volume knob, a switch and a pickup, that as mentioned earlier are going to be moved and stay in the same place respectively, and a 3 inch speaker that is going to be taken out and the hole filled with a chunk of pine for that Swedish metal tone. Nothing sounds as good as a piece of pine that grew in the harsh cold climate of frozen hills, it gives a nice tight bite to the low end and smooths out the high end to the amount that I like. The 9volt battery case in the back will be filled either with another piece of pine, or a piece of brass to give it some wicked sustain.
In the future I want to try making a guitar from scratch because I think it would be cool.
Has anyone else made or modified their own instrument before?
I'm not doing a job like the idiots on youtube do when they mod a guitar (painting it with the hardware still in, not taping things off, etc), I'm going to spend time on this to make it look nice. Paint a cool design on it, put a few coats of lacquer on it, wetsand it to remove the orange peel texture, then buff it by hand to make it shine like a mirror.
It currently has 2 jacks, one output and one input to play stuff through the built in speaker I suppose, one volume knob, a switch and a pickup, that as mentioned earlier are going to be moved and stay in the same place respectively, and a 3 inch speaker that is going to be taken out and the hole filled with a chunk of pine for that Swedish metal tone. Nothing sounds as good as a piece of pine that grew in the harsh cold climate of frozen hills, it gives a nice tight bite to the low end and smooths out the high end to the amount that I like. The 9volt battery case in the back will be filled either with another piece of pine, or a piece of brass to give it some wicked sustain.
In the future I want to try making a guitar from scratch because I think it would be cool.
Has anyone else made or modified their own instrument before?
