The Guitar Weasel

'Ha ha ha I am the Count ....'

2012-01-25T02:52:00.000-08:00

It was about time the old mechanical three-digit counter on my pickup winding machine got replaced. It had done its job (bless it) … rescued from a fifties tape recorder … it had clicked it’s way through the winding of our first dozen or so pickup prototypes. Granted I had to do the maths that went with using a two to one ratio three figure display to wind five figure numbers of turns. It got the job done accurately enough, but it was a strain to use; I needed a proper electronic counter.

Enter the wonderful e bay! I found a nice little self-powered (lithium ion) counter that would use trigger voltages from 1.5 to 18 volts, and built it into a nice box (cos I’m a bit fussy like that). I added a reed switch on a remote sensor that’s tripped by a magnet on the back-plate of my winder … and voilà … much less strain to use and all under 20 quid ... result!

Oil City pickups ...

2012-01-23T09:40:00.001-08:00

Above: an early prototype ... now we use cloth covered hook up wire!

Just for the record, my pickup range at the moment consists of …

The Oil City ‘Thames Delta’ Telecaster bridge and neck pickups … these are 6.5k neck and 7.5k Bridge … a tiny smidge hotter than vintage, with well-balanced outputs, Alnico 5 magnets, cloth covered hook up wire etc.

The Oil City ‘Hardman’ Telecaster Bridge pickup … a real edgy high output 9k beast … again, with Alnico 5 magnets and cloth covered hook up wire.

The Oil City ‘Triple Blues’ Stratocaster set … a little hotter than standard with a massive Texas blues sound! Flush pole pieces for definition and a natural mid boost … I have them in my own Strat, and they give the closest thing I have found to ‘that’ SRV tone.

I don’t carry a stock of any of these pickups at the moment … as they are ordered, so I wind them … simple as that … though with the work load building I may have to have a little ‘building spree’ shortly!

In the development and in the pipeline soon:

Vintage ‘Stagger’ Strat pickups, a Fender wide range humbucker replacement, a vintage PAF humbucker set … and a P Bass pair. Not as if I’m giving myself plenty of work or anything!

'Dantecaster!'

2012-01-19T03:58:00.000-08:00

I've always been a fan of the frankly, slightly loony design of Danelectro™ guitars. Nathan Daniel, the founder of the company cut production costs to the bone to supply rock and roll twang machines to the masses via the Sears catalogue. To that end 'Dannos' were built with ply, poplar or just plain 'scrap' wood frames ... clad front and back with Masonite (that's good old hardboard to the UK reader). I wanted to get some of that vibe and sound while opting for a slightly more traditional Telecaster™ body shape. Here we have the result ... still in primer ... a dead standard Tele™ body made with a pine frame and a Masonite top and back. I will be fitting this with a nice neck and some of my 'Thames Delta' pickups ... so watch this space.

2012-01-19T02:26:00.000-08:00

One term comes to mind when making Telecaster™ neck pickups: fiddly! Okay so the slim chrome covers look kinda cool and retro, but Leo was working near the limits in trying to fit a decent output pickup into such a tiny space. My new vintage Tele™ neck pickup uses every available millimetre of bobbin space to come in at about 6.5k … just a tad hotter than average, but well still balanced and open.

When I order our next consignment of custom magnets I will include some longer than standard alnico 5 slugs to make a ‘hotter’ bobbin that can hold more wire. Then I will have the option of winding a ‘traditional hot’ with 43awg wire or a warmer, more Strat™ like pickup with 42awg wire.

Mudbuckers

2012-01-19T02:01:00.000-08:00

Above: a late seventies DiMarzio X2N 'Power Plus' pickup. Mud personified!

I’ve got nothing against humbuckers … right? I’ve played, and gigged many guitars fitted with them and got the job done just fine. The problem for me is that they are a compromise … and for some … not all types of music they simply lack something. Okay, if I want the easiest route to smoking, full bore, metal grind and scream I’d take humbuckers pretty well every time … at least as a bridge pickup. Trouble is, I have a Telecaster™ fitted with my Oil City ‘Hardman’ Bridge single coil, that, given the right amp setting will produce gallons of grinding, doomy ‘dropped D’ chord work. Or face melting picked harmonic squealage for that matter. Okay so the ‘Hardman’ is over 9k of evil mutant force, but wound back it will do blues or even country quote happily. Try that with some ‘Metal’ humbuckers and you will get the sonic equivalent of drowning in lukewarm, unsalted porridge! Those who are interested … go check out the fantastic lead and rhythm work of Steve Zodiac guitarist and frontman of ground breaking metallers Vardis from the late seventies/early eighties … barefoot on stage … with a Telecaster™ and a groaning vintage Selmer valve amp. Pure magic!

The problem is, that in taking out hum you take out some of the good stuff too: harmonic sparkle, attack, twang. And simply having the ability to shut off one coil and make a limp, ‘pseudo single coil’ isn’t enough. And the hotter the humbucker is wound the more soulless and muddy it becomes if you try any subtlety with it. I firmly believe that about 9 or 10k is as far as you can go without making the whole thing pointless … Just stick a pedal in dude!

Don’t get me wrong, I love Peter Green or Gary Moore’s tone from a PAF Gibson™ pickup. But remember, the PAFs that gave the sound we all love ... the really early ones ... were not wax potted. That made them brighter, more dynamic .... and a total squealing bitch in high gain situations.

Now I have every intention of offering vintage style PAFs in my pickup range (8k or so, with Alnico 5 magnet). They should sound much better than mass produced 'buckers,' as they will get back most of their brightness and 'openness' through being scatter wound (the early Gibsons™ were all machine wound I believe).

For myself ... when all’s said and done, with a little tweaking I can get similar from my Strat™ fitted with my ‘Triple Blues’ set of single coils. Too much noise? Fit a noise gate. If you only buy one guitar, gigging or ‘bedroom hero’ … buy one with single coils … you will get loads more mileage from it. Remember … this is my opinion only!

Necking! Oh and Happy New Year!

2011-12-30T10:10:00.001-08:00

Some thoughts on necks … now it looks as if we will be producing them as well as pickups! Right, the biggest con out is the ‘double acting’ truss rod … it’s completely pointless. In all my years building and repairing guitars I have never seen a guitar with a neck that wants to bow back of its own accord: away from the pull of those six strings. Necks bow forward due to string tension; they twist due to either poor sawing/seasoning of the timber, and the do get curved backward by a poor fret job ‘wedging’ open narrow fret slots. But they don’t just take it into their grain to go against physics! A ‘dual acting truss rod won’t help a twisted neck so it’s inly use is after a poor fret job or to correct a manufacturing defect. So the point of a dual acting truss rod was what exactly? It’s a marketing ploy … simple as that.

Now I’m often asked about fretboard material and fret height. Well for the look I adore a one piece maple neck/fingerboard on a Strat or Tele … but beware of modern high gloss poly finishes on a maple fingerboard … they drag can the fingers like nitro never did, and are so hard that you will never wear a comfortable patina on them. Big old frets can help … kinda gets you up and away from the board like a mild form of scalloping … but vintage frets and a poly coated board will stickkkkk. I would chose a ‘rosewood’ board on a low end neck to do away with the problem. By the way, very few guitars have real rosewood fingerboards these days … the wood’s too rare and expensive. There are a number of ‘rosewood like’ woods in use that masquerade as the real thing, and in truth are every bit as hard wearing.

As for frets … well I personally like big-ass ‘railroad track’ fretwire … can cause heavy players to have intonation problems … but I find most people play faster and cleaner on big wire.

Tone

2011-06-24T00:56:00.000-07:00

Where does tone come from? When we hear a killer tone ... whether from a blues, rock or country guitarist ... how do we set about getting that tone for ourselves? Well personally, I think the first thing is to find your own original tone ... something that is uniquely you: not try and expend precious time and money chasing someone else’s sound. Still, I might be shouting in the wilderness here. I suppose it is still valid to use a famous artist as a yardstick for a tone to aspire to ... so here are my tips on a killer tone.

