I’ve built a few Telecasters but before now I have not worked on a Stratocaster and so I thought I would change that. The Strat I will assemble will have two single coils and a trembucker, some non-standard electronics, and no tremelo. I stumbled across this interesting option that Emerson offers in their pre-wired Strat kits and that is to use one of the two Strat tone controls instead as a […]
This guitar was going to be another painting experiment. I started with an unfinished HH Telecaster body applied the base primer/sealer, followed by a white/black stripe pattern. Originally, our plan was to use something thick and goopy like toothpaste as a mask, and to paint it on with brushes, or perhaps a stencil, then put color on top of that. After the color dried, we wiped off the toothpaste. A […]
I am a big Rolling Stones fan, especially of their live music from the late 60s and early 70s. They were a great live band in their early days. For example, while there is no video, the audio in this YouTube clip shows what you could expect at a Stones concert in 1970: two guitar solos for the price of one, the first by Keith Richards (starting at 3:12) and […]
I like to build stuff and I think the main reason I like to build stuff is that I like to understand how things work at a very low level of detail and building something really forces you to figure this out. In the past I’ve built guitars, I’ve built a mechanical pocketwatch, I’ve built computers, and I’ve even designed a very simple CPU from scratch, though that was just […]
On this second guitar, I wanted to experiment with wiring some more and I wanted to build a slightly more traditional Telecaster, but with a nice wooden finish. Before I go into detail on the wiring, I want to show you the two pickups I plan to use. Seymour Duncan makes a nice set of noiseless pickups designed to produce a vintage Tele sound – the Vintage Stack set. Now these are […]
I decided to build an electric guitar. The reasons no longer matter and in fact this guitar didn’t even turn out that well. I made many, many mistakes but I finished it and in so doing, learned enough to build the next one even better. And so on, and so on, and so on. I’d always wanted a Telecaster Deluxe with two humbuckers and so that is what I decided […]
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