Hi all,
A while back I was seized by GAS and wasted £80 on a MIJ, thru neck charvel with a maple fretboard.
except it wasn't thru neck, wasn't made in japan, and wasn't a charvel.
There was a 2-bolt neck joint sculpted with filler, a plywood body, an awful floyd rose, and an unbelievable thick finish (literally 5mm in some places, eventually removed with a metal file).
It was H/S/S, but the singles were gone and the HB had been replaced with a schaller. only 5 of the tuners were working.
I think you get the picture. Anyway, I'm hoping to find a silver lining by turning it into my "experiment" guitar. here are some of the ideas, what do you think of them? completely impractical? done before? any advice? any other ideas?
1) Floyd rose and recessed tune-o-matic bridge with graphite saddles to allow huge dives and vibrato, but keep some of the tone and sustain of a fixed-bridge (not all of it, obviously, but an improvement over a lone floyd). Kind of like a bigsby, but with a floyd instead of the sprung bar. The floyd would have a tremel-no, so I could use the guitar as a hardtail most of the time. I could also (on another guitar) use fanned frets and a floyd this way, if I cut the saddles myself and didn't mess around with the action and intonation too much.
2) 4 pickups (say a P90 and a tele at bridge and neck) with Two SG jacks (although I don't know exactly how the switching would work) and some geeky wiring to allow me to run the guitar in stereo, with different pickups into each channel of a rig- so youd have one really roaring, and the other on the brink of break-up allowing you the thickess of AC/DC (say), without a second guitarist. how far apart would they have to be relatively free of magnetic interference?
3) Tuners rotated 90 degrees and mounted on the side of the headstock, classical style.
http://www.rockingchairs.net/Pages/Classical%20Guitar%20headstock.jpgWith the whole array covered by a cap with space for the strings to pass through, giving the appearance that there were no tuners. This would just look cool really. but would it destroy the tuners and mess up the angle over the nut, ruining sustain/attack/whatever?
4) Finally, what about a theremin built in, with the volume antenna in between the bridge and neck pups (although we're rapidly running out of space there :oops: ...) and the pitch antenna running up the neck with the trussrod (to 12th fret say). the theremin audio output could come out of (another) seperate jack. I suppose the obvious problem here is possible interference between the strings, frets, pickups and theremin itself (both ways), even if you could fit the antennae in. I suppose you could build one of the antennae just above where the selector switch is (on a strat), but it wouldn't be quite as cool.
Anyway, end of rambling essay.
younger members may have guessed I'm supposed to be revising today.
what do you think?
