A Feedback Loop In The Head

It's time to start designing the body, and right off the bat there are some major complications.  In order to gain the most amount of... manipulative flexible potential with the strings, I want Big Riff to have a floating Floyd Rose bridge and a feedback controller like a Sustainiac or a Fernandes Sustainer.  These options mean routing wood out of the guitar and meticulously planning angles and dimensions and such.  Exciting and daunting and annoying all at once.

The Sustainiac Stealth Pro and the Fernandes Sustainer are pickups that can be switched on to act as an electromagnet to cause guitar strings to vibrate continuously, and allow for control of the feedback.  For those players who are familiar with the EBow, pickup feedback controllers are exactly like that except they activate any of the six strings on the fly and of course, are permanently mounted.  They do work on their own as a pickup, and both brands come in single coil or humbucker variations.

I've had an EBow for almost a decade by this point and love the control that it offers, especially when set in the fifth harmonic mode.  Add a delay to that and you'll find yourself floating in the audio equivalent of rays of light.  Fernandes tends to market their Sustainer-equipped guitar line toward metal players, but I think it's redundant since a metal guitarist is more likely than anyone to get feedback from pushing the gain on their amps so hard.  The simplicity and usefulness of feedback control goes far beyond the headbanging chucklehead looking to create noise; it allows for beautiful passages that couldn't otherwise be obtained.

For the layperson, I promise you know what that sounds like:

Anyway, so, using an EBow is rad until you need to set it down and start strumming the guitar mid-song, which takes an awkward five seconds.  A sustainer-equipped guitar will have two small switches mounted on the top: one to turn it on, and the other to switch between natural and harmonic modes.  No mess, just reach down and turn it on or off.  Pretty damn cool.

...Except that this means a battery and circuit board install are required.  Warmoth allows a routing option for placing either one or two 9-volt batteries on the back of the guitar.  Sustainiac and Fernandes single-coil and humbucker versions require just a single 9-volt, so no big deal.  However, that circuit board could cause problems.  I need to know the dimensions of each and determine how to make it fit in the control cavity.

There are two options:

1. Top rout, which is the traditional Strat style and my preferred way to go since I intend to put a pickguard on the guitar:

2. Rear rout, which I'm sure will fit either circuit board but effectively eliminates the need for a pickguard (though I want one):

This is the rout style of my beloved flame-top Jackson SL2H Soloist.

The FAQ section on Fernandes's website tells me the Sustainer circuit board itself is 3" long x 2" wide x 1" deep.  The switches are 1" apart and mounted directly to the top of the PCB.

Pulled this photo from a Google image search; it's the cleanest Fernandes Sustainer install I've seen in a Strat-style body (Ibanez JEM).

The Sustainiac's circuit board is 3.75" long by 1.15" wide by .725" tall, so it's longer but much thinner.  The switches can be wired anywhere.

Google image search result: Sustainiac PCB tucked away neatly into a section which would be covered by a pickguard.  This top rout configuration looks ideal.

It just might work, but I'm already really annoyed skimming through the technical details on Sustainiac's webpage.  So much info to sift through.  Choosing between the two systems will not be easy.

Why does all of this matter?  Because I want to get it right on the first try.  Most guitarists who do the feedback controller thing have to deal with a a pre-existing guitar setup working against them.  I want this to be the foremost consideration in order to have as little wood carved out of the body as possible for maximum resonance.  This post was actually supposed to be about the wood that I would have chosen for the body, but then I got sidetracked.

*sigh*  Time to rest up.

On The Romantic

Who Inspires You?

I realized as I was writing my first post that there was quite a lot of information that I was leaving out of it, but do feel is necessary, before I dive into the realm of numbers and settings.  One of my favorite books is called Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.  I don't subscribe to a Buddhist worldview at all, but Pirsig makes a fascinating case on the dichotomy between what he calls the classical and the romantic views.  Classical means a thing being the literal sum of its parts.  Romantic is the pursuit or emotion or mystique behind it.