1. 1. It’s all in your hands ... for example; Stevie Ray would have sounded distinctly ... well, Stevie Ray, on any guitar he picked up (check out some of his acoustic tracks). So learn to express yourself with touch and phrasing before blowing hard earned dosh on gizmos.

2. 2. Strings make your sound ... make sure they are fresh, good quality, and as heavy as you can get away with for your style. Yes heavy! The more mass your string has, the better the sustain and the gutsier the tone. Heavy strings will stay in tune better, last longer, and really hack off any guitar light-weights that pick up your instrument! Get strong fingers and wail baby wail. I use 10 to 53s and get to feel like Tarzan often.

3. 3. Look at your string contact points ... are you overlapping string on the tuning machine? Has your plastic top nut got the consistency of soap? Are your bridge saddles some disgusting alloy pot-metal rubbish? All the afore mentioned will rob tone and sustain. Get a proper bone nut, or brass if you are that way inclined. Learn how to string without creating bird’s nests ... get some steel or hard brass saddles.

444. Check over all your electrics and fit a good quality tone capacitor/s ... cheap ones sound it ... or it could just be my ears. Cheap pots feel awful but I don’t think they really affect your tone very much. Make sure the right value and taper ones are fitted for your pickups though. Swapping from a 500k to a 250k (or visa versa) can make all the difference.

5. 5. Get your amplification sorted! The market is awash with small, relatively cheap, low wattage tube amps. One of these babies will sound mouth watering ... I show an Epiphone ... but there are loads of other good ones out there.

but if you need really squeaky clean sounds at high volumes you might have to go bigger.For the record, I have nothing against transistor amps ... in fact there are two I would love to own ... a hundred watt HH VS musician 2x12 combo from the seventies, and a twenty watt Gorilla combo amplifier from the early eighties. The trouble is that these are the only two tranny amps I have ever heard/played through that I really liked ... out of all the hundreds I had through my shop in the nineties!

6. 6. Right ... now, as a pickup maker, perhaps you would have expected me to put ‘getting expensive pickups’ at the top of my list. Well you’d be wrong. I have played plenty of guitars with cheap pickups that sound perfectly acceptable. In fact, if you are going to be bunging your sound through a rack full of effects or into a ‘modelling amp’ (must be made in Essex) then a cheap but powerful humbucker is probably your best bet ... no point in drinking the finest wines if all you want is to get hammered!. However if you are like me, and prefer to play a guitar, a lead and a tube amplifier (sometimes a chorus and/ or overdrive box ), and you want the most versatile and detailed sound then ... babies ... I’ll wind you a beauty!

7. 7. Don’t be fooled by hype. There is no pedal on earth that gives ‘instant Hendrix’ ... there is no pickup wound that will make you sound just like your heros ... gadgets get you closer perhaps ... but ultimately it comes right back to number one ... learn to play with passion and soul and your sound will fall into place.

Oh yes ... and my favourite pickup in the entire world? Apart from the ones I wind of course ... the first after-market pickup I ever bought ... the DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker ... all over-winding and ceramic magnets ... pure filth. But it takes me back to being seventeen again!

The Beast lives!

2011-06-12T06:43:00.000-07:00

Prototype pickup RDTD0002 known as 'The Beast' due to being born in a thunderstorm and being over-wound 666 turns was completed today and installed on my own Tele to test. Yes I know I should have installed 0001 onto my own, but the provenance of 0002 and my sense of theatre won out. (links to a demo on utube will follow shortly)

Above 0001 gets potted just before 0002. Twenty minutes of soaking in hot wax before ...

... being blotted on kitchen paper like a couple of big chips, and allowed to cool ... in fact such was my haste to hear 0002 that I installed it still warm from the potting! The Beast can be identified by the purple grounding wire as opposed to the white on 0001

How does it sound ... well it's a hell of a lot hotter than the 6.35k Fender offering that admittedly sounded great in there before. It has more low down grunt ... with stinging highs that are complex not 'ice pick'. Clean it's civilised and tuneful, mixing well with the stock neck pickup. Country riffs and chicken-picking - were I much good at them - seem as they should be. Okay, what about the filth? I hear you ask. Well here the Beast's raw power drives my Laney's preamp a lot harder from the get go. The sound dead flat on the controls is a little more P90 like, but much more aggressive at the treble end. As you gradually wind up, things go through vintage 'Keef' territory to Wilko type stuttering rhythm crunch ... then, well due to neighbours I had to moderate slightly, but it seems that screaming lead tones are there for the taking too.

What conclusions do I draw on 0002? Well firstly my potting seemed to work fine ... no hint of scream, and the pickup is no more microphonic than a stock Fender. Secondly, that I can produce a detailed subtle pickup with plenty of balls to a professional standard. Thirdly I have learned that Allparts baseplates are overpriced and poorly made: the cut-out that gives access to the soldering lugs is miles too narrow and needs dressed open with a file on each unit. Oh and never mind the mounting holes that need tapped before fitting ... okay I can excuse that as, I suppose, you might have American standard or 'imported' thread mounting screws ... but they could tell you before you buy! When I spend a fiver each for a bit of nickel plated, stamped out steel that probably cost pence to make ... I expect it to be as near as dammit perfect!

Demon Pickup ... perhaps ...

2011-06-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

Here’s a spooky story: I was winding prototype pickup number two this afternoon while a thunderstorm raged outside. I was winding the last 500 turns (my counter is only three digit so I use a tally system for winding the total number of turns) when a particularly loud clap of thunder made me loose count then snap the winding ... at (near as makes no difference) 666 turns over wound ... okay 666.5 ... but why ruin a good story?. I took a quick snap of the new pickup ... unsoldered bare coils hanging loose against the rain covered window ... and the counter.

This prototype serial number RDTD0002 ... measuring 7.87k ... will hence forth be referred to as the Beastcaster pickup! Quake mortals the ‘Honky Tonk Hammer of the Gods’ has been born.

The first proper prototype...

2011-06-09T07:54:00.000-07:00

Pickup: serial no RDTD001 ... the first prototype Eastend Customs 'Themes Delta' pickup gets 9000 turns of 42awg wire and clocks up a healthy 7.51k on my multi-meter. This beastie caused me a few winding headaches: though the magnets were new the top and bottom flatwork was reclaimed and the residue wax left on the Forbon caused the pressure of winding to pop off the top flatwork (when about 8000 turns was reached on the first two attempts ... sickening, frustrating and wasteful of wire). A strip down and running some water-thin super glue into the gaps between the magnet slugs and the flatwork cured the problem ... along with narrowing my winding guides.Now she awaits a nickel plated steel base-plate from Allparts, a wrap in cotton string to protect the windings ... and a nice wax hot tub!

My Themes Delta pickups are made pretty well exactly the way early Fender pickups were ... my only concession to modernity being the PVC covered hook-up wire.Yes there will be some loony who can claim to hear the difference if waxed cotton 'push back' cable is not used ... these types can probably 'hear' fifties solder too! If people want 'push back' they can have it ... then again it's not me having to wire the damn stuff up in their guitar ... most of the time!

As soon as this pickup is complete I’ll whip it into a handy Tele and upload some demo noodling through the valve LC30 Laney.

I'm completely lacquered ...

2011-06-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

Another part of the pickup building process: here a set of vulcanized fibre flatwork, equipped with vintage style staggered alnico 5 magnets ... north up ... is about to be hung to dry after being dipped in cellulose lacquer.

This process helps bond the magnets firmly into the flatwork and stops the bobbins deforming when they are wound (it also stops the rough magnet castings from nicking the coil wire insulation as you wind on the first turns ... you get a dead pickup if that happens!

