Huginn – Pickup Choice

Posted on May 7, 2014 by mattICT in Bespoke | Leave a comment

For the Bridge I have chosen to utilise an EMG HZ4 just like Muninn. I found this pickup to give a very good ‘hot’ metal sound when driven hard.

As Huginn will have a brighter and more mellow finish with the gold hardware and ashen-grey finish, i wanted a little more warmth and tone in the neck position, whilst keeping the raw aggression of an over-wound humbucker. In this case I have opted for a custom Alan Entwistle ‘Darkstar’. This has an open-coil appearance by default, so i will be adding a plastic covering to give it more of an EMG vibe for symmetry.

Taming Huginn

Posted on May 6, 2014 by mattICT in Bespoke, portfolio | Leave a comment

This body (the twin of Muninn) has been cut out and ready for finishing for over twelve months now, since I began the Muninn build. Most of my time recently has been spent on a couple of personal projects, but I felt it was time to crack on with this project now.

As these two builds have drawn inspiration from two Ravens, a dark finish is a necessity. To set Huginn aside from its twin, I have decided to go with a lighter finish and gold hardware instead of all black.

The body has gone through the same black-dyeing process as Muninn to highlight the heavy open grain of the Swamp Ash. This is then sanded back to 220 grit revealing a much darker figuring where the more open-pored grain retains the black dye. For Huginn though, this has been done on the face and bottom chamfer of the guitar only, the back and sides remain fully black. My intention is to then finish the body with a trans-white Wudtone product. The full black of the back and sides should form a dark grey finish and the top will hopefully be a lighter ashen-grey with dark grain highlights (lowlights??).

Chamfered Edge

The bottom chamfer in this case will act as pin-stripe highlighting the natural timber as it will not be finished in the trans-white coating at all. This will leave the thin strip with a dark-grained amber-gold edge which will complement the gold hardware nicely.
This chamfering was designed originally to give the bottom profile of the Raven body a sharper defined, blade like edge. Taking inspiration from other guitar builders, I toyed with the idea of having a strong contrasting colour along this chamfer, like a red or navy blue, but did not want this aspect to be over-bearing. The natural finish will act like a window into the timbers character underneath.

The next step will be to inlay Raven silhouette design into the fretboard. This will be quite large and will be centered on the12th fret, maybe spanning across frets 10, 11, 13 and 14.

Body Mounting Humbuckers

Posted on April 30, 2014 by mattICT in Bespoke, Skills & Services | Leave a comment

Pickups traditionally need some form of bracket to mount them to the guitar; Pickup_Ring e.g. Stratocasters have pick-guards and Les Pauls have pickup rings. The mounting bolts pass through the pick-guard or ring, through an adjusting spring or silicone tube and finally screw into the pickups threaded side tabs. pickguard The height of the pickup is then adjusted by tightening or loosening the bolt on either side, while the spring or silicone tube applies the constant resistance required so that the pickup doesn’t flap around and moves up and down with the adjustment.

Mounting a pickup directly to the body is almost the inverse of this process.

The routing of the pickup area does not need to be as large. In fact it is desirable for the routing to be as tight as possible with the chosen pickup so that any gaps are minimal, limiting sight into the cavity. Failure to do this results in a finish similar to Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstein guitar.

“Franky”

Body-mount

I found when researching the options for body mounting that there were very few solutions available. The general consensus seems to be changing the mounting bolts for wood screws that pass though the pickup tabs and directly into the guitar body. This obviously means that the threaded holes in the pickup need to be drilled out to allow a screw to pass though freely. Most solutions add a piece of foam between the back of the pickup and the guitar body, creating the resistance in place of the springs/silicone used with pickup rings. The length and diameter of the wood screw in this case would be very critical as it would need to be sized accurately for the required final height the pickup once complete. Adjustment of the pickup height by the customer would then be at risk of the screws possibly coming right through the back of the guitar if they were too long.

Screws of unknown length, girth and finish to mount a pickup didn’t appeal to me. Putting a bit of foam in one of my guitars with the hope that it remained spongy, also seemed destined to fail and an overall bodge, so I decided to do it my own way.

