So, after 3 1/2 months of work, the guitar project has drawn to a close. I finished the guitar on 1/13, then played it live three days later on a Sunday morning. The more I play it, the better it feels. It really does play well, which considering that this is my first attempt at building a guitar, is amazing.
As far as the sound, well that gets pretty subjective. I love the sound of the neck pickup position. It is thick and dirty, but still has lots of clarity (don't you love how humans pick words to try and describe sounds?) The neck pickup isn't as "woofy" as a lot of neck humbuckers tend to be (my friend Mike calls the Les Paul neck position "cow tone.") I think one of the reasons the neck pickup on this guitar sounds like it does, is that I moved it a little closer to the bridge than other guitars, specifically for this reason.
The bridge pickup position sounds good, although in my opinion I think it could use a little more low end. I purposefully moved the pickup a hair farther from the bridge than the traditional location, which should warm up the sound. I'm guessing that the subdued low end is probably due to the characteristics of the Seymour Duncan JB. It's not anything that a small tweak on the bass knob of the amp wouldn't fix.
The in-between positions give some good variations, especially when paired with the series/parallel switching. A great sounding clean tone can be achieved by running both pickups with each of their coils set to parallel.
Here are the final pics. After taking them, I decided I didn't care for the lighting, so they may get replaced with some better quality shots in the future.
You can click on them to see them full-size. Note that if you're using IE 6 or higher, the "full size" image may not initially be displayed full size until you move your mouse over the image, then click on the button that appears in the lower right hand corner of the image that looks like this:
First, some shots of the entire front and back:
Here are some close up shots of the front and back.
Some close up shots of the front and back of the headstock.
And finally, a close shot of the neck join.
I took some pictures of the guitar in action. Click here to see Remedy Drive putting it through it's paces.
What happened to get us to this point? Return to the hardware installation stage.
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This page last updated on 06/28/2018