As some of you over on Facebook may know I've been assembling an electric guitar from parts for the last few months. The reason I was quiet in the last few weeks is because the body finally arrived and I was putting it all together rather than spending my nights tapping away at the keyboard. Since then, some people have asked what guided my decisions in picking the parts so I've decided to write it all down. This is sort of an entry to explain my decisions. Others will have different ideas so don't look at this as any kind of best practice - it's more like an extension of where my thoughts were headed.
This guitar project has its origins in my frustration at not being able to find a 'shred axe' - a guitar for playing heavy metal tones that covered all the things I wanted. There are many out there that look like shred axes wielded by the mighty shredders we know, but they don't cover important points. They might have bodies made of bad woods, crappy pickups, horrible replicas of Floyd Rose bridges and so on. Thus the exercise became sourcing all the right components to put into the one guitar to make it kick and scream in a particular way.
Overview
The concept of this guitar has a name and it is, 'super-strat'. This term came about in the 1990s when the original single coil strat design was updated with humbuckers in the bridge. All the shred axes we see today are downstream developments of this idea of marrying a Fender Strat to a Gibson pickup, looking for the best of both worlds.
Historically speaking, the model of this thinking actually goes back to the famous 'Frankenstrat' as constructed from parts by none other than Eddie Van Halen himself. Unashamedly, I have to admit that what I wanted to do was build something that had a Floyd Rose, a Maple neck and a humbucker that had the right out put, which is to say, just another 'super-strat'. but you'd be amazed at how hard it is find one with everything done right these days.
Since the death of Shred as a market force, the guitar manufacturers have beaten a retreat from the once saturated 'super-strat' market to the point where it is actually a lot harder to get the real thing in one piece. Instead there are various low end models for kids that look the part while cutting costs and therefore charm and performance. Presumably the adults get $8,999 Re-Issue Marc Bolan Commemorative 'Pre-Aged' Gibson Les Pauls. Like, yeah.
As for 'super-strats' and shred axes, you can always get a mediocre substitute, but it's worth doing this for real.
The Neck
I got the wooden parts from Warmoth. The neck was bought off their showcase while I specially ordered the body. I picked Warmoth over buying the 'Frankenstrat kit' you can now buy on line because I wasn't really interested in slavishly duplicating the original Frankenstrat. The other reason is that I really wasn't sure of the wood that comes with the kit while Warmoth were all about the best woods they can get their hands on, but more of that in a moment.
The neck is maple, with a maple fretboard because when it gets down to it, that's what I like. I know ebony is nice, Bubinga is interesting as are exotic things like Pau Ferro, wenge, Bloodwood and Purpleheart, but I actually don't know what some of those exotic things sound like, and whether I would like them at all. Maple on Maple? I know I like that.
I was fortunate in that the 'KWS' banana headstock also had the 'Nightswan' inlays which are quirky to look at. Other than that, it was just the clean satin nitro finish and a shelf for the Floyd Rose lock down nut that sold me. Warmoth is particularly cool because if you're adventurous, you could come up with all kinds of wood combinations to satisfy the most inquisitive impulses.
The frets are '6130' so it is like a vintage Gibson. This is possibly the most perverse combination in as much as the neck dimensions are like a Fender stratocaster, but the frets are Gibson-like. This also comes from an old interview in Guitar Player magazine I read years ago where Eddie Van Halen described his early attempts at building a Frankenstrat and how he ruined a strat neck striving to put in Gibson frets. It's nice that you can just order it that way these days.
The Body
Being cautious (or conservative, depending on point of view, I guess) I settled on a combination of a carved Flame Maple top on Mahogany. Again, Warmoth offers a lot of options so you could go crazy looking through their site, but when it comes right down to it, the idea was to marry a Strat to a Gibson. If the maple on maple 25-1/2 scale neck is all Fender, then the body materials had to be something a bit like a Gibson Les Paul Custom.
Just as a side note, the original Frankenstrat was Swamp Ash and many of the kits on offer seem to be made of Alder, so I figured the biggest expenditure should go on getting a combination of woods that justified the whole exercise. To that end, the soloist body also has a carved top, which is in some ways excessive over-design; But you only do this once in a blue moon, why not?
