the-takosader

[the-takosader]

Hello there.

Okay, now that I have your attention, welcome to a subseries of my ramblings I'd like to call:

"X Was A Mad(wo)man"

This is a series in which I will take a look at patents, guitar, bass or drum techniques, and give my own little comments on how crazy they are. People who know me from the Curated Tumblr Discord Server (hereafter referred to as CTDS) will recognise this format from when I rambled about 12-string guitars for 2 straight hours. For everyone not from CTDS, I wish you the best of luck in trying to follow along.

So, who is our first subject? Oh, just a radio repair guy from California, you probably won't have heard of him. Who is he? One Mr. Clarence Leonidas Fender, founder of and innovator for famous companies such as Fender Musical Instruments Corporation (sold to the Columbia Broadcasting System [CBS] in 1965, rescued from CBS in 1985 by William Schultz and the company's employees), Music Man (technically a silent partner to the founders, ties cut in 1979 after issues regarding payment for refinishing), and G&L, founded by himself, Dale Hyatt and George Fullerton.

If you want to go, now would be the time. If you want to read on, buckle in, this one's going wild from the get-go.

Fender was born in August, 1909, to parents who owned a very successful orange grove between Anaheim and Fullerton, California. His childhood was presumably unremarkable, apart from when he developed a tumor in his left eye, causing said eye to be removed, and replaced with a glass one. This, you might be surprised to know, is what made him ineligible for the draft during WW2. That, however, is for later. For now, let's go back to Fender's life and times.

He was interested in piano and saxaphone during his youth, but later developed an interest in electronics, which only strengthened after a visit to his uncle's automotive-electric shop at the age of 14. Why? Because of a project his uncle had made: a radio, cobbled together from spare parts. Soon thereafter, he started repairing radios in his parents' house.

He wasn't doing this as a full career at this point, not by a long shot. If anything, it seems like it was only a hobby from the late 1920s onwards. He went through college majoring in accounting, and later did work as both an ice delivery man and a bookkeeper (alternate title for an accountant, if you didn't know; there's a reason their job is to balance the books), but his biggest job, at that point, was in the mid-1930s, when he was approached by a local bandleader to make six public address systems for Hollywood dance halls.

Now, let's pause there. What is a public address, or PA, system? According to Wikipedia, a PA system is "an electronic system comprising microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers and related equipment." They're basically used to make people louder for the purpose of addressing many people. For the few, if any, Brits that follow me, we'd call them Tannoys because that was the main brand of them over here.

An interesting subset is one directly used for live music, called a sound reinforcement system. That's the kind where the music's fed through the mixing console, and then adjusted to be louder or quieter depending on the requirement. It's quite ingenious when you think about it. It also allows for feeding in of prerecorded sounds and backing tracks, just to allow for extra accuracy when compared to the studio version.

Back to Fender, he started Fender Radio Service in 1938 after returning to Fullerton with his wife Esther Klosky, and soon after, musicians and band leaders alike began coming to him for their PA systems, which he built, rented and sold, and the amplification for both the amplified acoustic guitars which were becoming popular in big band and jazz music, and the Hawaiian or "lap steel" guitars which were making headway in country music.

But then, the Second Small Disagreement happened. Well, I say it "happened", it had been happening for at least 3 years by the time America got involved. Anyway, during this time, due to being ineligible to fight for America due to his glass eye, Leo Fender was still in America, making these amplifiers and PA systems, and then he met Doc Kauffman. He's another inventor you might know for his work with Adolph Rickenbacher (yes, that's how you spell it as originally written, he only changed it because of his cousin Eddie.)

Kauffman and Fender, upon the urging of the latter, started a company together: K&F Manufacturing Corporation, the purpose of which, was to build amplifiers and amplified Hawaiian guitars, resulting in Fender's second patent; having previously filed a patent for his pickup design in September of that year, Kauffman and Fender filed a patent for their lap steel guitar design, and in 1945, the lap steel was sold as a kit, including a K&F lap steel amplifier.

