The Song Has Ended

Ten months of design, experimentation, purchasing, assembly, anxiously waiting while it was being worked on at Mike & Mike's, and tweaking at home, and I now have my first ever custom instrument.  And just in time for the target date of March 8th, 2015—my 30th birthday.

 

I couldn't have known when the process started in April, but working on this guitar seriously helped to get me through one of the toughest periods of my life—for the fall of 2014, taking on a full-time course load at North Seattle Community College while still working my full-time job.  When I couldn't see friends, when I was losing sleep, when I was up to my eyeballs in math and physics and programming homework, I had something tangible to look forward to.  I'm convinced that the idea and the followthrough were a gift from the Lord.  Now that it's over, I actually miss the journey of working on this project.  It feels funny, like mental pins and needles.  But the time is moving on.  I'm leaving my job of three years so I can solely focus on pursuing my engineering degree.

Tackling this project through the lenses of the Classical versus the Romantic, as described in Robert Pirsig's Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, felt like both a complicated math equation and a celebration of my history with guitar, which I loved.  Both sides came together to produce something unique and special.  My friends became excited for and fascinated with the process as it went along.  Michael Adams, tech extraordinaire who has had his hands on perhaps hundreds of guitars, told me that Big Riff was one of the most exciting guitars he had worked on last year.  He paid me the highest compliment: "It's not something I would ever go for, but everything worked together beautifully."

I've already been asked what the next project will be.  I wish I could keep on designing and making guitars!  But I can't, at least not for now.  Big Riff was my attempt at an "end-all be-all" double fat Strat with a built-in sustainer device, which could handle metal.

If I had the ability to make another guitar, it would be a baritone.  I've been interested in baritone guitars since I was a teenager.  There's something awesome about the increased scale length and low-end girth.  The problem with baritones is that guitar manufacturers tend to view them as secondary: poorly made, with a cheap black paint job and an irredeemably disgusting tribal motif intended for nu-metal fans to go "Yeeeaaaaah!  F***in' cool, bro!"  OR, they're just a knock-off of a traditional Fender design and are always equipped with single-coils pickups.  Why aren't there humbucker-equipped baritones, with original new designs and made with quality wood and components?  There's a void there in guitardom.  7- and 8-string guitars are finally being taken seriously as professional quality instruments, but given the longer scale length which impairs the ability to bend strings (even high ones), you'd think that heavy guitarists would be content with foregoing high strings and asking more for baritones.

In the last few years, I've also been interested in guitars made with unconventional materials like acrylic and aluminum.  Acrylics aren't common, but they have been around for a while.  The Dan Armstrong plexi is a classic instrument with an innovative "hot swap" pickup design (seriously, why didn't this take off?).  It's heavy, unusually expressive and clear—no pun intended—and fun.

Photo pulled from Google image search.

And then there's Electrical Guitar Company.  These folks craft space-age looking necks machined from aluminum.  I've yet to play with one, as they're a custom order only, but sweet goodness they look amazing.  The bodies may still be made out of wood, or chambered aluminum with a slick polished "mirror" finish...

(Google image search)

...Or acrylic WITH the aluminum neck!  Best of both worlds!

WHAT IN THE WORLD?!  (Google image search)

And then there's the Moog Guitar.  It's like having a sustainer on speed.  Both pickups are independent devices which can be set for sustaining or stopping power, and the pickup operations can be blended for out-of-this-world harmonics.  And it's not a cheap sound-effect gimmick, either: the strings are actually being affected to produce these tones.  The Moog Guitar comes complete with a built-in ladder filter.  It's unfortunate that these guitars have already been discontinued.  I'm certain the $3400 price point didn't help its cause:

A millenium ahead of its time.

Obviously these materials and designs reach far beyond anything I could ever ask Warmoth to do if I wanted to build another custom guitar.  But this is where my mind goes in my ongoing quest for tone.  I don't want a vintage or "relic-ed" instrument.  Give me the unusual stuff.  The really unusual stuff.  Perhaps, after another three years of school and electrical engineering degree attained, I will have ideas for even more guitar functions that haven't been explored yet.

Anyway, enough of that.  This blog will remain online as an archive to an entire beginning-to-end process, and if I get to design another axe, I may decide to reinstate it.

I need to thank the heroes who made Big Riff possible:

Warmoth guitars — Everything about my experience with them has been awesome.  Well-laid-out website on both the body/neck design and purchasing ends.  Every time I needed to call them to ask a technical question, the very first person I talked to on the phone answered that question; there was not a single "Oh, that's not my department, let me transfer you to..."  Also, EVERY order came in on time or earlier, including the birdseye maple neck.  I would be proud to do business with them again.

Angeles Moreno — Angeles was super cool about sending me the Moogdula font for the headstock logo.  Through our email interaction, she seemed pleasantly surprised that someone wanted to feature her handiwork on a musical instrument.

Chris Mannino — My coworker who helped by making the vinyl labels for the headstock.  They're killer and I now have spares!

