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The Acousti-Phonic circuit board produces an audio signal. The Hexpander circuit board can not. It requires an outboard sound module capable of responding to MIDI Mode 4. The sound module requires its own stereo amplification. You will soon require the services of a roadie to shift it all.
I like walnut for caps - where you can see/appreciate the grain pattern and colouring of a nice piece.
A key part of any project is deciding which risks you are going to take. In guitar building terms this means what am I going to do that I haven't tried before. As @WezV knows, I have an ambition to build a guitar from local wood. By local I mean within a mile or so of my house. I haven't found any local wood which is suitable for a neck, and once I do it will have to season. So that challenge is probably a couple of years away. The guitar will have a cedar body, but I'll buy wood for the neck.
For some time the next objective on my personal journey has been to make my own necks. To date I've used recycled necks that I bought through the forum, plus that cheap Chinese disaster that had the frets in the wrong positions. Now is the time to make my own. I haven't decided whether to stick to 25.5", which I'm used to, or go for something shorter. I find it difficult to play Message In A Bottle on 25.5", but easy on PRS or shorter. Opinions welcome.
MIDI and piezos are low risk. I've done it before, albeit not with a Tele bridge.
Pickup wise my starting point is an Oil City Californian and Wapping Wharf. I do like the twin sounds that a tapped single coil bridge pickup gives. However I'm tempted to put a P90 neck in this one, believing that I can use piezos, rather than neck pickup, to drive an acoustic simulation.
Controls will most likely be three volumes (magnetics, Piezo, and MIDI), magnetic tone, and some form of magnetic switching. There will be no MIDI switching on the guitar. I need to see the GR-33 display when I change patches so I might as well switch from the floor.
Shouldn't be, I've done necks. But under the watchful eye of Mr Bailey. things never seem to go wrong, whereas when I'm in my own workshop, they have a tendency to go plenty wrong!
Consequently, I've wimped out and have a stock of premade necks that will probably see me though all the guitar builds that I ever do ...
What woods are you using for the neck, and how are you going to fit the frets?
The decision is whether to buy a ready slotted board or a blank. I favour the blank, which I’ll slot by hand. To slot and radius I’ll need to make cutting and radiusing jigs.
Fret jobs I've done before. Previously I’ve tapped the frets in with a plastic hammer. Now that I’ve got a pillar drill I’ll try using that to press the frets in, for which I’ll need to make a caul.
So lots of fun Making jigs and tools.
If you'll only be doing one or two, then you can mark it out by hand and cut freehand. Both with lots of care!
I've got a router cutter somewhere that puts a radius on a fretboard blank. Bought it back in the days of UKGB from a guy in Vietnam IIRC!
Last year (ie 2016) ago I re-radiused a couple of necks, during which I made a couple of radiused router sledges. They’ll do for rough radiusing, and I’ll make a concave sanding block to finish off. For this one I’ll use 12” radius. For future necks I want to try different radii, and also compound. The subtext is that, after 47 years of playing, I’m still exploring the impact of dimensional and material differences.
- Make a 25.5" scale neck from maple and rosewood blanks. The radius will be 12", and the thinnish profile will match the Yamaha Pacifica neck which I used in an earlier build.
- Make and single bind a Telecaster body. The body will have a deep forearm champfer, which makes it an interesting challenge cutting the ledge for the binding.
- Mount all of the controls from behind, which means the body top will be quite thin at that point, and fit all the MIDI gubbins into the guitar.
Along the way several jigs and templates will get made:The bits are ordered, or left over from previous builds. All I need to do now is find the time.
Somewhere I read that Fender's 60's neck profile is an ellipse. That seemed the sort of shape which Yamaha would use too. If not then it would be a good starting point. Using drawing software I printed ellipses which match the width and depth of my favourite necks, stuck them on plywood, and cut them out with a scrollsaw. Plywood seemed a good idea. Metal would be more precise, and more durable, but likely to scratch the finish.
They match the neck perfectly.
I don't think that we've cracked embedding from Google sources since they changed the rules on Picasa ...
The concave sanding block was an interesting problem. I wasn’t prepared to mount my router on a swinging jig. Instead I marked out the 12” radius curve on the ends of a suitable block using an off cut from the radius jig as template. The concave section was then hollowed out by:
- removing lines of wood with the router, using a rounded bit,
- smoothing the ridges which this created using a bobbin sander,
- sanding to section using abrasive paper stuck to the 12”radius off cut.
Sanding by hand meant that I had to be careful not to create a dip in the middle of the block.
Yesterday I was thinking about the shape of the guitar. Two things that I’m not happy with on recent builds are the 25.5” scale (because of the stretch on MIAB mentioned above), and the strap balance. On my lastest build I pushed the strap button out by 1/4”, but it’s not enough. Last night I drew the modified Telecaster outline on a Stratocaster blueprint, and then pencilled in an upper horn which is somewhere between the two. This will put the strap button roughly where it is on a PRS.
Still thinking about the scale length.
Mine is finished, but I already had most of the parts as I was planning the build, then the challenge was announced.....and assembling a partscaster is much quicker than building from scratch
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With everything else that’s going on over the next few months the planned build isn’t going to be completed by the end of March. So I’m considering installing the midi gear in an existing guitar. Decisions, decisions.
As I think we've discussed before, I have the same combination of Ghost stuff running through a Roland GR30. To be honest, other than the cable being different, it's just like using a modest sized multi-pedal. The whole set up works a treat
Also, very interested in your thought process on jigs - been pretty much on the same evolution myself.
Watching with great interest. Don't forget to post the photos (including the home-made jigs! )