2011-06-07T13:46:00.000-07:00

Research and development goes on with our ‘Custom T-Cycler pickups. Here are three sets of flatwork and Alnico 5 magnets that will turn into the first batch of hot Oil City Specials. The plan is to produce a sharp barking Tele bridge pickup with plenty of overtones ... for that London R and B sound beloved of Mick green and Wilko Johnson. Not so powerful that the razor edge is blunted, but with enough body to really fill out the sound of a three piece band. Nine thousand turns of 42 awg wire (only just bigger diameter than a human hair ... and much easier to break) and a custom steel base plate each ... and these babies will be ready to rock and roll.

Why did we start with Tele pickups ... well, the Telecaster is a bloody good workhorse axe that players love to customise to their own special needs. It’s timeless and classless ... practically every studio has one, everyone knows what one should sound and play like. Yet it is also one of the most versatile instruments out there, and can easily be personalised. A Tele player generally has attitude and means business!

Strat pickups will come soon ... and Humbuckers. I intend to produce P90 style pickups as well as more uncommon types influenced by sixties British brands like Burns and Watkins. Why should all the plaudits just go to US icons?

Potty time!

2011-06-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

As an addendum to the last pickup article I thought I’d show you my lo-tec pickup potting arrangements ... an old saucepan, some coat-hanger wire and a tin can. Oh and of course some wax (altar candles are the perfect blend of beeswax and paraffin wax!)

In fairness the early Fender pickups were not potted at all ... but then they were never meant to deal with modern high gain amplifiers and high stage volumes. In fact, an un-potted pickup has a more open, detailed sound: due to some inherent microphonic action when unrestrained pickup elements move like a microphone diaphragm. But squeal is always a threat, and most people would prefer the peace of mind of wax potted coils.

An interesting fact is that the harder the potting material the more 'sterile' a pickup sounds ... thus epoxy potted units suffer no microphonic problems but sound cold. Wax is a good compromise in my opinion and allows pickups to be 'unwound' and rewound again more easily.

Pick up pick-me-up ...

2011-05-25T14:19:00.000-07:00

For some while my business partner in crime Tim and I have been developing our range of Eastend Custom T-cycler custom guitars as well as a range of boutique T-Cycler pickups. The pickup end of this enterprise kicked up another gear today as my mark 2 home brewed coil winder has come online. It’s mostly a drill press with a face plate made from a grinder hub and a turn counter that used to be the tape counter from an old valve tape recorder. It allows me to scatter wind a single coil pickup in an hour or so.

We have a thing about lo-tech ... Leo Fender produced legendary guitars in the early fifties with virtually no tech at all. We love reclaimed wood, re engineered and up-cycled components and low environmental footprint construction.

The first working result of this is the T style bridge pickup below. It meters up at a nice vintage 7.5k

Observations: pickup winding is made more difficult with the ‘help’ of several playful cats trying to catch the wire on its way off the spool!

The Weasel's myth buster

2011-05-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

An occasional series with my take on the common beliefs and voodoo that surround the guitar world.

Myth: they used to build guitars better in the old days ... Arggggggggggh have you ever played a nasty seventies Les Paul copy? Never mind that some twat says that because it’s ‘law suit’ you have to pay a couple of hundred notes for it. It was a turd when it was squeezed out of the factory ... it’s still a turd thirty years later ... okay perhaps an old, rare turd ... ill give it that. Today you can buy a guitar new for a couple of hundred quid that will destroy a Kay or Columbus or even an exalted Ibanez. Yet I see so often, Avons, Jedsons, CMIs Antoria and Ibanez ... going for silly money on e bay. They are okay guitars ... but they don’t really feel or sound like the instruments they copied. If you like old curiosities buy one ... but do everyone a favour and don’t pay daft money. After all, Austin Maestros are rare cars nowadays ... that’s because they were crap and people couldn’t wait to scrap them!

Fender Strats, even old fifties ones are not rare ... that is because in general they were superb instruments and people have ensured they survived. Rosetti Lucky Sevens and Top Twenty guitars were sold in Freemans catalogues and Woolworths all over the country... and yes they are now quite rare. Ever tried to play one?

2011-05-12T03:16:00.000-07:00

This was the worst set up bass I have ever bought ... being honest ... whether it was as bad from the factory or just got bad through being owned by a plonker I don’t know. Well it all amounts to the same thing really: A perfectly well made Westfield Precision bass copy: nice feeling neck, adequate fret job, nice, deep, rich punchy pickup ... a match for any Squier really (except for the plywood body perhaps). However when it came to me the truss rod was slack, leaving the neck bent forward like a banana and the action six miles high. A cheap plastic nut (too narrow for the slot and broken at one end) was ruining the sustain; there was no neck set angle, so the bridge saddles rested on the bridge base –plate ... the one remaining strap button was held in with Blue-tac and the strings were actually rusty!

Okay so it was super cheap ... well it had to be really ... and sounded potentially nice, so I set about putting it right. Firstly I made and installed a new bone nut, re strung, tightened the truss rod until there was only a small amount of ‘relief,’ then shimmed the neck joint until the action came right down. I ordered new, oversized strap buttons from my old friends at Axes-r-us, and a new set of bass strings. The ripped-out strap button holes were plugged with maple dowels (after drilling out the Blue-tac gunk)

What’s this bass like now you might ask? Well pretty much like any Precision really: chunky, clunky, conservative, non – threatening yet punchy ... we’ve all played them ... they are ubiquitous. Sure the US made Fender originals are better made ... but I’ll stick my neck out and say there’s not a lot to choose between them in the sound ... through the right bass rig. A Precision is a bit of a ‘blunt instrument’ anyway.

So what am I going to use it for? Well I don’t like carrying expensive instruments to jam nights (even if I owned them these days).I am planning to sing and play bass on a few numbers at local pubs and I want a ‘beater’ I’m not too fussed about scratching. I’ve owned BC Rich basses, vintage 60s Fenders, Warwicks and Shergolds ... lord knows I owned a whole shop stocked with expensive basses I could chose from when I came to gig ... but so long as the neck is nice and the pickups good ... there is not much difference to me between a £100 bass and a £1000 one. Sure the expensive one will feel better finished, survive a bit longer perhaps, and will have snob value I suppose. But getting a cheepie to perform well has its own satisfactions.

Recipe for guitarists wanting to ‘double’ on bass: take one second hand, cheap far eastern bass ... Richwood, Westfield etc, etc, with solid hardware and a reasonably straight neck (remember, cheap bass pickups are far better than cheap guitar pickups). Put in a decent nut and have a pro setup done (or do it yourself). Enjoy!

Pickup joint

2009-05-26T03:52:00.000-07:00

For those who are interested here is my unofficial and totally biased top five of favourite aftermarket pickups.

No 5……..Bare Knuckle vintage Strat set………had those on my ‘mint and cream’ Strat……very good but VERY pricey…..

No 4………better value for money (all three pickups cost less than one Bare Knuckle) and nearly as good sounding: Wilkinson Vintage Alnico Strat set…got to be the best bang per buck on the market for Strat users.

No 3………Kent Armstrong vintage alnico Telecaster pickup. Another cheaply made far eastern pickup, but a fabulous sounding one for all that.

Worthy runner up………The Wilkinson Alnico PAF humbucker. Cheap as chips and nearly as hot! I honestly cannot praise this pickup highly enough.

In first place………The Di Marzio super distortion/dual sound humbucker, the pickup that started the whole aftermarket pickup thing……Designed in the early seventies and still as good today as ever. I had a pair of these first in 1975 in an Antoria Les Paul Copy….. it was a killer!

More on the green meanie

2009-05-19T01:01:00.001-07:00

Before/After

Progress has carried on the ‘Junior’ I have been attempting to complete after it’s long rest in one of my cupboards (see March post). Well the horrible green see through poly brushed on to test it years ago has been sanded off…contrary to my initial worries it put up very little resistance. Some green gunk has soaked into the grain of the body but I’m not too worried as white primer is going to cover up all that, especially when followed by a butterscotch cream top coat.

My initial plan to use a wrap over Les Paul junior tailpiece was shot down in flames when after spending out on one (gold plated) I discovered the neck set angle of about two and a half degrees would not allow the action to go low with the ‘Badass’ stile bridge that tops out at 20mm from base to top of saddles. It was back to the drawing board and back to Axesrus who have a brilliant string through body ‘hardtail’ Strat style bridge that looks different enough from a fender item to give the junior a character all of it’s own……I like it so much I may say to everyone that I planned to use it all along!