Pickup base-plates are readily available from guitar building sites such as AxesRus, which are used for building custom-wound pickups. They’re cheap, they have holes pre-drilled which can be used for mounting and the tabs are already exactly spaced and threaded to fit any standard 6-pole humbucker. It seemed very logical to just mount one of these plates upside down in the pickup cavity. The side tabs (then facing upwards) mirror the pickup to be fitted, and act as a bracket for mounting. This also allows for the supplied bolt and spring configuration for resistance. I couldn’t believe that nobody else had seemed to have tried this.

HumBase-Plate The threaded holes in the side tabs of the chosen pickup still need to be drilled out to allow the bolts to pass through freely, but this is the only modification required (with possible exception to the mounting bolts).

NB: In a recent build the bolts were so long that they ‘bottomed out’ into the pickup cavity when I tried to lower the pickup. Simply snipping off around 4 mm of the bolt with some side-cutters and tidying up with a needle file quickly fixed this.

A clean, tidy mounting method and no worries of wood screw length/girth or shabby bits of foam.

The Ragnarok Concept

Posted on April 24, 2014 by mattICT in Bespoke, Conceptual | Leave a comment

Following the completion of Huginn, as always my projects come in pairs to keep myself busy (like the Sith: ‘No more. No less’), so along with the Green Man I intend to base a guitar on a Nordic theme again: Ragnarok – the death of the Gods.

‘The Great Day of His Wrath’, John Martin 1853

In Norse mythology, Raganarok (‘Fate of the Gods’) will be the final battle that occurs on the Vigrid Plain following three years of Winter. Ragnarok is prophesised and Odin will try in vain to avert it’s coming, but ultimately he will be devoured by the great wolf Fenrir. All the fallen warriors in Valhalla will rise once more and fight in the battle to end all battles.

‘Tyr and Fenrir’, John Bauer 1911

My first 7 string build to date; at this moment in time I plan to do a little research into some on-board effects for the guitar also like high gain or tonal boosts to increase the array of possibilities native to the instrument. Coil splitting will be included with the single humbucker configuration and a fixed bridge setup.

White Grain Filler

The inevitability of this prophesised ‘end of days’ conjures images of a brewing storm on the horizon. I am using this influence for choosing the finish of the guitar. In this case I am thinking of a Blood red/Deep Purple sun-burst fading into black towards the outside edges of the body. As Ragnarok is prophesised to follow three years of winter, and include the world devouring Frost Giants as major contributors in the battle, I think it would be good acknowledge the cold in some way. I am thinking a white grain filler to emphasise the wood grain as an ice white highlight running through the design. Like fissures in the doom.

With regard to inlays; I have seen some brilliant examples of Nordic design in the British Museum a few months ago which will be a very good starter for inspiration. The fretboard will be very wide, so there will be plenty of space for a decent design reaching up to the headstock.

Valknut

Odin with Muninn & Huginn, Alan Lee

For the headstock I think a ‘Valknut’ symbol would be apt. A Valknut is an interlocked motif of three triangles and represents slain warriors. They have been found on many Norse stone carvings with funery motifs, and represent a slain warrior or mark the wearer as willing to be sacrificed by Odin himself.

As this is a 7-stringer, I will need to give a little thought to the headstock design as I intend to use a balanced split of machine heads. So in other words not all in a row like Fender and some Ibanez, but split either side like Gibson and Gretch. This means it will have an asymmetry of 4×3 machine heads. So I plan to research some Nordic spearhead designs in tribute of Gungnir, Odin’s weapon.
A broken spear-tip would allow the off-set design I require, much like the ESP headstocks in the Ltd range.

This guitar needs to be awesome in every aspect. It must look and sound capable of committing deicide.

Abalone Inlay Process

Posted on April 22, 2014 by mattICT in Skills & Services | Leave a comment

This post charts the process of inlaying my standard logo into the headstock of a personal guitar project. In this case, I am using MGuest_Logo_Inlay Black Tahiti Abalone, which gives black, green and purple hues in different lights. This has been chosen as a match for the Walnut neck predominantly for its darker appearance.
Once the design has been cut out and finished with needle files (see previous posts), the inlay is glued to the headstock, and once dried, scored around with a scalpel. This can be tricky with heavily grained timbers like Walnut as the blade can catch in the grain and travel off course. I am waiting for the delivery of an engineer’s scribe for future work, as this should make things easier on the first pass.

