Tag: fender

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DIY guitar

Kitschcaster: An Experimental Fender/Gretsch Hybrid

Kitschcaster front

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, and the basis for this new guitar’s name: Kitschcaster.

Mind you, it sounds nothing like a Starcaster. I ordered the body (which Warmoth calls the Mooncaster) in warm-toned korina, and the neck is mahogany. (Fender used bright-sounding maple for the original necks and bodies.) True to form, the Gretsch-style humbuckers provide a percussive, “plinky” attack quite distinct from PAF-style pickups. The Bigsby assembly also nudges things further from Fenderland. But I always dug the Starcaster’s offset semi-acoustic body, and I thought it would make a nice platform for my latest platypus.

As before, I’m 100% delighted with Warmoth’s work. The finish is flawless (correction: was flawless till I dinged it), and everything fit together beautifully. The only hurdle came when installing the wiring. I failed to take into account the body’s thinness, and I didn’t have enough room to accommodate all the big push/pull and dual-concentric pots I’d planned to deploy. The comic highlight of the build came when I somehow managed to force a standard-sized pickup selector switch into the narrow lower horn. I disconnected a wire while doing so, and then found myself completely incapable of removing the switch. I took it to repair genius Gary Brawer, whose first comment was, “How did you get this in here? And more important, why?” But he managed to free the trapped part, and then he installed a cunning little access cover. Go, Gary!

Kitschcaster back
Yes, the neck is silver too. Gary Brawer added the pickup selector access cover.

I’m especially besotted with Warmoth’s “Clapton” profile necks, which I’ve used in all three of my builds. They have a pronounced V shape that feels so comfy in my left hand, and provides relief for my left thumb joint, where, sadly, I’m feeling my first tentative twinges of arthritis. It’s a trip having three radically different guitars with identical neck profiles. I dig the sleek, comfy body as well, and I love its ability to generate musically coherent feedback.

Anyway, consider this a work in progress. I’m still fussing with the tone circuit. (If I can find suitably sized rotary switches, I want to try a sort of “double Vartitone,” with separate treble-cut and bass-cut dials. If it works out as as planned, I’ll do another post on it.) I’ll also probably jigger with the built-in distortion, taking off some of the treble. Like my Bigsby equipped Les Paul, the Kitschcaster can have overly aggressive highs. Something about the combination of the Bigsby hardware and flatwound strings makes certain notes come screaming out of the amp. Both guitars benefit from a carefully controlled touch.

But even now, I’m really stoked about this fun, cheesy-cool instrument.

Categories
DIY guitar

Next Victim! A New DIY Guitar

Starjet

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 ever there was one. But for the neck, I swiped an idea from Warmoth’s Josh Spataro, and substituted a reverse angled Strat neck. The tacky silver finish and extravagant binding are solely the result of my bad taste. (Josh compared it to a pinky ring, which is pretty accurate.) The body is korina, the neck mahogany.

If my last Warmoth parts guitar was a sort of Fender/Gibson hybrid, this one is more Fender/Gretsch. I’m planning to install a set of TV Jones pickups, and this will be my chance to try out a very different type of tone control scheme, one I’ve been thinking about for a while. If it turns out well, I’ll write about it. If not, I’ll probably delete the last few sentences and deny they ever existed.

This is my third Warmoth parts project since starting this blog. As before, I’m 100% delighted with the materials and build quality. Since I requested expensive options (like the vulgarly bound and finished neck) and I’m using fancy parts, the guitar probably won’t be vastly cheaper than if I’d bought it already made. But it should be unique and fun. Stay tuned — and I’ll hope the guitar does too.

Categories
DIY guitar

My Top Three Wiring Mods

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 director Meghan Molumby created beautifully clear tech diagrams like this one:

 

Screen Shot 2014-07-23 at 9.54.35 AM

The descriptions and instructions in the new story are clearer and more detailed than my original posts here, plus I’ve refined some details, so I suggest working from the new PG versions.

My three choices:

Yup, the ol’ PTB tone control, the coolest mod I know, at least for players who love distortion. The new version of the project uses the 500K pots you probably already have in your guitar rather than the more eccentric G&L values.

I also revisited the Strat version of the “Nashville-style” Tele wiring popularized by Brent Mason and other Music City cats. It performs brilliantly in a Strat, and IMHO its benefits (vastly more blended-pickup options plus a musical and intuitive control layout) for outweigh the costs (loss of the middle-pickup-alone setting, cost of a 3-way switch). Not to launch a protracted Strat-vs.-Tele battle, but I love the whole notion of “Tele-fying” a Strat via wiring, control layout, and pickup choice.