Up at the head end I have installed a set of lovely gold plated Wilkinson open gear tuners…Wilkinson hardware is so impressive these days.

Next step will be putting the body in primer, cutting a proper scratchplate and ordering a pickup.

2009-05-14T02:21:00.000-07:00

Well I’ve slapped some strings on the Canjo to try it out….I was fed up with waiting to finish it completely.

Well…it plays….like a banjo really. The intonation is pretty well spot on….it’s a little more guitar like and less spranky than a proper drum headed instrument…..bit like a banjo crossed with a National Steel guitar.

Lessons learned? Well aside from vowing never to attack a lump of Jarra in earnest again, I think it’s fascinating that perfectly playable instruments can be made out of junk…..though it has to be said…a pug ugly ones! I may now indulge myself by creating a baritone guitar, a mandolin and any other junk yard orchestra instruments I can think of! I am even thinking about writing a book about it!

Tuner friendly!

2009-05-11T01:47:00.000-07:00

The 'Canjo' neck is fretted......like the first Telecasters there is no separate fingreboard...the narrow banjo/mandolin frets are pressed straight into the neck. also like the first Teles there is no truss rod.......the Jarra is so hard and stiff there is absolutely no point! Above is a piccie of the ace-of-bodge job I have done making a 5th string tuner. I shortened the tuner shaft and re-bored and reamed the string hole......ten quid saved on a commercial banjo tuner!

HEAVY Man!

2009-05-08T01:07:00.000-07:00

Well here it is partially complete....as ugly as...well... a lump of sub atomically heavy Jarrah wood temporarily clamped to a Roses sweetie tin that's roughly banjo shaped! the whole assemblage is so weighty I might have invented the worlds first heavy metal banjo. No fret slots cut yet and the neck needs half a ton more wood taken off it.....

'Ring Ring those....er....Cookie tins!

2009-05-07T02:23:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing to me how crude a musical instrument can get away with being and still produce a pleasing sound in the hands of a skilled musician. If you type in cookie tin banjo or cigar box guitar into U tube you will get an idea of what can be done with very little…and indeed how our ancestors probably made music.

Yes this is the cue for yet another project…..I have always had a yen to try my hand at banjo….and hearing the results of others efforts at construction…I decided to chuck together a ‘Cookie Tin Banjo’. I have a large stock of Australian Jarra hardwood kicking about so I decided to sculpt a neck from that…….poor move……the stuff is soooo hard that virtually all tools bounce off it (okay so no truss rod will be needed) and boy do you get vicious splinters from it.

I’ve got it roughed out after two evenings of hard graft…note to self….don’t experiment with lovely looking hardwoods you’ve never worked with before unless you have adequate tools!

I have found however some fabulous software for calculating fret spacing, and better, printing out a ‘fret board’ on paper that can be stuck with Spraymount to the blank finger board then the fret slots cut through it with a ‘Gents saw’. This eliminates all the tedious marking and checking….result!

http://www.topshareware.com/Fret-Calculator-download-40998.htm

I will post photos of the beastie soon.

30th anniversary

2009-05-02T10:17:00.000-07:00

It's thirty years since I built my first custom guitar to order........and this was it........seen in 1979.
It was quite a beast and well over the top....but then that suited the personality of the guy I built it for TomTaylor, at that time my boss at the music shop where I worked. The features were: an ash straight through neck with Honduras mahogany 'wings', two high output humbucking DiMarzio bass pickups with series/parallel and in/out of phase switches feeding in stereo to two (yes two) six band graphic equalisers and an active preamp! This was a fretless tone monster with a gaboon ebony fingerboard and a Leo Quan Badass bass bridge...Oh yeh and it weighed a bloody ton!

Making it safe!

2009-04-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

Mucking about with valve amps is fun...but less so when the original manufacturer of my amp project's idea of a safe mains connection was a knotted (for strain relief) length of two core with a 1.5 amp slow-blow fuse in a weedy holder, they didn't have health and safety in 1964 clearly. As a concession to modern use I've chain drilled and punched out a hole in the back of the amp chassis for a three pin euro-socket, added a proper period Bakelite fuse holder and grounded the chassis to boot...that ought to stop all that leaky electricity making a big puddle on the floor that someone can step in!

I keep finding bits of redundant circuitry (left over from it's tape recording origins) in the amp as I work on it and have great satisfaction in ripping it out. Every time I junk something I fire up the amp to check I haven't trashed anything vital and so far so good.

Even though I've used valve guitar amps most of my playing life, their inner workings...short of simply swapping tubes...have always seemed some sort of voodoo to me. I decided that was going to change, so I started reading up on valves and amplifier theory...In fact I've gone a bit mad and burnt the midnight oil more than a few times learning my plate resistors from my cathode bias. This little amp has taught me more already than I can quite believe.

I'm now scouring e bay for a vintage 16 Ohm 12" speaker to go with the little beastie.

2009-04-20T00:56:00.000-07:00

First little job on the valve amp was to remove the 'play/record' switch. This two position wafer switch gave me some headaches when I tried to figure out how to rewire and cut it out of the circuit......

It took an evening of looking it the job and a night of sleeping on it to work it out! I seem to have got it right as the little beastie fired up without self destruction....granted the wiring is a dogs breakfast and needs a length of tag strip to tidy it up but I have succeeded in impressing myself.

Now I need to sort out the input gain, as a humbucker overdrives the poor little machine too far!

Quick way to get frizzy hair!

2009-04-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

..
I have just come by an interesting old amplifier........It languished in a busted tape recorder circa 1964 until it found a home with me. I would have loved to get the old reel to reel mono beast working again but the heads were stuffed, so out of curiosity and simply coz the valve layout looked a bit like a Fender Champ...I bunged my Strat into the mic in and was rewarded with a beautifully gutsy overdriven growl......hummmm.......Okay so the strain of putting a guitar through the strange oval 6" speaker caused bits to fall off of the plywood casing, but the sound was there, so I spent a happy couple of hours removing the amp from the casing and separating it electrically from the tape recorderish bits that would no longer be needed.
On the bench it fired up again fine......this time through an 8" guitar speaker I happened to have about the joint...Sweeeeeet but bloody dangerous with exposed mains wiring etc.
Next Step? Well perhaps a new custom casing to make baby 'Plexi' head, proper tone controls for bass mid and treble(hi fi amp tone controls suck the big one with guitar) . A master volume shouldn't tax my amp modding skills too much...and of course a standby switch to save those Mullard tubes!
Lets see, twenty quids worth of leathercloth and MDF....twenty quids worth of components equals a small hotrod 'boutique' style head for the studio or small gigs (10-15 watts)......a saving of several hundred knicker!

2009-04-15T00:43:00.000-07:00

I’m off tomorrow night to see ACDC at the O2 Arena…….A happy accident as I was invited by one of my guitar students to go with him.

I have always had a great respect for ACDC, they have served up solid unpretentious, chauvinistic, testosterone fuelled hard rock since Adam’s dog was a foetus……and the quality of the product never wavers.

Angus Young, apart from in interview coming over like Sir Les Patterson’s bastard lovechild, is a stunningly expressive blues rock soloist; idolised by fans of the band but never really given the credit he deserves by the ‘serious’ music press……however the genius of the band in my opinion is his brother Malcolm. Always a bit in the shadows Malcolm Young is the ‘boogie engine’ of rhythm guitar playing……like Mick green of the Pirates, Wilko of Dr Feelgood or Pete Townsend, he builds a solid and instantly recognisable framework for the band’s swaggering ‘in your face’ style……plus he has the balls to play a Gretch!