Very early variants of the lap steel featured a metal tag with the K&F logo on it, while later versions had it stencilled on. The earliest models also have a body design difference - on the left is a 1943 K&F lap steel in possession of the Museum of Pop Culutre; on the right, a 1945 K&F lap steel.

As you can see, there's just a few differences here. First of all, the body shape: the 1945 lap steel is just a slab, while the 1943 model has a slightly contoured body, akin to a violin. Secondly, the headstock: the 1943 model is exactly as the patent depicts, with a rounded rectangular headstock, similar to Martin headstocks, while the 1945 headstock has entirely straight string pull.

Now, considering the era of guitars we're talking about here, that is an actual miracle, because the main two competitors for this were Rickenbacker and Gibson. Martin and Harmony were mostly doing their own thing, and most of the other big names weren't even there. If you didn't know, or couldn't guess without it being pointed out to you, Gibson and Rickenbacker's headstocks are a bit... wacky, when it comes to having manageable string pull. The main issue is that the strings splay out to the sides in both cases...

...which places emphasis on the logo of the manufacturer (as if the headstock shape didn't already do that).

Fender wasn't the only one figuring out string pull around this time, either, as Paul A. Bigsby, inventor of the Bigsby vibrola, was also working on guitars around this time. Fender and Bigsby did work together at one point, or at least they both knew each other. Bigsby was, however, an inventive soul, and interested where Rickenbacker's idea of a solid-body electric guitar would go, and so was another madman: Lester William Polfuss, known more by the stage name he recorded under, and the name chosen for his Gibson endorsement: Les Paul.

I will not touch on Les Paul even slightly in this post. Just know that he built his own neck-through semi-hollow guitar out of a 4x4 fence post, and a disassembled Gibson and Epiphone archtop each. Why? In pursuit of the cleanest tone possible. Think of it as like if metal bands tried one-upping themselves every album, making each on dirtier, more distorted, more grungy and crunchy.

There is a story of a feud from about 1949-1950, though. Bigsby built a solid body guitar for a country player, Merle Travis. The original didn't have the vibrola, and looked remarkably like a Les Paul with a Trini Lopez headstock (or an Aldo Nova Les Paul if you're into '80s rock). Fender asked to see this guitar he'd made. Then, in Spring 1950, the Esquire came out. That is to say, version two of the Esquire came out.

Yeah, the Esquire didn't look like that at first. Instead, it looked more like this...

No, your eyes do not deceive you, that is a double-sided headstock on a Fender electric Spanish guitar that wasn't made of surplus 12-string parts. And yes, it only has half a pickguard, and a separated control plate. Overall, the lower half is laid out much more like the Stratocaster than the Esquire, so much so that it makes you wonder if Leo decided to revisit this control layout when it came time to do the Stratocaster design.

Now, this version of the Esquire had no truss rod in the neck, which was one massive block of maple, and had a pinewood body. The Esquire we all know is either alder or ash, rarely roasted pine, with a maple bolt-on neck fitted with either a rosewood fingerboard, or a one-piece neck made of maple with a skunk stripe to hold the truss rod in place.

Now, I've rambled for a while now about a guitar, so surely we must be ending, right? Well, for everyone aware of how big Fender is as a company, it... yeah no, this is only the beginning. Anyway, the Esquire was available in black or in a semi-transparent blond acetate lacquer, which is where the famous Butterscotch Blonde colour comes from. One thing I'd like to note before we move on: the advertisement Esquire, and the commercially released Esquires have one difference between the two: the ad model hasn't got a selector switch. This requires stepping back a couple years to explain, though.

One of the features of Fender's lap steels early on was something referred to as the "Organ Button", a circuit between the pickup and the output jack that, somewhere in there, is meant to try and simulate the sound of an organ. Now, I know what you're thinking: "What's this got to do with the lap steels? The Esquire has a selector switch!" Well, dear reader, you're correct, the Esquire does have a selector switch! However, that almost didn't happen, as can be proven by this April 1950 advert (source: Fuzzfaced):

These are what's called "Lamp Button" Esquires, due to using an on/off Leviton lamp switch, designed for military use, and probably gotten as surplus. The 3-way switch it got replaced with was more straightforward, if you know how to work with your tone knob:

Back position (towards knobs): signal from pickup bypasses tone pot, meaning its as bright as it can be.