As with the neck, I can think of all sorts of crazy combos from the options available, and it's tempting to just keep building these guitars with different combinations of woods. You can spend hours playing with the Warmoth site. It's like IKEA for guitar players.
Pickups
The most fun you'll have customising an electric guitar is picking pickups. The plan of attack I had for this one was to go for a set that had about 8.5k ohm resistance and a resonant frequency well below 10kHz. You want a lower resistance because you want the pickups to be responsive. The higher resistance comes from stronger magnets that keep the electrons in place. The lower the resistance, the less power the magnets are exerting on the electrons, the more responsive they become. The bad news is that they have less output, so it's a case of finding the right compromise.
There is a sound you can get from high output pickups but dynamic is not a feature of that sound. Conversely, you can get more dynamic with weaker magnets but you might not get a lot of output to do much with. Both the Humbuckers I picked feature Alnico II magnets as opposed to Alnico V, and the designs are fairly close to the Gibson PAFs.
A more modern metal sound would be to go for the higher output pickups with Alnico V magnets. In my case I was looking for a piece of 1978 (hey, the Yankees won the World Series that year). The bridge pickup is a Seymour Duncan Custom '78. The neck Humbucker is an Alnico II Pro, also from Seymour Duncan and the middle pickup is the Seymour Duncan Cool Rails.
There are some other amazing pickup options out there so this is by no means any kind of ideal. The most important thing I was looking for was that they were roughly the same in resistance so that when I had the switch in between the pickups, I'd get a balanced combined tone. Looking back on the soldering I did, I sort of regret not installing a 5-way super switch to do the fancy coil splitting, but then I didn't know about it until I sat down to wire it up. I naively assumed a normal 5 way switch would get me there.
The Tremolo System
It goes without saying that an axe like this needs a Floyd Rose. What's probably not as well known is that you can easily change the block on the Floyd Rose. Yes, it adds sustain. My advice is "Nike" as in, "Just Do It". I upgraded mine with a big L-shaped block from Floyd Upgrades. The hope was to have as much Bell Brass sustain to last into the next millennium... except... the problem with the L is that it blocks the forward movement with the L protrusion so I can't pull back. I'll have to get the non-'L' 42mm block now.
Replacing the block is not too hard. Setting up the Floyd Rose system is a little harder. It helps to get one of these trem stoppers. Once it's in place, then it's easier to set the action, the neck relief and then the intonation. Afterwards you can adjust the spring tension. It's a hassle winding the strings on and off, but it's about 2 hours work.
Potentiometers, Capacitors, Switches, Knobs
The most tedious part is ordering these necessary components. You need 3 pots for a Strat configuration; 3 knobs; a 5-way switch; and ouput plug; wire and copper shielding. Copper shielding is something I recommend, now that I've built mine. I encased the entire rear rout with the shielding and it is quiet as a mouse. No RF in the guitar.
The potentiometers in this guitar are 500ohms, as per Gibson specs as opposed to 250 ohms as per Fender specs. The simple reason is that I've loaded up with 3 Humbuckers instead of 3 single coils. It's worth remembering that Humbuckers need 500 ohm pots.
The other note is that on recommendation of the guys at Sydney Guitar Setups, I used this capacitor here. I have no real explanation for this one except that the 0.047 uf I ordered from Warmoth looked strangely 'weak'. I'm no expert but I figured the guys at Sydney Guitar Setup might know something I didn't so I asked them their recommendation and it was the Sprague Big Orange Drop Capacitor.
I don't have a capacitor for my bridge pickup tone control. It's weird, I know, but I wanted to duplicate the 'direct' thing by not putting any capacitor with the Custom 78, as per the original Frankenstrat that had no tone controls. Yes, it's a little hardcore but I can really live without any tone control on the bridge pickup on this guitar. I can't remember ever winding back the tone on the bridge pickups on my Stratocaster or Deusenberg.
The Tools You Need
It's worth listing the tools I needed:
- drill
- soldering iron & solder
- wire-stripper
- pliers
- screwdrivers
- guitar tuner
- sandpaper in '220' and '100' - and sandpaper block
- scissors
It's not much if you already own it. I didn't own a drill or a set of drill bits so I had to shell out for that. You don't need a super-powerful drill. In fact it helps to go slow when you screw in to precious bits of wood.
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