At this point ideally, some coloured chalk should be cross-hatched around the scoring to highlight the boundaries of the design to be routed. Snooker chalk is good for this, but I couldn’t find anything in the ‘Man-drawer’ that would suffice, so I did without. This becomes very tricky as the cutting progresses due to the build-up of sawdust covering the guidelines.
A Dremel multi-tool and Stewart MacDonald router base are essential for intricate routing work like this.

When adjusting the cutting depth, it’s always better to cut deeper than required, especially with a thick substrate like abalone. This allows a much greater tolerance for a tight fit. It’s easy to pad the routing with epoxy to raise the level if the inlay is sitting too low.
I mix the leftover sawdust with some epoxy resin to create a darker colour. Without this darkening effect, the resin can tend to look too translucent and can spoil the definition of the edges of the inlay.
Even though they reckon Epoxy doesn’t shrink during the curing process like super glue, I find that it does tend to settle and can leave holes and gaps if the excess is skimmed off. For this reason I leave a good mound of Epoxy over the inlay to cure (a minimum of 24 hours).

It’s then just a case of sanding off the excess after curing. I started with 80-grit, and worked down to 240 via 180. As a Wudtone finish is going to be applied to this neck, I did not want to sand the timber too fine. However, to ensure the inlay itself is highly polished, I used some 0000 ultra-fine steel wool and a little Lemon oil as a lubricant to make it shine.

Green Man Inspiration

Posted on April 11, 2014 by mattICT in Inspiration | Leave a comment

greenman

“… can it be true? That I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest Green?”

– Lord Percy Percy, Blackadder II

These images represent the influences that guide my choice of colour-finish in this project: natural, dark, earthy green.

An early memory for me was rooting through my maternal Grandmother’s bookcase and being fixated on the cover of a SciFi book called ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’. The alien on the cover was walking solemnly towards the viewer and I remember thinking ‘He’s green: that’s cool’.

In fact, a great many of my favourite ‘things’ from childhood including art, toys, and literature have been not just green, but a deep, dark green.

: Gandalf the Grey-Green

: Atari classic

: Prince Barin of Arboria

: Sharpe’s Rifles

: Frazetta

: Sam Keith’s Hulk

: Swamp Thing

: The Green Knight

The Peak District

For most of my youth (up to the point of discovering the Commodore 64 and becoming a pre-pubescent hermit), I would be found in the nearby woods, dells and general undergrowth around Thrybergh, making dens and fashioning rapiers out of Elderberry. The smell of sap to this day reminds me of the residue left on my hands as a child following hours of fencing with an unsuspecting tree or unruly mob of nettles. I feel most at home to this day in some thick woodland area or rolling English meadow, and the deep greens of midsummer naturally rearrange any predisposition in favour of a more soothing contentment.

For a green finish to work on a guitar however, I think it will need to be as dark as possible. To be at harmony with the timber itself, it needs to be an earthy moss, verging on brown. It can be such a striking colour that it would be very easy to lose the subtlety of the natural grain finish that I try to achieve in my builds. It can’t be a slap in the face.
This is more of a concern when it comes to the inlay material as this will be formed of a reconstituted rock, emulating a natural Malachite mineral. Although this can be corrected with varnishes to temper the tone prior to inlay.

Work on the Green Man Guitar will commence following the sale of Huginn, but inlay designs will begin in the near future.

The Green Man Concept

Posted on April 9, 2014 by mattICT in Bespoke, Conceptual | Leave a comment

I have been thinking recently about the next project I would like to work on following completion of Huginn, and have wanted to own a guitar with a deep green finish ever since I saw a Blues Saraceno promo in one of my brother Lee’s guitar magazines, circa 1993.