Middle position: volume and tone pots factor into output signal from pickup.

Front position (away from knobs): through some magical wizardry, as well as a 3.3kΩ resistor and two 0.05 mF capacitors, a tone that's more akin to a bass guitar makes itself apparent.

If you know the guitar order, you know where this goes. If not, let's follow the logical course:

It's 1950, and you've started mass-producing electric guitars for the general market, and everyone seems smitten with this thing for its sound, especially the front position with the filtered sound, and the Broadcaster itself is selling like hotcakes because people want the guitar with 2 pickups.

But wait, this company over in New York already uses Broadcaster for their drums! We didn't think about that! Quick, get the decals modified, we'll sort out new names for them later.

Wait a second, people like the filtered sound? It sounds like an upright bass if you lower the tuning of the bottom string... Oh, there's an idea! What if we made a bass that's more like the Esquire?

(Note: the above is purely a summary of late 1950 and 1951 for Fender, covering the success of the Esquire and Telecaster, the dropping of the Broadcaster name, leading to the highly sought-after "Nocaster" variant, and the creation of our next item.)

As a result of all this rushing about, as stated above, we got the "Nocaster" variant of the Telecaster, and the next item: the Fender Precision Bass. Like its little brother, the Telecaster, the Precision Bass is a string-through body with a bolt-on maple neck complete with the usual Fender skunk stripe. It is, of course, much longer than the Telecaster, with a full 34" scale length and much larger strings, but that's to be expected with a bass.

Original P-Basses were much like the Telecaster in design, albeit with an upper horn, and a finger rest below the strings to allow the player to strike the strings with their thumb. It also had a pickup and bridge cover, which just... existed on there; I think most players tended to toss those in the case and never use them again.

Now, who was this designed for? It can't have been for the standard bass players of the age, they still swore by their upright basses. From what I can find, it was designed for big band guitarists, with two of the biggest original users being Roy Johnson and Monk Montgomery, both of Lionel Hampton's big band. Johnson was actually the first to use this style of instrument in a concert setting, something that surprised contemporary music critic Leonard Feather, who wrote in Down Beat that this was due to hearing bass sounds from a guitar. Montgomery, however, was the one to help popularise the P-Bass, even if veteran bass players called it "a weak note amplified" or "an amplified plink-plonk".

For what it's worth? I think they were just sour that it was getting easier to play bass. I've not played an original-style P-Bass myself, but I have played the more well-known variant, and it certainly doesn't sound weak or like it's going "plink-plonk" at you. Anyway, it's the year 1952, and Fender have settled on a new name for the guitar: the Telecaster, named for this new medium getting really popular, something called "television" or something like that. It's still selling like hotcakes, but all this time, Leo's been collecting feedback from guitarists. After all, he's not just an inventor, he's an innovator; he wants to make these guitars better for people.

One thing he had heard from guitarists is that the intonation is good, but it should be individually adjustible, so they can get it sounding exact all the way up the neck, but by far the biggest critic was Bill Carson, a Western swing guitarist, who said that the next model should have "body contours" which would make it far more comfortable to play and "wear" in comparison to the plank of wood that the Telecaster was, famously remarking that it should fit the body "like a well-tailored suit."

This one was to be the Stratocaster, which entered prototyping in late 1953, with Carson helping beta-test the design. The design was slightly inspired by the dual-horn body of the P-Bass, and when it entered full production in 1954, the P-Bass was modified slightly to include slight contouring, a new two-section bridge, and a new 1-layer white pickguard, while keeping the same control layout, headstock design and general Telecaster aesthetic.

The Stratocaster, though, that became a hit almost immediately. Unlike the competition's guitars, which were either amplified acoustics or something like the Electro-Spanish or Les Paul, it didn't immediately or significantly resemble prior acoustic models, not that Fender previously made acoustic models. Their popularity was so great that, even today, Strats are some of the most recognised electric guitars out there, on par with the SG, Les Paul, Telecaster and some Rickenbacker guitars.