SG finished

2009-04-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

Above you can see the SG strung and next to my 'number one wife' Strat. Okay I still need to do a little more action adjustment when it has gotten used to being a guitar again....but initial playing brought forth the expletive '----king hell'...... the difference between it's sound before being smashed to smithereens and after rebuilding is dramatic with the sustain is surprisingly much improved. The sound is typically SG: sweet and round until you drive the amp hard when it becomes a tight, raw, aggressive bark. I have difficulty in believing that this is a £200 quid copy that has been well trashed in the recent past...I have heard real Gibbo SGs (usually seventies/eighties ones) that sound much worse than this.

I think stripping off the straitjacket of the Poly finish and giving it a Nitro one like a real vintage SG has helped the instrument breathe. This coupled with the added neck mass of 2.9mm frets, a real bone nut and a damn good setup as raised this old girl's game. The pickups remain the alnico magnet Wilkinson originals...and damn fiddlingly good they sound too!

Eco worryer!

2009-04-07T00:19:00.000-07:00

Do I want to see nice shiny rows of new guitars in the shops........or see rain forests survive? Tough call....but on balance I would like to have a world left for my (prospective as yet) grandchildren to enjoy. Mahogany rosewood and ebony are now all very rare and expensive, and perhaps we could start to take a cue from guitar builders in the fifties and come up with some oddball but more sustainable instruments. Danelectro and Sears/Silvertone built iconic instruments from stapled together softwood (reclaimable), Masonite (thats hardboard to you youngsters) and pickups made of lipstick tubes and coil wrapped bar magnets! OK so the necks were halfway decent wood....maple to be exact.....but for a hardwood, maple is plentiful and fast growing. As for fingerboards......Brian May's 'Red Special' has a fret board made of black painted oak, finnished with a thick layer of Rustins Plastic Coating....that has held up through thirty
years of gigging without even a refret! Solutions are there.....lets go innovate!

A 57 'Danno' and throbbing vibrato....
what more could a red blooded male want!

So unveiled here is my design for a relatively cheap instrument built with a chambered semi acoustic ply body a maple neck.
This may be my next project.......Oh yes the design is copyright 'Cocksoldier Guitars 2009'

Twins of evil!

2009-04-06T23:29:00.000-07:00

The work on the SG copy is nearing completion, as is my usual quirky way of doing things I have 'flatted off' the last clear coat of lacquer before fitting the hardware and allowing the finish to harden for a month before polishing and relicing it (if relicing is not a word I'm officially making it one!) I won't be going for trashed finish as I have done on some Fender relics I have built....just the well played sweat and bar-room look.

The guitar formally known as the 'green mess' my scratch built roughly Les Paul Junior inspired baby is also now advancing after her decade of being in the bedroom cupboard. The experimental green polyester gloopy-crap finish was stripped....except for the the bits that got into the grain. The headstock has been sprayed black and a home brewed 'Junior 79' transfer applied. The 79 bit refers to the fact that this year it is the thirtieth anniversary of me building and selling my first custom guitar.....it was a bass anyway , but that by the by......

I have decided to put the Artec active onboard preamp/distortion in the Junior.......see this demo

I like the idea of a guitar I can take to a jam night......and when the house band guitarist tries to make himself sound streets better than everyone else by removing all the decent overdrive on his amp for any one else using it (that's a common trick around here)......I will have a little secret onboard weapon! For seventeen quid from Axesrus how can you go wrong?

I want to widdle

2009-03-27T04:35:00.000-07:00

What ever happened to the Floyd Rose sporting, multi humbucker equipped, skinny necked, widdly widdly eighties Vai/Satriani type guitars? Of late Ibanez and Jackson seem to be the only ones still carrying the torch for the formula one cars of the guitar world. Nowadays it seems we have returned to vintage everything with a side order of relic and quirk….is quirk a word?

I can see why people got piddled off with Floyds…sorry Steve…you have all the hassle of having to carry around a tool kit to change a string, you have a complex chunk of metal as large as a small fridge balanced on the equivalent of two Stanley knife blades over a hole in your guitar body so large mist forms around it’s rim like a jungle sink hole! Yes it stays in tune while you do impressions of defective space invader machines and swanny whistles…….the trouble is that any well set up Strat bridge with a roller nut and locking machine heads will do nearly as well without the downside.

Yet all in all I rather mourn the fall from grace of the Monkey Grip and the wanky wallpaper finishes….the cheap Perspex pyramid position markers and ghastly dayglo pickup covers. There is a new seriousness in music that eschews frippery and humour….a new breed of rock and metal bands that would never dream of calling an album OU812, Eat ‘em and Smile or Slippery When Wet!

So I want a ‘widdly beast'….if only for old times sake…to wipe away fears of recession with remembrances of poodle rock and eighties excess. To play in the bedroom while pretending I could still get away with snakeskin PVC jeans……I want an Ibanez Jem 77 Floral with a Wizard neck and ‘tree of life’ inlays….Of course for gigging I’ll still use my Strat….or whatever other six string mistress I’m flirting with at the time….but I want a bit of guilty pleasure….a bit of Super Strat on the side!

Lean green and mean

2009-03-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

Working on the SG has whetted my appetite......I have had a unfinished scratch built prototype from my old AMP days hanging around in a cupboard for the last twenty years. I had used it as a lacquer test bed at some time or another but the alder body, Honduras Mahogany neck and Rio Rosewood fingerboard are too good to either trash or allow to gather dust. It needs a fret job, the crap finish stripped (oh bum...dust city again) and a new one blown on. I think a black pearloid scratch plate (the one on there is a card mockup), a humbucker sized P90, a single volume control and perhaps an active preamp with three preset gain levels: normal...armageddon...and armageddon out of here! Top off with an old english white finish ...Yeah!

Don't fret mate...or rather the reverse

2009-03-26T03:03:00.000-07:00

Something I did not mention with the SG project was my choice of fret wire. For my own use I equip all my guitars with en-friggin-ormous frets…the widest and highest I can lay my paws on. I play blues rock and R and B and perform vicious string bends and wide fast vibrato….high frets allow me to ‘dig in’ under the string better. If was a jazzer or a regular player of complex ‘suspended pregnant eleventh half demented flattened wassername’ chords I would choose smaller lower wire as it would allow better intonation within a given chord shape and better open string to fretted string intonation…..As my technique has always been just on the creative side of brutal I stick to my ‘railway track’ frets!

SG gets a boner!

2009-03-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

The single biggest cause of copy guitars and cheaper instruments in general not sounding as powerful as real Fenders or Gibsons is not weak pickups or duff wood, it this little beggar....

The humble and rather crap....cheap plastic nut. It sucks tone, stuffs up sustain and is as cool as a polyether anorak. I am going to replace this hunk of poo with a new nut made from a nice well aged bit of cow thigh bone. My supply of bone is our local pet shop. I buy a bone intended for fido, tantalise the cats with it for a while.....then boil the bejusus out of it for several hours..... leaving it to bleach out on our flat roof for a month or two.

Here I am cutting a blank from said bone.....music retailers will generously sell you a bone nut blank for six quid, I get about ten from a 99p bone!

Here I am using the old nut as a template to shape the new bone one, plus position and part cut the string slots. Some gutar repair men ponce about with graduated width nut slot files...I simply have a selection of junior hacksaw blades with some or all of the 'set' ground off of them. They do the same job and cost pence.
Here's the nut installed....
Note...the fret ends are still rough, the metallic blue is not cut back or clear coated...and in fact there's still loads to do. Will have fun choosing new hardware to replace the bust bits next week!

PLUG PLUG PLUG!

2009-03-23T01:56:00.000-07:00

Here's a free plug for the place where I get most of my guitar hardware http://www.axesrus.com/
they've got loadsa stuff and deliver faster than a speeding fast thing.....

The SG

2009-03-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

Shot the colour coat on the SG......in the parlance of the students in my place of work......well sweet innit....

Naughty...very very naughty!