Let's break this down in terms guitarists will understand:

The Classical:
-An electric guitar is [almost always] made up of two or more pieces of wood attached together to form a "neck" and a "body".
-These pieces of wood also have components attached to convert the energy of a plucked string to an electrical signal to be carried to an amplifier.
-A guitar neck can be bolted on to the body, "set" in (meaning glued to the body), or carved so that it goes through the body.
-Scale length is the distance from the bridge to the nut.  The typical scale length for most Fender models is 25.5 inches, while Gibson's is 24.75 inches.
-Tonewoods, pickups, potentiometers, wire, truss rod, scarf joint, strap pegs, pickguard, jack/jack plate, binding, paint, lacquer, fretboard, frets, and so on.

The Romantic:
-Every term meant to generate buzz like "Made in USA", "vintage", "boutique", "custom", etc.
-Les Paul left an indelible mark in modern music with his songwriting craft as well as his genius as an inventor.  The Gibson guitar that now bears his namesake is the most easily recognizable next to the Fender Stratocaster and Telecaster.
-Ted McCarty, CEO for Gibson from 1948 to 1966, is considered to have ushered in the company's "golden era", a period of unprecedented workmanship and innovation in the electric guitar world.  Instruments from this time are still some of the most sought after in the vintage buyer market.
-A few of the original master builders that made up Jackson's custom shop in the early '80s, still work for Jackson over thirty years later, though the company as a whole is now owned by Fender.  As metal has become popular again throughout the 2000s, the wait period for a new custom axe is over a year.
-Bill Haley & His Comets rocking around the clock, Elvis Presley's shaking hips, Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival, Pete Townshend's windmills and nightly gear destruction, George Harrison's gently weeping guitar, Jimmy Page's double-neck stairway to guitar solo heaven, Eddie Van Halen's eruption into shredder glory, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera...

Alright, you get the idea.

So the Classical has to do with the actual features of an instrument here, and the Romantic is made up of the stories, the impetus behind why we choose this or that guitar, etc.  We tend to gravitate toward one of the two spheres as our way of viewing the world, but Pirsig's point is that both are equally valid and important.  In order to move forward with the planning phase of building my own custom guitar, I get to (and need to) revisit my own history with the instrument.

The Case For The Double Fat Strat 

Feast your eyes on this.  Stare at it for a while, because Lord knows how many hours I've spent doing so when I was sixteen:

It's in the photograph of love...

After a stint of listening exclusively to Christian rock (much of it was terrible!) during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I decided that I needed more guitar distortion than I was getting.  It was 2001, and word passed around that Weezer were coming back to reign in a new era of dorky power chord fuzziness.  The Green album was the first secular record I bought to break my "fast".  [I bought Blue and Pinkerton shortly thereafter and yes, I'm now one of those their-earlier-material-was-better purists.]

No visible tattoos, no piercings, no hats, no grunge beards [extra points if you catch the reference!], just a group of nerds who want to rock.  And there's Rivers Cuomo, front and center with a Warmoth double fat Strat covered in stickers, and that lightning bolt strap.  That thing floored me, actually; it was the coolest thing I had ever seen then.  There was something fresh and punk as #&$% about it.  Weren't Strats supposed to have three single coil pickups?  Here we have the same familiar style and comfort, but those humbuckers and stickers...  Clearly this was meant to be LOUDER.

Of course, I had to follow suit with my Squier:

Note the Weezer sticker behind the bridge.  This is as edgy as a teenage Christian rocker guitarist can get.  It did not get me any female attention.

That's a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails humbucker in the bridge position.  I had originally planned to add a Cool Rails in the neck and a Little '59 in the middle positions, but I caught on to the Gibson thing once I found a hardtail bridge and a set neck to be more agreeable with what I wanted to do.  Why spend money outfitting a crummy Squier with new pickups when I could get dual humbuckers in my next guitar, an Epiphone G-400?  And so I moved on from there.

But there is still something to be said for the contoured comfort of a Stratocaster.  It just... fits.  The iconic instrument connects every guitarist with the rock and roll dream.  I love that.  My main arguments against it mainly have to do with the pickup configuration and the lack of handling capacity for heavier music, but those elements can be fixed.  If I want a double fat Strat, so be it.

I didn't even bother talking about my other major Strat hero, Billy Corgan, but that's enough for the Chautauqua today.  Warmoth design to begin with the next installment.  Enjoy:

That Dream Guitar

Greetings.  My name is Nicholas Greenwood.  Welcome to my nerdy blog wherein I will document my journey to build my dream electric guitar made of custom ordered parts from Warmoth.  I expect this to be a year-long project.

