I just completed my third DIY guitar experiment using Warmoth parts. This one is a wacky Fender/Gretsch hybrid with a semi-acoustic Fender Starcaster body, a reverse, angled Strat neck, and various Gretsch-like elements, including TV Jones Filter’Tron pickups, a Bigsby/Vibramate vibrato, and a vulgar silver-sparkle finish — a tribute to the Gretsch Silver Jet, […]
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Look what UPS left on my porch: the neck and body for my latest ill-advised “parts” guitar project. I’ll be slapping it together in the coming days, but I couldn’t resist showing off the pretty parts. The body is Warmoth’s Mooncaster model, which is based on Fender’s semi-hollowbody Starcaster, a quirky cult guitar if […] Premier Guitar just posted my new article on three favorite electric guitar wiring mods. The concepts won’t be new to anyone who hangs out here — I’ve pretty much flogged them all to death! But the new article includes the step-by-step walkthroughs that I never got around to creating for this site, and PG art […]
Just in time for the single-coil holiday season: my comparison review of 16 humbucker-sized P-90 pickups is live at Premier Guitar. This heartwarming holiday fun-fest has it all: Mouth-watering adjectives. Freshly baked audio clips. Irate manufacturers. Don’t miss it! This was a fun, if challenging project. Comparison pickup reviews are such cans […] Small puncture, big pain. I was trying to decide which self-indulgent experiment fascinating project to demo this week when my hand slipped, driving a sharp soldering iron tip into the meat of my fretting-hand index finger. It didn’t hurt all that much—until I tried to play. Ye-OWCH! (No, of course I wasn’t using […] You can TELL it’s Photoshopped! There’s no TBX! Thanks again to everyone who chimed in on the “What your favorite mod?” discussion. I got tons of great ideas from your comments. Like this one, which I’ve been meaning to explore for ages: the Fender TBX tone control circuit, which appears in several Custom […] 
As threatened, the Fuzz Detective video: WHAT: Twelve germanium fuzz circuits compared and analyzed. These represent the sounds of almost every fuzz pedal introduced between 1962 and 1968. WHY: A tool to help players identify the circuits most relevant to their musical needs. This isn’t about particular brands of pedals, but the circuits they […] Codex Chantilly: the electrifying page-turner that blew the lid off the perverse musical excesses of the late Middle Ages! NOTE: I am a known perpetrator of musical hoaxes, but this isn’t one of them. This bizarre composition really is over 600 years old. As Marsellus Wallace once quipped: “I’m’a get medieval on your […] 
Which kick more ass? Class A or Class AB? The recent experience making a DIY Class A Champ reignites for me the eternal debate between the merits of Class A and Class A/B amps. (I link once more to Dave Hunter’s excellent short article on the topic, since he explains the distinction so […] |
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