In the article’s comments thread, several savvy readers also mention Strat wiring systems that provide the sounds of the Nashville mod without sacrificing any others. They’re right — but the more I mess with this stuff, the more I value simplified operation. I’m less concerned with having all options than with having the coolest ones, ergonomically organized. Still, there are many ways you can go here.

Finally, I’m once more beating the dead Varitone horse exploring variations on Gibson’s Varitone concept, updated for modern players. I added a new twist in the PG story: deploying these ideas via toggle switches, rather than a big, clunky rotary switch.

It was fun when PG editor Shawn Hammond asked me to choose my favorite mods. It was easy to decide though — these are the three I keep coming back to, and all three deliver dramatic results, unlike many better-known mods.

So which electric guitar mods would be on your short list? Wiring, hardware, whatever. How do you make your guitars cooler?

Categories
Pickups Uncategorized

Happy Humbucker-Sized P-90s!

Happy-P-90s

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 of worms! Not only are they sadistically labor-intensive, but the differences between one pickup and the next are easily overshadowed by other variables in the tone chain.

After much thought about how to create meaningful comparisons, we came up with an intriguing process: I tested all the pickups in the same guitar, with identical setups, and ReAmped them through the same combo amps with identical recording settings. If this were an amp or pedal review, I would have used the same performances throughout, but of course, each example had to be played anew with each pickup, so I spent much time matching performances to guard against misleading variations in touch and intensity. It’s not a perfect solution, but better than most, and in the end quite revealing.

And what did it reveal, exactly? You’ll find out at the link. Beyond that, I can report that:

  • All the products sounded pretty good.
  • They sounded more similar than you might expect.
  • I’m gonna find me a guitar to house a set of my favorites — though I’m not sure which ones are my faves! Really, they’re close enough that, say, the tone of a particular body wood alone would be enough to sway the decision. It’s not so much a case of “better or worse” as “brighter or darker” and “louder or quieter.”

As mentioned in the article, there’s no “gold standard” of P-90 tone — or rather, every P-90 lover has his or her own standard. Gibson’s ’50s original are notoriously inconsistent in their output, even their magnet type. Plus, the mere fact that you’re winding coils around a narrow, tall humbucker bobbin rather than a wide, low P-90 one has sonic implications. So I tend to think of this entire pickup category as either “single-coils that are ballsier than Fender single-coils,” or, in the case of hum-canceling models, “humbuckers with brighter highs and clearer mids.” (Or as my ol’ pal Steve Blucher from DiMarzio calls them, “humbuckers that hum.”)

Funny thing: I love P-90s, but don’t own any guitars fitted with them. Not yet. :satansmoking:

So talk to me about P-90s! Your faves? Beloved P-90 guitars? Fave P-90 players and performances?

Categories
DIY Effects guitar Pickups

Blood on the Workbench

Small puncture, big pain.
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 the tool properly! I was trying to pick loose a knot of wire with the iron’s tip rather than the recommended wire-picker-thingy.)

So no guitar recordings for me this week while my poor l’il finger recuperates. But I’ll try to compensate for this dog-ate-my-homework post by sharing three works in progress. If they turn out well (and they might!), audio and video will follow.

1. Lipstick Tubes Revisited. For more than a year, the generic Mexican Strat I fitted with lipstick tube pickups has lived, disassembled, in a filthy cardboard box next to my workbench, guilt-tripping me every time I fired up the soldering iron. There were a number of experiments I’d been meaning to perform on it, and in a spectacularly bad example of scientific methodology, I incorporated them all at once, making it pretty much impossible to discern what’s doing what. But I hear some things I like. Here’s what’s new (beside the blood spatters):

lipstick_labeled

Not everything is working as desired yet — but there are some promising directions here, and it’s so nice to have a lipstick tube instrument again. :pacman:

Joystick fuzz: like giving a loaded gun to a monkey.
Joystick fuzz: like giving a loaded gun to a monkey.