2009-03-20T11:24:00.001-07:00

The SG headstock is getting the Weasel once over...the victimised Vintage stringy-fixy-end has transmogrified into a relic 1960's Gibbo SG Special. I am making damn sure that there are elements on this guitar that scream fake in case I ever sell it...but this is a beware to all of you who buy guitars on Flea Bay, I can fake Gibbos and Fenders that you would never know didn't come from the good old US of A...don't fool yourself you could tell...you couldn't. I use 'the force' for good Luke...there are loads who can do what I do and will happily rip you off BEWARE!

Is it real or fake?

2009-03-19T03:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes there is a defining moment in your life….I had already had my brush with the 1970 IOW festival to whet my appetite to be a muso….It’s odd that fishing should lead to the other shaping event in my youth.

I fished in my early teens from the shore and from Sandown pier and I used to sneak of for a spot of underage drinking in the Blue Lagoon bars opposite the Pier while my folks thought I was casting my line upon the waters!

The Blue Lagoon was a real dive, occupying the floor above some seedy amusements and the floor below a dodgy nightclub called the Birdcage. It had a full length balcony covered in roaches and a largely leather clad biker clientèle but the music there was fantastic. The Mecanix played there regularly and their punk/pub rock versions of Whisky in the Jar and Cherry Red kept me riveted. I watched their guitarist like a hawk and modeled my emerging style on his. I started to devour LPs as fast as I could get them, and that was pretty fast. My parents dealt with a local cash and carry for their hardware business and it had a record section……I bought albums by the clash, the Vibrators, Dr Feelgood and just absorbed everything I could.

If anyone asks me my favorite guitar solo though after all those years it’s still Eric Bell's brilliant jewel in Whiskey in the Jar…..if you cover the song you play it as is, because you can’t improve on perfection…..even the mighty Metallica in their version, like the Mecanix all those years ago, leave the solo largely true to the original.

Eric Bell

My most embarrassing band: Loodaxe!

2009-03-18T03:16:00.000-07:00

Finding a cool name for your band always used to be a problem. I remember drunken evenings after band practice back in the twilight of the seventies when we all dreamt of being the next Deep Purple and ‘breaking it’ big and we needed to find that ‘sweet’ name.

Colours seemed to figure large…..Silver Fox, Black Rose, Blue Pearl…..Barry’s Plastic Moon Hoppers….we thought of them all. The problem was that the singer with the band at the time, Dave the one eyed welder, wanted us called Bloodaxe…..ho hum….I still shudder at that. Mind you, he owned the PA and the van so Bloodaxe we became!

Our first major gig, in fact our first gig, was booked to be playing for Cowes (Isle of Wight) carnival, on Cowes seafront, on the back of a lorry. First of all they printed the flyers all wrong when they copied the band name off of Dave’s van…..The vinyl B had fallen off so all our pre-publicity had us listed as Loodaxe.

Come the day of the gig it poured with rain and we played nervously eying the rapidly filling canvas awning over our lorry bed. It finally gave way and our generator got swamped killing all the amps!

If I remember rightly I left the band shortly thereafter! Interestingly they soldiered on and under the singer’s influence blended the influences of heavy metal and Chaz and Dave to unbelievable effect…advertising themselves as exponents of rockney music and singing covers of Deep Purple and Sabbath in a gor-blimey accent!

'Ee's a got sum-oke on da waw-ter....aaaaaaand fire inna sky......ah!'

SG body in primer

2009-03-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

I've bitten the bullet and shot the first primer coat on the beater SG.....woo hoo there's some flaws to fill!

One more time...with feeling!

2009-03-16T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a blast from the past....Back in the last big recession when I still had my music shop.....me on the left.

2009-03-16T01:35:00.000-07:00

Here’s the next installment of my SG beater project…..in which the destroyed Vintage V6 copy SG gets to live again (cue manic laughter). I took the opportunity of having to strip off the dreadful, thick, sound choking polyester lacquer to do some surgery to the headstock. The Korean makers of Vintage guitars obviously couldn’t bring themselves to use the proper Gibson ‘open book’ headstock shape for fear of being slapped with a lawsuit….I would like,for my own amusement I hasten to add, to make this as close a ringer for an early sixties SG as I can, so the dreadful bumpy original shape must go.

See below.

There was not enough length to the Vintage headstock to convert it to the Gibbo shape by simply cutting…..so I had to graft on a shaped piece of Jarra hardwood.

The finished job will be hidden by the black lacquer on the front of the head, and by the solid metallic 'Pelham blue' finish on the back of the head and indeed the rest of the guitar.

Tom Taylor Music

2009-03-13T03:22:00.000-07:00

Flavour of the year for 1978.....when I worked at Tom Taylor Music.....The Sunn Mustang. Actually licensed by Fender and made in India. This was before the era of the Squier Strat, when if you couldn't afford a yank plank you couldn't have a Fender at all. We sold truck loads of them!
The old ones are rock solid and still a damn good Strat. They come up regularly on e bay. See my previous post about my guitars over the years for my relic 'Old Red' Mustang.

Working in a music shop on the Isle of Wight in the late seventies was a real blast. Tom Taylor Music was a hub and meeting place for local musos, I had my little workshop out the back building and modifying guitars, the electrical repair side of things was taken care of by the brilliant Ron Fairweather.

I was nineteen and Saturdays were the highlight of my week. ‘Big Tom’ would lord it over bass lessons in his office, supplied by myself or Ron with cups of strong varnish like tea. ‘Prince’ Dave Kahn would teach guitar in the store room, clad in pvc jeans and posing on the table while playing Hendrix licks.

It was a glorious optimistic madhouse…Di marzio pickups were the latest craze, and with abandon we ripped and routed old Fenders and Gibbos…slapping in Super Distortions and little coil tap switches. Ibanez, Antoria and all the other ‘Law suit’ Japanese guitar makers were in full flow, and tasty instruments flooded in and were snapped up just as quickly. I have fond memories of demonstrating a twin neck Jimmy Page style Ibanez 6/12 string to customers.

The summers seemed to be long and hot then…perhaps just selective memory…I often played with the Alan Thomas Dance Quartet in the evenings, knocking out the St Bernards waltz and the Gay Gordons for the old folks on their SAGA holidays…..while in the days learning the punk and heavy metal genres and forming short lived but gloriously high energy bands every few weeks…or so it seemed. Few of those proto-bands ever gigged more than once, but man was it fun.

My Guitars over the last 30 or so years.

2009-03-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Me with my latest Strat

For those of you who are nerdy enough to like this sort of thing.....here is a list of just about every guitar I've owned.....I have tried to find pictures of similar instruments to illustrate the more unusual gems.

1. Old “parlour” acoustic guitar bought for me at an auction sale when I was eleven. Cost about three bob, and had a completely busted off headstock. Made a new head, and knowing nothing about guitars at the time turned up violin style tuning pegs on my Dad’s lathe.
Strung it with nylon strings (I think now it should have had steel) and hammered the hell out of it! It was German or Italian and very old…….Wish I still had it!

2. Black D28 copy acoustic: bought from Freemans Catalogue. Can’t remember the make, had a horrible action, dead sound due to several gallons of thick lacquer……Looked
fantastic, but a plank! Sold it (or gave it away in disgust).

3. Maya solid body electric: Cheap, ply bodied Stratish thing, bought from a junkshop for twenty quid. The first guitar I ever sorted the action out on……Couldn’t sort out the fact that it had a neck like a cricket bat however. Played it through an old valve tape recorder cos I couldn’t afford an amp. Sold it for £25……RESULT!

4. Strange Les Paulish thing I built myself: Got some bits of Mahogany counter top, copied the fret spacing from my Maya, body shape from the old Parlour guitar (adding two cutaways). Got a new Framus pickup from Stentor Music, a tunomatic bridge and a semi-acoustic tailpiece. Copied the fret spacing wrong so the damn thing would not play in tune above the fifth fret…….Learned to play slide on that one! Smashed it up at some point……Can’t remember why!

5. Antoria Les Paul copy: This was my first “proper” electric guitar. I will always have a soft spot for this instrument, it was truly lovely to look at, a la “sunburst 1959”, and its build quality was fantastic (man was it heavy). As so often happened in those far off seventies, the pickups let the whole shooting match down, so in went new fangled Di Marzios. Kept it a couple of years, till I got a yen for a “semi”.