This idea reignited during a day trip to York last summer. I popped into a coffee shop just around the corner from the Guy Fawkes Inn with the latest copy of Guitarist magazine. Pending a rendezvous with Chloe, I had an hour to kill and sat reading the articles with some forgotten bun. The main article was regarding the Latest Ibanez Jem model called UV70P (catchy). A predominantly black finished guitar, though it had green highlights of pickups, controls and inlays. This was no doubt a subtle tribute to Vai’s guitar during the early part of his career, GreenMeanie affectionately known as the Green Meanie. This was actually a Charvel manufactured guitar, so Ibanez would not be able to build an official replica tribute of this without stepping on someone’s toes. Vai had used this during his stint with Alcatrazz (it was a sunburst finish then before the ‘Loch-ness Green’ application) and more famously with David Lee Roth where he had carved out the lower horn to allow higher access to the fret-board (visible in the image on the left). As all the Jem guitars were built on the specifications of the Green meanie, it is a pretty iconic model.

This gave me the impetus to start thinking about a Green Meanie tribute myself. However, I have spent the last couple of years working on the Raven projects, which are super Strat inspired, floating-point tremolo guitars; I want to focus on a couple of carved top Les Paul type projects. Focussing more on figured timbers and minimalisim, these will likely have a single hard-tail bridge, solitary bridge humbucker and maximum control selectivity with a minimum of actual control components (ideally just one control knob). The body finish will be a trans-sunburst satin finish ranging from a very dark, almost black, moss-green up to a deep emereld. It will need to be a well figured grain as it will be wholly on show with the limited hardware, so I will be considering Walnut, Swamp Ash and Indigbo for the timber.
I have wanted to use a neck timber called Wenge for some time now, so this would probably remain natural with a clear finish as it will be dark enough to merge with the darker areas of the body finish. No scalloping this time, just jumbo frets with some elaborate fret-board inlay designs.

Wenge

Initially I wanted this to be in the same vein as the UV70P, i.e. predominantly black with green highlights, but recently I have decided on a theme for the build which would require an all green finish (albeit almost black in areas).

As always, I needed to choose a soul for th GreenMan e project in keeping with my ethos, so taking note of the green theme and applying some Pagan/Tolkien influence I decided on the Green Man. This is typically a representation of a man’s face surrounded by foliage and sometimes spewing vegetation out from the mouth and/or eyes, and represents rebirth.

Malachite

My intention is to personify the symbol, and design a large headstock inlay constituted from varying shades of malachite, maybe in an Art Deco style.

The Green Man face will retain all the distinguishing features of the symbol, but will likely be stylised to cater for the (my) limitations of marquetry application. I plan to consider other similar mythical beings into the design such as Treebeard, Spriggans and Will-o’-the-wisps for fret-board inlay ideas.

Keep an eye out for posts in the Inspiration section as the project unfolds.

Fret-end/Tang Finishing

Posted on April 8, 2014 by mattICT in Skills & Services | Leave a comment

Fret-end finishing

Here is a guitar neck I have had in storage for a couple of months now, intended for a Les Paul style guitar for our private collection.

I had it commissioned by a great luthier Owen Jackson, and had it in a wardrobe while I was finishing the body with Wudtone clear. When I recently took it out to start prepping for a headstock inlay, I noticed the Ebony fretboard had contracted slightly, causing the fret tangs to become exposed.
These can quickly be filed back flush with my new Crimson Guitars fret shaping files.

Epiphone Black Beauty – ‘Leniel’

Posted on April 8, 2014 by mattICT in Skills & Services | Leave a comment

Spring 2012

A good friend of mine, ex-Riverstyx frontman Joe Nightingale, had an unfortunate accident a couple of years before I took this commission on. The guitar had Black Beuty somehow slipped from its upright position against an amp, landing face-down and breaking clean through the headstock itself just under the bottom machine-heads holes. This guitar was then out of commission for a long time as my friend requested quotes from local Luthiers to re-join the head.
As this would require a lot of preparation around the neck joint and probably ultimately a re-spray, the quotes were understandably expensive. In the end a DIY fix was chosen and the headstock was reattached using Gorilla glue. It was at this point I was given the guitar.

