NGD (Crimson Build Content)

crunchman

I went to Crimson a month ago on one of their guitar building courses.  Didn't quite get the guitar finished while I was there.  Been a bit busy, but finally finished it today:

It's my first build, and it's not flawless, but it plays and sounds pretty good.

Bridge pickup is a Fender Custom Shop courtesy of @BintyTwanger77 in the classifieds.

Neck pickup is a Blitz Spirit from @OilCityPickups ;;

Body is chambered.  Went for the 3 a side headstock to avoid the need for string trees.  It's got a flash coat finish on it.

The control layout is not what I originally planned (was going to have a blade switch under the volume) but we had to salvage an accident, and the 3 way toggle neatly covered the hole I made in the top!

The course was hard work, but it's very rewarding to have something like this at the end of it.

Have to give a shout to to Christopher at Crimson who is a great tutor and has an incredible amount of patience.

Not sure if I have a phasing issue with the pickups as I've got a volume drop in the middle position.  That will be relatively easy to fix though.

SlopeSoarer

Excellent! Being a serial tinker I'd love to do the Crimson course... one day I probably will.

axisus

Looks cool! Tele is my fave shape, I love to see variants.

Kittyfrisk

I'm liking the look of that, I'm jealous of your skills.
And I really love the  shaped control cover plate. 
Proper FB DNA  

BintyTwanger77

That looks fantastic, excellent work!

Henrytwang

Well thought out design. Nice looking guitar a bit of a change from the run of the mill stuff. I’d like to try one with TV Jones Filtertrons, bet that they’d sound great in that chambered body.

crunchman

Henrytwang said:

Well thought out design. Nice looking guitar a bit of a change from the run of the mill stuff. I’d like to try one with TV Jones Filtertrons, bet that they’d sound great in that chambered body.

I did think about that for the neck pickup but I went for the conventional humbucker.  I really like the sounds I'm getting from it.  It's quite low output so it balances well with the bridge pickup.  I've put a PRS style partial coil spilt on it, so it gives me the single coil(ish) sounds that you would get from a normal Tele neck, but you get the option of the full humbucker as well.

I've just flipped the wires on the neck pickup, so the phase issue in the middle postion is fixed.

I'm glad I went for the chambering.  It's still got the Tele twang but it's slightly tamed.

Other thing I forgot to mention above is the Gotoh locking tuners.  I wanted locking tuners for the ease of changing strings having owned a few PRS guitars over the years.  They are really good tuners and feel really good to use.  I'm debating fitting them on some of my other guitars.