Michael Adams and Mike & Mike's Guitar Bar — What can I say?  In his last month in Seattle, Mike really pulled through and did a thoroughly kickass job with the electronics as well as with fixing several small points on the body and neck.  There was only one person I would have felt comfortable bringing it to for wiring the Sustainiac, and he took charge of it like the expert professional that he is.  Mike, thank you again, friend, and I'm so happy for you and Charissa as you both pursue your passions in Los Angeles.  Mike Ball (aka "Other Mike") told me "This doesn't have to end just because Mike [A.] is away."  I'll be sure to visit as often as I can!

And I'd like to thank God, the Creator, who has made us in his image and given us the capacity be creative.  May the music I make with this instrument be pleasing to him.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Iconography: The Headstock Complete

I neglected to talk about the headstock decals I had made (!!!) because it had to be done in a couple of phases.  Well, the cat's out of the bag:

Alright, so the satellite's reversed, but give me a break; it's badass.

A quick word before I get too far: I don't know anything about waterslide decals, or how to go about getting custom waterslide decals made for that matter, but there's a label department at my manufacturing job and I asked if it would be okay to print vinyl labels for personal use.  The same thing?  On our scale of printing, I could get a sheet of black-on-clear labels, they could be custom die-cut (I think plotted is the right word here), and it would cost virtually nothing.  The results were fantastic.  Read and look on:

Let's refer back to the Finishing The Neck Design post from July.  I postulated that I wanted the number 15 on the back of the headstock, inside a circle.  I was convinced that I wanted a logo or a trademark for the main part of the front side of the headstock, and that it should be in the same font as the front cover of Cave In's Jupiter record.  I was leaning toward Big Riff, but hadn't come to a conclusion yet and would give myself the time to figure it out.  However, with the project being inspired so heavily from Cave In's music—and my undying love for both metal and space rock—the satellite logo from Jupiter was picked to go on the circular end of the headstock.  (Is there a name for that part, by the way?)

Same font?  Look at the letter 'V'.  Someone's going to find this blog later and say "Well DUH, Nick, that's _________."  Please do.

That Cave In font.  Just, IMPOSSIBLE to find.  I scoured Google; no luck.  I put up a .jpg of Jupiter on my Facebook wall and asked my Seattle designer friends to tell me what it was; no one knew.  I asked Cave In themselves through Twitter.  The question was put off to Hydra Head, no doubt to Aaron Turner (Hydra Head founder, Isis [the band!], Old Man Gloom, + 500 other projects).  Turner did the artwork/design for that record.  No answer.

Cave In, if you get to read this, thank you for trying.

I put off looking for a font through November and December since that's when the majority of the hardware pieces came in AND when it was Go Time to send it off to Mike & Mike's Guitar Bar for tech work.  The search picked up again in January.  Should I bother with a font at all, and simply pay a designer (plenty of friends to choose from) to make a custom logo?  Maybe that fat '70s style headstock would do well with a '70s style logo.  Big, wavy letters.  But that idea just didn't seem right.  With all of the tech considerations and that satellite logo on the end, I needed the main logo to look modern.

This launched a small-scale study of typography itself.  For example, I like Futura a lot and have used it in the past for my YouTube videos, but I didn't realize that it dates all the way back to 1927.  I had a coworker telling me about all kinds of font design things, which was fascinating (but I've forgotten by now).  And I was scouring the web trying to find a free font that looked sci-fi and retro.  I found some cool stuff, but nothing clicked.

But then I thought...  WHAT ABOUT MOOG?

Why didn't I think about this sooner?  As a longtime fan and user of Moog products, of course I'd be proud to emulate the Moog logo for my own logo—by this time, I knew I wanted the guitar to be definitively titled Big Riff.  I assumed I'd be able to find the font easily—surely it must exist, right?—but to the best of my ability to learn about it online, it looked like the logo was simply designed for Moog back in the sixties and it stuck.  Hmph.

Then, in a moment of blessing, I found this on a message board:

The Moog documentary film, since purchasing it in 2006, has continued to be a source of inspiration to me.  I hadn't made the connection all these years that the font used in the film was based on the Moog logo, but at the same time, I was very well familiar with Ms. Moreno's work:

Highly recommended, whether you're a synth player or [like me] any other type of musician.

So I emailed Angeles Moreno, and she was gracious enough to send me her Moogdula font for free, with one stipulation, "Show me what you do with it!"

It took some additional planning on my part,

But the result turned out much better than I had expected.

Perfect.

Remember the number 15 that I wanted for the back of the headstock?  I decided to go with Futura.  We set it up so that there would be a black circle around the number, but the plotter just couldn't cut it quite right, so I cut out the number by itself:

Fifteen years of pursuing my craft since age fifteen.

By the way, I've got plenty of spares in case anything happens.

...Incredible.  The guitar is now 100 percent complete.  No more additions.  No more tweaking.  It's all there, it all works, and I'm totally satisfied with it.  I'm ready to wrap up this blog with one final post in the next week or so.

By the way, I've actually been enjoying the tone of the Sustainiac when used as a neck single-coil pickup.  It's a new thing for me.  Jangling, open chords just sound great.  I'm thinking about getting a compressor pedal sometime so I can replicate the guitar sound in the verses of the song "Wounded" by Third Eye Blind, which I talked about in my Top Ten Tones post.