I found the joint itself to be surprisingly strong. Areas where the wood grain had delaminated meant that the joint was far from flush, and in areas you could see daylight through the joint. Nevertheless, my job was to give the guitar a decent fettle and new setup with particular focus on the electrics.

Areas of concern I identified were:

Missing tip from selector switch
Crackly/intermittent operation of all controls (including selector switch)
Missing speed control knob
Broken plastic jack-plate
Seized Bigsby lever-arm

After taking the control cover off I was greeted with some horrendous Korean wiring and components, so attempting to clean the pots was futile in my opinon. After checking with the client we decided to replace all components for new (including switch and jack).
This is a Black Beauty after all, and with an extra pickup, but the same number of controls as a standard Les Paul, this means that the wiring is slightly different to standard. In this case, the selector switch acts as normal, i.e.

Neck only
Neck & Bridge
Bridge Only

The Neck Tone control in this case acts as a Master Tone for all pickups however. The tone pot that would usually be for the Bridge, then acts as a Volume control for the middle humbucker. This pickup is isolated from the selector switch altogether and can be brought into the mix or silenced using this volume pot.
Approaching the wiring took a little more thought than usual, as I had not wired up to this configuration before.

NB: For reference, GuitarElectronics.com is an invaluable site and there has only been a few occasions when I have not been able to find a solution using this website.

Work completed:

New CTS pots (Vol1, Vol2, Vol3 & Master Tone)
New AxesRUs Selector switch
New jack-socket
New jack-plate (gold)
New black speed control knob
Complete rewire throughout

At the point of plugging the guitar into my test amp, this was one of the “Oh Bother…” occasions where there was definitely something amiss in the wiring. This case was a loud ‘buzz’ that disappeared whenever I touched a metal component. One of the better symptoms of a problem really as it’s clearly an earthing issue. No sound at all can take much longer to fault-find and incur a much higher degree of profanity.

In this case, the earth cable coming from the bridge was at fault. Stripping back the wire further to remove the badly corroded tinning, I soldered the freshly tinned wire back onto the back of one of the volume pots. This fixed the problem, after a re-test everything was then ‘hum-free’ as all Les Pauls should be.

‘MG’ Logo inlay

Posted on April 6, 2014 by mattICT in Skills & Services | Leave a comment

Although I have been setting up and building guitars for a few years now, I have only fairly recently started to fully customise and create a ‘new’ guitar where none of the contributing components have ever existed or belonged to a musical instrument before. As these builds are unique and created by me, I wanted to brand them as such.

My initial ideas for a logo revolved around Runology as these characters are simple by design (so not too fiddly to make many inlays) and also enabled me to divulge my inner LOTR geek. Keeping things very simple, I have just amalgamated the Mannaz and Fehu runes (‘M’ and ‘G’) to reflect my initials. The Fehu rune is a little controvertial as it can be regarded as an ‘F’ character, but if it is good enough for Gandalf the Grey then it’s good enough for me.
This logo will appear on all guitars built by myself as a headstock inlay of varying materials.

Abalone inlay

I have recently restocked my supply of marquetry supplies from Small Wonder Music, and decided to cut out a headstock logo ready to inlay into a personal Les Paul project guitar.

I have a selection of different abalone shell materials including Black Tahiti, Red Abalone and Japanese Awabi. Also there is a small piece of reconstituted rock ‘Black Web’ that I wam planning to use as a Raven fretboard inlay in Huginn. In this case the inlay will be inteneded for a Walnut neck, so I wanted to aim for a little mor subtelty and opt for something dark.

The Black Tahiti abalone has a very dark green hue, but also has flashes of purple and blue in different light.

P1010692 Progress was pretty slow as I needed to use a very 0/2 grade saw blade to allow the tight turns around the points of the runes. Cutting the arms of the logo was a little delicate so as not to crack the thin shell on the downward cutting stroke, but on the whole the process just requires a little patience.

For anybody looking to cut Abalone for the first time, ensure you have an N95-rated dust mask as the resulting powder can be pretty nasty to inhale.

Almost ready to inlay into the headstock, just a short session with some needle files to tidy up the edges and it’s time to get the Dremel out.

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