Now, up to this point in time, and up to 1971, with the introduction of the adjustible-tilt 3-bolt neck, all of Fender's guitars were designed with a heel-adjust truss rod in mind, meaning that before 1971, all Fender guitars had to have their neck relief set by either relieving the tension of the strings, and raising the neck high enough to access the heel adjust, or, and this seems to be how it was intended in the '50s and '60s, you take your strings off, you take the neck off, and then you adjust the truss rod, before then putting your neck back on, putting the strings back on, and then checking the relief. Yeah, not fun. I'd imagine it was changed because people were fed up of the rigamarole of doing all that.

Anyway, the other thing that the Strat had going for it is the 6-point synchronised tremolo- wait, tremolo?! Yes, tremolo; Fender quite famously mixed up tremolo (change in amplitude) and vibrato (change in pitch), which carried over to the 1956 Vibrolux amplifier. The synch trem was something else specifically requested from criticism, as the only other options available on the market at the time, the Kauffman and the Bigsby, were both separate units from the bridge, meaning that the strings would be more likely to detune from a slightly more exaggerated warble, what the Bigsby unit was intended for.

Meanwhile, the mechanism and design of the synch trem allowed for two things. First, it allowed for perfect intonation due to its six, freely moveable saddles, each with two Allen screw adjustments to follow and match the 7.25" radius of the fretboard, and second, it allowed for more exaggerated changes in pitch in comparison to both the Kauffman and Bigsby, best demonstrated by players like David Gilmour, whose control over the mechanism is, frankly, amazing.

So, we've seen 1954 come and go, but Fender never stopped. He improved the way his lap steel's tuners functioned, resulting in a classical-style tuner set, 3 or 4 on either side, facing into a hollowed-out peghead which, much like the style of peghead used on the 1945 lap steels onwards, had accurate and straight string pull.

Fender unfortunately doesn't make lap steels nowadays, but they still exist second hand, if you want to look through Reverb and similar sites for those things. Anyway, in 1956, Fender also came out with the previously mentioned Vibrolux amp, an amp that you would think acted much like a Leslie speaker. Well, no. It has an oscillator in the circuit, but audio oscillators for a guitar sounds more like a phaser to me than a Leslie. Leslies give the tonal quality that John Lennon's voice had in Tomorrow Never Knows, or the wavy guitars you can hear on Here Comes The Sun and Badge, or for my fellow prog fans out there, the B note "ping" from the piano on Echoes.

Anyway, moving on, the year is 1957, and we have some upgrades to make! Specifically, the P-Bass needs an aesthetic update, because it's still themed around the Telecaster. That needs a change, to capitalise on the success on the Stratocaster. So, they changed the pickguard, integrated the control plate into the pickguard, changed the headstock to something more like the Strat's, and put a new type of pickup in the body, leading to the quite iconic and well known split-coil. This design emphasised the D and G strings by making them brighter in comparison to the E and A strings, mainly by placing the D and G strings' pickup a whole 1.09375" (1³⁄₃₂", or 27.78125mm) further away from the neck.

An inch doesn't sound like much, but when you're talking about guitars, everything is inches. Never feet, never millimetres (unless it's a European brand like Höfner), always inches. For example, something I've neglected to mention for the entire post, so far, is that the scale length of every electric guitar Fender has made so far is 25.5". That is one of the Big Three scale lengths that everyone goes for, the other two are 24.75" (actually 24.6", Gibson, you lying money-grubbing fucks) and 25", though I don't know how many people use 25" outside of PRS. There's some outliers here and there, for example 24", 22.5", which Fender used the year prior to this (1956) on the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic, or the insanely short 20.75", but that won't become relevant until the next year on our list. Speaking of...