6. Hofner President semi acoustic (1967): I worked part time in a music shop at the time (I was about 16) and fell in love with this old beauty. Someone had already bodged the pickups by fitting cheap Jap Telecaster pickups under the Hofner chrome Humbucker covers, so I fitted the Di Marzios off my Antoria, carved bigger pick up holes in the top, and the old girl really flew! It was my first gigging guitar and I even used it for Punk and Heavy Metal. Had it for a few years but eventually I got hard up and sold it to a mate for a silly-cheap price and I think he still gigs with it.

7. Fender Telecaster USA 1972: Black with maple neck (to be like the guy in the Stranglers). Thought it was time I got a real Yank guitar. Bought 2nd hand “sight unseen” from Telecoms music in Portsmouth for a couple of hundred quid. It played like a dream, but I have never really been a Tele convert so I sold it on……Should have kept this one, could have got a grand for it now!

8. Fender Precision bass: White, early seventies. What can I say? The best thing to drink tea out of is a cup, the best thing to play bass on is an old Precision. Sheer class. Never played it as much as I should……Feel quite guilty about that. Wound up passing it on to someone who would love it so that was alright in the end!

9. Manson solid body electric one and two: My Tele wasn’t driving my 50 watt Marshall “Plexiglass” head hard enough so chopped it in for British made Manson. Sexy thin neck, Ebony fingerboard Kent Armstrong pickups, lots of little switches and weighed a TON!
Many years later I bought another of these cheap (well battered). The second one was rubbish compared to the first!

10. Ibanez Flying V: Bought on a whim……Went into shop to buy strings……Came out with V! Super low action, lovely feel, sexy shape. Pickups were low powered so put on Di Marzios. I was mad to sell it, but was gigging with a band that had a real problem with the V’s image……Bye bye V…..Sob.

11. Another home made Les Paul Junior sort of thing: I seem to have a thing about building LP Junior copies. Built this one, never bothered to paint or varnish it slapped the ubiquitous Di Marzio Super Distortion pickup and rocked. I wish I could remember what happened to it!

12. Hofner (Japanese made) semi acoustic: Looked lovely, played like a dog, bent neck, gutless pickups…….I was given it what can I say! Sold it to a mug.

13. Westone 335 copy: I love BB King so I thought I’d love this guitar. Finish looked muddy like a half melted Malteaser, pickups were muddier…..Nice case though!

14. Casio Synth guitar: Why I bought this I don’t really know. Cheap and nasty “Super Strat” with unreliable synth tracking. Who wants to play a flute solo on a guitar?

15. Fenix or Phoenix Super Strat thing.

16. Ibanez Roadster: Funny guitar this, Strat shaped with two Humbuckers, nice maple neck, low action and lovely feel. I was teaching guitar at the time, and a student pestered me until I sold it to him.

17. Encore Strat. Bought it for peanuts at a local music store, stuck a Di Marzio Humbucker on the back, slim fast neck, but cheap locking bridge. Another one I flogged to a student!

18. Dreadnought twelve-string: Can’t remember the make. Looked fantastic, flamed maple veneer top, big blond and beautiful…….Tough on the fingers: I was using .08s on my electrics at the time so I wussed out and sold the 12.

19. Avon “EB1” Bass copy: I either bought or was given this sad specimen when I started to rehearse with Pete Hogman’s “Jukes”. 1970s vintage with a damaged neck/body joint, it used to self destruct on a regular basis. It was lovely for a guitarist to play due to its shorter scale. The finish looked like it had been attacked with a chain-flail, the electrics worked when they felt like it, another one I wish I still had!

20. Home made “Explorer” fretless bass: Wanted a bass, so I built one. It turned out pretty good, and got me the commissions to build several other instruments for local musos. It had a mahogany neck and body, with an ebony fingerboard and a single Di Marzio EB1 pickup. Played it for several years but in the end the light neck construction failed in a big way! I was adjusting the truss rod when the neck literally exploded! I gave the body to a mate……so it might still be about.

21. Fernandes BC Rich Mockingbird bass copy: Played this with the “The Jukes” when the EB1 copy used to get temperamental. A good bass with lots of punch but too rock and roll looking for a blues band!

22. Squier Heavy Metal Strat: Crappiest of the most crappy! Sick pink in colour, would not stay in tune, crap action, so gigged it a few times as a “slide plank”.

23. Gibson Les Paul special 1974 re-issue: This was my once in a lifetime guitar. As a guitar repair/set-up expert I had looked after this beauty for its owner for several years. Flat topped with twin P90 soap bar pickups it was as loud, raucous and typically American as the Gerry Springer Show! Its Light mahogany construction had lead to it getting a broken neck at some point in its history, so I bought it cheap (for a Gibson). Lord could that guitar wail out the Texas Blues!
WARNING: The second to worst crime in the world is to sell your guitar cos your hard up…….The worst crime is to sell your Gibson.

24. Squier Strat, candy apple red: Yawn! I mean this guitar was boring! Bought it as a “clean” option to gig with my Gibson LP. OK action, OK sound OK looks……Ended up smashing it up on stage to relieve the tedium……. The damn thing wouldn’t even break in an interesting way!

The Wilderness Years:
I sold all my instruments and amps in 1991 when my music shop folded, and gave up playing for nearly ten years. When I wanted to play again I was too skint to afford a decent “name” guitar, so I started scouring the junk shops for hidden gems!

25. Burton (or some similar name) black pointy super strat copy. Bought this off an American bass player in a mate’s band……cheap as he had a habit to feed! Not too bad an axe but I’m not really into super strats so I gave it away.

26. Trashed looking blue 1970s strat copy with no name….Kay or Kimbara or something perhaps: Bought it in a pawn shop when I was really hard up. Spotted that it had a solid brass bridge and a Bill Laurence Blade fitted….Got it for £35.00……Sold it after a few months (for a profit) to buy something trivial like food!

27.Italian acoustic D28 copy: 70s or early 80s (perhaps EKO). Bought from e-bay on the spur of the moment for £21.00 this is a cheaply produced but lovely sounding guitar. I set the action quite low for an acoustic, and repaired some of the old girl’s battle scars! She made me want to come over all finger picking. It got nicked!

28.Gallan 1970s Gibson SG copy. Bit of a rare beast this one. Bought off e-bay for under £80.00. I don’t think Gallan guitars were ever officially imported into this country, though they were probably made in the same factory as the Antoria and Ibanez copies that were! This model dates from the “lawsuit” era, and is a copy of one of the least popular SG models: the short lived “front routed” 72/73 type. Sold this guitar again a few months for a fat profit.

29.Squier Korean Strat.
Bought this for eighty quid or so on e bay, lumpy neck, ply body, weak pickups………….So stripped it for parts, flogged the neck and body on e bay. Other good bits went into………

30. Mongrel Strat no 1 built from bits sourced on e-bay features: a vintage Japanese Squier neck serial no 15587 fitted to a Squier Affinity series solid Agathis wood body for lightness.
I added Kent Armstrong pickups and naturally aged covers to give it
a honky Stevie Ray Vaughn type tone, with plenty of sustain. And with the slim-line body, no strain is put on my shoulder. It was a real looker with light relic work, and a mint scratchplate it is finished in “yellowed” white. Sold!

31.Epiphone “1957” Korina Flying V
A pissed conversation lead to me bidding on this beauty: At 200 quid with fitted case it was a bargain. Pots are awful, and machines are cheap and not very cheerful……….Neck heavy…….had to go!

32. 1962 Hofner Colorama: Bought this to do up and sell....sold it.

33. Sunn Mustang 'Old red' relic: built it, flogged it.

34. Squier Tele Custom: Nice body and pickups, nasty neck…ditched it.

35. Cruiser Tele: turned it into a 51 clone then flogged it.

36. My current strat: Korean neck, mahogany body, 1967 pickups…Luvverly!

37. Vintage SG Copy:

Amps I have had/used over the years:

My Dad’s tape recorder of course!