2. The Joy of Stick. Anyone tried a joystick effect, like Devi Ever’s Drone Fuck Drone? I bought a few joysticks from 4Site and have been having a blast. I thought they’d be difficult to wrangle, but it’s really just two pots, each with the standard three-lug connection, deployed in X/Y configuration. Two things to bear in mind, though: They’re generally available only with identical resistance values for each pot, and more important, you need two controls that have meaningful values throughout their ranges. Fortunately, I had just the circuit for it: my Filth Fuzz (which Fuzzbox Girl was kind enough to demo and review in 2011). I’d even labeled the controls X and Y! (I’m not selling these, but I do hope to bring it to market before long. Honest.)

photo

3. A Reanimated Amp.  This one’s personal: I’m finally refurbishing the 1951 “TV front” Fender Deluxe amp that I received for as a bar mitzvah present in the ’70s. (I was mature enough not to express my disappointment over getting some crummy old tweed. But how I longed for that shiny post-CBS crap!) My mom procured it from the son of one of her fellow elementary school teachers, who worked at Fender in nearby Fullerton. (Sadly, I’ve forgotten his name.) I also got to pick from three early-’70s Fender guitars: a sunburst Strat, a paisley Tele, and a black Jazzmaster. I, of course, chose the Jazzmaster — at the exact moment when no one on earth gave a crap about that model.  And naturally, I sold it just when new wave arrived and Jazzmasters became cool again. See? I established my pattern of buying and selling the wrong things at the wrong times while still in my teens!

I didn’t wreck the amp by myself — the process started with the black paint job it acquired long before I entered the picture. Over the years it received a preamp mod from Paul Rivera, and later got totally ruined by an overambitious repairman who added mods I never requested, and who probably stole most of the original electronic parts. But the cab, chassis, speaker, and output transformer are original, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t sound bitchin’ after I restore it to its original 5A3 circuit. I’m getting expert help from Tube Depot’s Rob Hull, who helped me source parts and make a grommet board to house the components.

So my apologies for all talk, no audio. My boo-boo is healing, and I should be back able to, like, actually play some of this stuff soon!

Categories
DIY guitar

The Fender TBX:
A Cool 2-Band Tone Control

You can TELL it's Photoshopped! There's no TBX!
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 Shop instruments, notably the Clapton signature Strats. Like the G&L PTB circuit I’m so apeshit about, it’s a 2-band passive tone control — but one that sounds very different.

The PTB is a two-knob circuit that lets you siphon off highs, lows, or both. I’m agog at how well it works with humbuckers — you can get so many cool sounds by rolling off lows on the way to a fuzz, as heard here.

But TBX (it stand for “treble bass expander”) is a one-knob circuit, tbough that single knob rotates two stacked pots. The control has a center detente. Set here, it’s like a regular tone control, wide-open. Turn it counter-clockwise and highs vanish, per usual. (You could “tune” the roll-off frequency with various capacitors, though I went with the stock .022uF.) But when you rotate clockwise, the absence of lows makes glassy highs erupt.

The dual pot cut highs or lows.
The dual pot cut highs or lows.

Technically, it’s not a boost, but it sure feels like one. Dirk Wacker, my now-colleague at Premier Guitar, dissects the circuit far more capably than I can here. (And he goes way beyond in this subsequent article on TBX mods. Man, I have some catching up to do!) He makes a good case for replacing the stock resistor with another value, but I went with the original 82K to establish a point of reference. I’ll try his mod when I restring, and I’ll update you here.)

BTW, you need the Fender TBX kit for this project — it uses highly customized pots to work its magic, and a standard stacked pot won’t do. But it’s cheap: You can find the TBX kit, with the pot, hardware, and passive components, online for about $15.

I put it into the mongrel strat I’ve been using as my digital synth/looping guitar. I’d been using a Stellartone Tone Styler, a cool Vari-Tone variant that switches between multiple capacitors. I dig it, but it’s the old model which clicks, rather than fades, from setting to setting, and it requires a powerful twist of the wrist to go from maximum to minumum, which I do every time I grab an EBow. Since I hadn’t gotten around to replacing it with the smooth-action version, I figured I’d try the TBX.

And I’m glad I did. It’s a super-easy install, at least to the extent that any job that requires removing both strings and pickguard can be easy.And here’s how it sounds:

I’m going to keep this one around for awhile. You’re hearing it through an analog rig, obviously, but I want to find out whether that extra shot of highs does anything meaningful when playing digitally. I’d also like to experiment with different cap and resistor values.

And now I can’t help wondering whether this would sound cool with humbuckers. Anyone have any experience with that?

Categories
Effects guitar

Fuzz Detective:
The Case of the 12 Germanium Fuzzes

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 employ. If you hear something you like, you can either do as I did and build a clone from the schematic, or buy one based on that particular design. (The relative merits of rival clones is another story.) Of course, if you’re rich and you desire an ancient pedal that probably doesn’t sound as good as a new clone, you can always purchase a vintage original. 😉

HOW: I tried to establish a “level playing field” by removing as many sonic variables as possible. I used the same signal chain, the same guitars, the same musical material, etc. (Tech details below.)

