Guitar
- A Body That Preserves Vibration
With the addition of a body to the T-beam bass, it begins to resemble an instrument. The body is a 3 mm (around 1/8") acrylic (or plexiglass) shield, cut with a saw and an angle grinder, polished, and bent in shape with a hot air gun. As with almost everything...
- New Tuners
I've always wanted to try out my a particular form of tuners for headless guitars and basses. They work by having a scew pulling a brass block in which the ball end of the string is mounted. The main inspiration was Jeff Turpin's tuners; drawings...
- Bridge And Tuners For The Headless Design
Having settled on a headless design, one of the next questions was which bridge and tuners to use. A small number of bridges with built-in tuners already exist, e.g. the ABM or the Steinberger. Unfortunately, they are all fairly expensive, and it was...
- Guitar Ergonomics
The classical Guitar Back in the old days, before we had electric guitars, a guitar looked like this: CC Martin Möller, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Germany, resized by me It's beautiful and sounds nice, but it's not...
- Background - Why And How
Over the last years, I've become more and more interested in building guitars rather than (just) playing them. I never got around to actually building anything, but I took a couple of guitars apart and put them together again. I also discovered, that...
Guitar
more sketches
I was thinking that I could explain a little bit to the new readers of this blog what I'm trying to do here… This morning as I was making these sketches (sitting in the sun at the terrace of a cool Viennese café), I realized that the D model could easily be seen as an extravagant batwing-shaped guitar with a fancy headstock, while I was trying to reach something both simple and ergonomic - and still cool…
Aluminium neck, headstock and hollow central beam are meant for perfect rigidity, hence big sustain (the back of the neck should have wooden inserts like a Kramer to keep a familiar feel), and the wooden wings add uneven mass for sound richness - the windows lighten the weight of the guitar. Upper wing is for arm rest, lower wing shape allows to easily rest on both legs when playing sitting, with a neck in upper position for playing comfort, and wide cutaway for easy access. The reverse headstock gives better access to the tuners with a high neck, and the whole shape of the headstock is wall hanger friendly - also the guitar can lean against a wall. The controls - reduced to one volume, one tone and switch as the less the better - are under the beam so they don't get in the way while strumming, but still are of easy access.
I often draw Bigsby trems on radical designs to give a more traditional feel - it should help to make a basic guitarist accept a non-Les Paul / Stratocaster guitar. Wouldn't you love to play that guitar?
- A Body That Preserves Vibration
With the addition of a body to the T-beam bass, it begins to resemble an instrument. The body is a 3 mm (around 1/8") acrylic (or plexiglass) shield, cut with a saw and an angle grinder, polished, and bent in shape with a hot air gun. As with almost everything...
- New Tuners
I've always wanted to try out my a particular form of tuners for headless guitars and basses. They work by having a scew pulling a brass block in which the ball end of the string is mounted. The main inspiration was Jeff Turpin's tuners; drawings...
- Bridge And Tuners For The Headless Design
Having settled on a headless design, one of the next questions was which bridge and tuners to use. A small number of bridges with built-in tuners already exist, e.g. the ABM or the Steinberger. Unfortunately, they are all fairly expensive, and it was...
- Guitar Ergonomics
The classical Guitar Back in the old days, before we had electric guitars, a guitar looked like this: CC Martin Möller, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Germany, resized by me It's beautiful and sounds nice, but it's not...
- Background - Why And How
Over the last years, I've become more and more interested in building guitars rather than (just) playing them. I never got around to actually building anything, but I took a couple of guitars apart and put them together again. I also discovered, that...