Some crappy Freemans catalogue 10 watt practice thing…..Two in fact as the first one blew up within a week!

Marshall “Plexiglass” 50 watt lead head with 2x Fender 2x12 cabs (early sixties). My first good amp that I ended up using for years. With a valve, tweed covered Watkins “Copycat” sat on top, this combination really rocked. Got a pint of best in the top at a gig and self destructed!

Marshall 100w lead head and two 4 by 12 cabs. Good but not as good as my old 50.

Crate 40 watt combo: Little and very heavy metal. Not quite loud enough for rock gigs, and the distortion was very “fizzy”. All well and good for bedroom Van Halens to do low volume widdley-widdley bits on!

Various Proamp combos: I had the music shop at the time and got these at cost price. They were very expensive all valve “Mesa Boogie” type amps, but they had a design flaw, or quality control problem: They sounded great, really rocked out, then they blew up. Often quite spectacularly. I remember one time the other guitarist was using one at a gig, when it started to ooze greenish smoke that smelt of prawn cocktail crisps! We had to put it outside to cool off in the rain. The company refused to acknowledge there was a problem with their products, and blamed their customers. I believe Proamp went bust in the end……..Like their amps really……..good riddance!

Peavey 120w piece of junk

Carlsbro GXL 80w Combo. Duff amp lovely speaker…….so I drove it with my Laney

Laney Lc15 All Valve Class A and Sweet as they come...but too small.

Laney Lc30.....now this rocks, and is what I use all the time now.

SG beater

2009-03-11T03:57:00.000-07:00

I’m just in the process of re building a Vintage V6 Gibbo SG copy at the moment……not that a 250 quid plank is worth fixing after having a ‘Townsend’ done on it like this one ……it’s just that this one came to me as a freebie and I have always had a soft spot for SGs, even fake ones.

The body was split completely in two when it was given to me in a sad plastic bag….the neck was smashed off, headstock split and several frets badly damaged. Normally I’d have stripped off the hardware and consigned the splintered woody bits to the nearest bin….adding the Wilkinson pickups and other bits to my parts store. I hesitated with this axe - I had played it before its violent demise and it was quite smooth but not remarkable in any way – I just could not bring myself to junk the not-so-old girl.

I started the SG’s resurrection by carefully sash-clamping and gluing the body back together while juggling the remains of the neck into position and gluing and clamping that back too. I fixed the split headstock last

I now had a cherry red Frankenstein’s jigsaw guitar….all in one piece again, but a mass of chipped glue lines. I am still making my mind up what finish I am going to put on the damn thing once I have sanded the stubborn thick polyester off the instrument. Chemical strippers don’t touch ‘Poly’ unfortunately.

For those of you interested I will catalog my progress until the beast is singing once more.

Go figure!

2009-01-14T03:46:00.000-08:00

Strange isn’t it……….As a guitarist in the late seventies it felt like a breath of fresh air when the likes of Di Marzio and Mighty Mite first started selling replacement pickups and hardware in the UK.; particularly for those of us who had dire seventies Fenders with their weak characterless pickups.

I remember getting my dad to hammer up his credit card (then new and unusual to have) for Di Marzios for my black 74 Telecaster……….and following that with a brass nut, a brass bridge, and half way decient Schaller machineheads. After the treatment it played like a dream and turned heads at gigs. We were all at it, Strats grew big chunky brass knobs and even brass scratchplates, Teles got bridges that could sport a humbucker on the back, and in fact we all got jiggy with the chisel, and even my old Hofner President was tricked out with two Super Distortion Dimarzios (yes I know I have sinned mightily and must do penance……..but I was young).

My point is it has now gone the other way: Recently I saw three grubby pots, a crappy capacitor and a few bits of wire advertised on e bay for over £300, as apparently they were a mega rare ‘untouched’ set from a 1970 Strat. Well first of all the fact that they still had the solder intact on some of the joints does not make them untouched……….the very act of ripping them out ruined their un-messed-with status, besides the fact that they were probably rubbish like most of the components on 1970s Fenders. I suppose because the prices of Pre CBS fenders bear more resemblance to 17th century violins than the mass produced items that they are has made any oldish Fender ‘collectable’ weather crap or not: however this does not explain how one dealer is attempting to sell a 1962 scratchplate for over £1000. If you put this on your Squier it will not make it play better………..in fact if you put this on a 1962 strat that one of my generation had given the ‘brass is good’ treatment it wouldn’t make that play better (It wouldn’t make it original either!)

I am a guitarist, an instrument builder and collector, and a lover of old Fenders………..but lets get real, three old crackly 1970s pots are worth very little, three new high quality modern US made pots will feel like silk by comparison. Three old seventies pickups will sound weak and cruddy compared to a set of ‘Fralins’ or even a set of mid priced Chinese or Korean alnico Wilkinsons!

We had a guitarist in our band in the late eighties who had a ‘sunburnt Malteaser’ mocha brown Strat with a black scratchplate and pickups. It had a crappy neck, a thin asthmatic sound, and looked aweful………..these now fetch mega bucks………go figure!

In the beginning there was Rock.....and he saw it was good!

2008-11-20T09:06:00.000-08:00

How did I start playing guitar? Well by accident really! It was 1969 and I was ten years old. My folks were obsessed with attending auctions at the local sale rooms, they had two or three self catering flats they used to let out to holiday makers, and used to pretty well furnish them completely at knock down prices from ‘Francis Pittis’ auctioneers. Anyway I was usually dragged along to the dusty smelly showrooms to hunt bargains, and on one occasion I spotted a dilapidated old guitar....what I now know to have been an old German ‘parlor’ acoustic.....filthy and with the headstock broken clean off. I don’t know why but I nagged my Mum and Dad rotten until they put a ‘four bob’ bid in on the pile of junk, and a couple of days later Dad brought it home. To be honest by the time I got my hands on it I had lost interest and gone back to my perennial pastime out of school hours if building Airfix models! The old Instrument sat forlorn in the corner of my bedroom for several months, until my Mother got fed up with blowing the dust off of it and relegated it to the loft.

There it might have languished but for a chance event.....I had an older cousin called Cheryl, she was about sixteen or seventeen and what I suppose you would call a hippy .... all cheese cloth skirts and feather boas! I suppose even at the age of innocent age of ten , I could see something alluring about this attractive young female......especially as she never ever seemed to wear a bra, unlike all the other females that surrounded me. When it was suggested therefore that she might like to take me (a bit of a sickly child) on the odd outing in her old, but quite extravagantly painted, Morris Oxford I was glad to go along.

This was how I came to be stood a year later in a field with 600,000 other people in the early hours of the last day of August. An eleven year old boy smuggled into one of the most significant music events in history by a gaggle of stoned teenagers to be spellbound by Jethro Tull, then completely thunderstruck by James Marshall Hendrix. It was the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, the summer of love was past and the mercurial career of probably the greatest guitar innovator there will ever be would soon end in tragedy. But that night burned into my soul and changed something in me forever.

Cheryl and her friends got into terrible trouble with my parents for keeping me out all night, but I had been infected with something far worse than a chill from the night air............all I could think about were guitars and playing, and the old acoustic was dug from the loft and hasty repairs were made. I remember thinking I was going to take on the world.....well when I learned to play I would anyway!

Heres some guitar porn to be going on with!

2008-11-19T09:19:00.000-08:00

HELLO TREACLE!

2008-11-19T04:26:00.000-08:00

This will be by way of a first post and introduction to the lair of the Guitar Weasel! A set of random musings from a nearing fifty rocker, who is coming to terms with having spent nearly forty years playing guitar and thirty five of those gigging!
Stories from just post Isle of Wight Festival 1970, through pub rock, punk rock, new romantic, poodle rock and beyond.
Guitars I have owned, muso’s I have played with, my thoughts on the ‘industry’, and on life in general…….
FOLLOW THE WEASEL!