My first guitar was a Squier Affinity Stratocaster which my grandparents gave me for my fifteenth birthday (I was a freshman in high school).  That moment of arrest when I first laid eyes on it is forever seared into my memory.  I knew then that something amazing had just been added to my life.  In those first couple of years of playing, I adored everything Fender, and looked forward to the day when I might own a real Fender, not just a Squier.

Free, er, I mean, Fender love!

But Fenders are really hit-or-miss for me, or rather, occasionally-hit-and-mostly-miss.  I like the curves of a Stratocaster but just can't get over the clack and noise of single-coil pickups.  I get annoyed when Telecaster owners brag about some purported legendary twang; I tend to hear more plink.  The strings seem to sag when they ring out.  The attack on a typical Strat or Tele just isn't quick enough to take the kind of fast and heavy-handed palm muting that has become my primary approach to the instrument.  Every now and then a Fender comes along that has some serious mojo, you know, that one, but then I go home knowing that within a month it will be swiped from the guitar shop it rests in before I can get to it.

And so, for years, I gave up on Fender (though I do like their designs) and focused on brands like Gibson and Jackson as my playing style gravitated toward hardcore and metal.  Heavier, more beefy, more sustain, able to take a beating.  I now own my second Gibson Explorer and have had a Flying V.  I own my second Jackson SL2H Soloist, which over the past couple of years has become my main axe; it has the fastest attack and most sustain of any guitar I've owned.  Jackson's compound-radius, quartersawn maple neck-through just takes anything you can give it and dishes it back.  I love it and will refer to it often in this blog.

I just won't let go of my beloved humbuckers and now feel comfortable enough and even excited to do what I previously though was a waste: have them in a bolt-on guitar.  The draw for a Stratocaster has come full circle.  But Fender just isn't going to put in all of the features I want, and so I have chosen to turn my back on them.  Charvel's recent Pro-Mod So Cal models look promising, but I came to a conclusion that I could get a lot more of the features I want for only a little raise in price, plus the DIY aspect makes the idea resonate more in my mind.  My friend Michael Adams over at Mike & Mike's Guitar Bar recently built a Rivers Cuomo replica Strat with pieces ordered from Warmoth...  Bingo.

I don't agree that every guitar needs a name, but this one does.  Guitarists have a weird corner on attributing exotic feminine themes to their instruments, looking wistfully away as they whisper the name of their muse: Charlene.  Luciana.  Daphne.  Ramona...

What?  This is rock and roll.  How about naming a guitar Star Destroyer?  Or some other rad name like Kid Monster, Jabberwocky, Cloaking Device, Trident, Particle Beam, Mystery Rune, Fire Smash, Pillar of Smoke, Synesthesia, or None More Black?

The moniker that's sticking in my mind at this time is Big Riff.  It seems a little too simple, and I'm not married to it, but it is the name of a Cave In song and a suitable suggestion for the sound I'm going for.  Big Riff will come together in pieces and hopefully see the light of day just before my thirtieth birthday next year, which marks the moment where I've been playing guitar for half of my life.  Ambitious?  Sure.

The intent is to balance all of the things I've been excited about with electric guitar design, past and present:
-Strat body with some funky surf color.
-Dual humbuckers, effectively making this a double fat Strat.
-Maple neck and fretboard because I've not yet had that on a guitar.
-Floyd Rose tremolo.
-Customizable for future pickup or electrical configurations (Duncan Liberator pickup selector, Fernandes Sustainer, etc.).
-Bright, fast attack, and built for shredding.

Early research to ensue on:
-Body tonewoods: Will a maple body be overkill on the highs?
-Circuit board size and power requirements for a Fernandes Sustainer system and/or active pickups.  This will affect internal routing of the body.
-Routing for recessed Floyd Rose trem—I want a floating bridge rather than a fixed one, but will it also accept an EVH D-tuna mod?

Going back over all of this, I seem a little scatterbrained, but I'm definitely excited.  I'll unpack these details and many more in future installments.  Time to fly to Jupiter: