A custom guitar....

Hello, I would just like some feedback on making a custom guitar.

I've decided to do a strat-clone with a mahogany body with maple neck and fingerboard (i might just buy a strat neck if i find one cheap). I want to keep the body as solid as possible so I'll only be carving just enough on the body to fit a bridge pickup and a neck pickup (no middle pickup, I hardly ever use it and if I feel the need to use it, I'll just pick up my fender). I've decided to go with dimarzio virtual vintage blues or kinman blues for both bridge and neck cause I can't stand noise.... I'm not a tone freak but i do like to keep it sounding like a strat. i'll be using 500k ohm pot for volume and maybe 1m ohm pot for tone (or maybe just stick with 500k ohm for tone too). For the capacitors on the tone pots, im gonna go with 0.033uf for neck tone and 0.02uf (or maybe 0.01uf) for bridge tone. and so far that's the plan i have so far. however, i've never built a guitar before so any suggestions at all will be greatly appreciated.

Have a look at >Warmoth<. You can get everything you need, precut, from them. It might be a good idea to start with a "kit" guitar like these that you can customize to your own taste, rather than risk ruining some expensive wood by cutting it wrong.

Check out the Tech section. There's a guy in there named Robsm who has been working on several guitar projects, and has posted his progress. You might be able to find some very useful information in his pages.

Good Luck!


One more thing... If you're wanting to stick to a Strat type tone, I would suggest going with either Ash or Alder for the body wood, instead of Mahogany. It will make a difference.

thanks for the info, im prob gonna go with a solid wood block and cut it myself (my dad is a retired carpenter so he'll be doing alot of the helping in the cutting). but ill still definitely still check out the site!

and your prob right about using alder instead of mahogany. i wanted to use mahogany to thicken up the sound but you might be right about gettin too far away from the strat sound. i'll prob debate it over in the coming weeks. maybe ill go to guitar center and compare a mahogany strat with a standard alder one.

sounds cool, i always wanted to do this. only thing i would say is if you already have a strat ( this is an assumption when you said fender) what is the point of making a guitar that is exactly like a strat, sure take inspiration from it but dont copy everythin. so if you want to use mahogony go for it, it mite give interestin results. on the other hand ther might be very good reasons fender doesnt use mahogony so please reasearch it before jumping to conclusions.

as to other stuff i would put a humbucker in the bridge position and then get coil taping, or the ability to switch the humbucker from series to parralel. this would give you humbucker and single coil sounds.

also you might want to look into gettin a whammy bar with piezo pickup in it. if you didnt know these give quite good acoustic tones. well at leat i think they are cool especially when you can blend them with the normall pickups. this might not be for you but i would do it. if you had loads of money to spair ( this isnt really that serious) you could buy a line 6 variax, remove the whammy bar/ piezo pickup and all the electronics, and put it in your custom guitar. then you would have a large arsenal of tones. but this is a bit over the top money wise.

things you should also consider are what scale length of neck you want, the fret radius and the profile. but if your used to playing strats you might as well stick with the standard strat neck.

as i said it sounds cool. keep us posted with progress and show some pictures, plz.

thought of something else

get staggered height tunning pegs so that you dont need a string tree.

for instance get the sperzel tunners, the stagard height ones

don't forget to check out www.stewmac.com !