WHO:

  1. Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone
  2. Sola Tone Bender Mk 1
  3. Hornby-Skewes Zonk Machine
  4. Sola Tone Bender “Mk 1.5” (similar to Vox Tone Benders)
  5. Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face
  6. WEM Pep Box Rush
  7. Sola Tone Bender Mk II (same as Marshall Supafuzz)
  8. Mosrite Fuzzrite (germanium version)
  9. Orpheum Fuzz (germanium version)
  10. Selmer Buzz Tone
  11. Sola Tone Bender Mk III (same as Park Fuzz Sound, Carlsbro Fuzz)
  12. Baldwin-Burns Buzzaround.

WHEN: Like, now, man!

Continue reading “Fuzz Detective:
The Case of the 12 Germanium Fuzzes”
Categories
Music

14th-Century Freakout!

Codex Chantilly
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 ass.”

I’ve been obsessing again on a medieval composition that’s fascinated me since my geeky teens. It’s Fumeux fume par fumee, a bizarre artifact from a bizarre moment in music history: France in the final years of the 14th century.

(If you’re wondering why I was listening to medieval and Renaissance music when I was 17 instead of Zep and Floyd, and what the stuff brings to my guitar playing today, read on. But first, that freaky music!)

The world that produced Fumeux fume par fumee wasn’t your storybook Middle Ages. We’re talking Hundred Years War, Black Death, Papal Schism — and a radical musical style of head-spinning complexity and abstraction. It was dissonant music for dissonant times. The death rattle of the Dark Ages.

The 14th century had witnessed the rise of ars nova, a florid and intellectual style characterized by bold new approaches to counterpoint and musical structure. But by the 1380s or so, ars nova had mutated into ars subtilior, an even more abstract and experimental style.

“Ars nova” means “new art.” It was.

“Ars subtilior” means “more subtle art.” It wasn’t — unless by “subtle,” you mean “characterized by extreme dissonance and chaotic rhythms.” And Fumeux is a perfect embodiment of this radical style.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

WTF, right?

You probably don’t need me to specify why this music is so freaky, but I will anyway: 

Continue reading “14th-Century Freakout!”
Categories
guitar Music

Meet the REAL Spiders from Mars!
Bartók on Electric Guitar

Bartók: Smarter than math-rock — and way more violent.
Bartók: Smarter than math-rock — and way more violent.

My Bowie fandom is second to none. Yet I’ve always felt a vague sense of disappointment that the Spiders from Mars didn’t really sound much like spiders from Mars.

On the other hand, the fourth movement from Béla Bartók‘s Fourth String Quartet really does sound like Martian spiders — assuming the critters in question had been force-fed a diet of chord clusters, mathematics, Hungarian folk music, and some of the most astonishing counterpoint this side of J.S. Bach.

And dig it: This white-hot blast of dissonant modernism was composed in 1928!

And how does this string quartet music sound on guitars? Awesome, IMHO — largely because the movement is played entirely pizzicato (plucked, not bowed). Very few modifications were needed to adopt it for four electric guitars.

Continue reading “Meet the REAL Spiders from Mars!
Bartók on Electric Guitar”
Categories
Amps

The Class A vs. Class A/B Slugfest!

Which kick more ass? Class A or Class AB?
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 much better than I can.)

Like most American players of a certain age, I grew up without access to great Class A amps. (I’m going to take the lazy way out here, and lump Voxes and their kin into the Class A category, despite the distinctions that Dave H. explains so well.) My initial exposure to various ’90s Vox reissues and other “Voxoids” of the era was enough to spark my interest. (And is “spark” the perfect verb for great Class A amps, or what?) But it wasn’t till I encountered Matchless amps and real vintage Voxes that I totally got it.

But still, I go back and forth constantly. And whenever I switch between categories, I think, “Ah! There’s what I was missing,” though I tend not to miss it when I’m playing an amp of the opposite type. So at least I’m usually happy.

Overall I’ve probably favored Vox-type amps over Fender- and Marshall-flavored ones, though I’m the sort of player who’s rarely interested in macho rock and metal distortion. (If that weren’t so, I’d be an A/B purist!) But having said that, my fave amp these days is the decidedly A/B brownface Tremolux I use in the lion’s share of my videos. So put me down as perennially undecided.

How about you? Do you pledge your allegiance to the explosive harmonic energy of Class A or the focused impact of Class A/B? And has anyone explored switchable schemes, as found on some Mesas and modded Marshalls?