The year is 1958, and Fender's at it again. Last year, he prototyped using 7 pole pieces with a 6-string guitar, which I've heard makes the top and bottom string less aggressive, but I haven't investigated enough to tell if that's the case or not. But anyway, the year's rolled over and NAMM's coming up. Leo needs to figure out how to compete with Gibson this year, after they came out with the "guitars of the future". This "7-pole on a 6-string" thing isn't exactly going to turn heads, so Fender decides to bring something he and George Fullerton, a longtime associate of his, had been working on over the past year.

They decide to bring the Jazzmaster, Fender's attempt to get the jazz players on board with his guitars. The Jazzmaster is a masterclass of guitar design, specifically because it comes straight out of left field. The biggest point is that the body is offset. Now, what does "offset" mean in this context? Offsets, when mentioned in guitar terms, are a style of body with a waist which dips in at 2 separated points, like the example in this image, courtesy of ATB Guitars:

Yes, this is a real example of a Jazzmaster from 1958. Gold-guards are rare, but this is unique beyond belief. Custom colours had only just been offered, and the sparkles were aluminium flake that was mixed into the lacquer. Now, what does that signify? It signifies the beginning of the car colours. Your Surf Greens, your Candy Apple Reds, all sorts of stuff. Why? Because Fender's first factory was just down the road from an automotive place, and why not take advantage of that?

So, the Jazzmaster gets revealed in 1958 at NAMM, and is marketed as the step above the Strat. Yes, the step above. A premium model, marketed as a solid body alternative to the standard jazz guitars that players of that genre used. He tried this, attempting to get them onto Fender's side, at the expense of Gibson, the same company who's been giving this genre's players instruments since they've been making electrified guitars.

As you can probably guess, this failed. However, an interesting thing about this, Fender actually patented the offset body design. Yes, seriously. And, because of its different ergonomics and entirely unique body design at this point, the patent was actually granted. Again, seriously. Don't believe me? Look at this:

Interestingly enough, that's actually not the design of the Jazzmaster that ended up being used in any way. It never had any top-mounted output jack, and the 7-pole pickup never got used. Moreover, there's no blade switch on the Jazzmaster, and the patent is entirely missing the rhythm-lead circuit, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. The tremolo and bridge is entirely different to the release, and the thing is, that's because this uses the original design of the Jazzmaster!

Strap in even further, because HOO BOY THIS GETS WEIRD.

So, this is a photo from 1957:

The composition of this picture is actually incredible for Fender history. I can't credit myself with having discovered it, though. From what I can find, this was actually a photo taken in Leo's office. With context and external knowledge, I can say with some certainty that this was taken between 1957 and 1958, and features some very interesting variants of guitars.

For one, that third guitar? That's an electric mandolin. Never heard of them? Makes sense. They are rarely ever made, and most, if not all, mandolin players prefer double-course acoustic mandolins like those produced by Gibson. The one seen in the image has a Telecaster-style pickup, a 24 fret neck (wow, who would have thought that there'd be a 24-fret Fender in the 1950s that could be played without a slide?), and an ash body, contrasting the guitar it's next to, the Strat. Strats, by 1956, had been moved to alder bodies from ash because of cost reasons; alder was both more affordable and more readily available than ash was.

But that's not the really crazy thing about this photo. The crazy thing here is the leftmost guitar on display, being the style of Jazzmaster featured in the original patent, complete with 7-pole pickups, a bar that's far more curved than anything the Jazzmaster later got, and the original style of pickguard. It even has the output jack mounted like a Strat, as it was originally. Another thing of note is the Telecaster with Wide Range single coils, or to use their proper name, JM soapbar coils.

Just kidding, no one knows what the fuck to call them! They're about the size of a Wide Range humbucker, but those didn't come into use until 1971 along with the head-adjust truss rod. Fender, the company, has made modified designs of the original pickup that actually are a Wide Range humbucker, just put underneath a modified version of the JM pickup casing. So you know what? Personal opinion time, these are called Wide Range single coils, due to the fact that it's basically what they are. The pickup is wound wide and hot for greater articulation, just like Wide Range humbuckers.

So, what about the Strat? Anything special there? Not really, no. If anything, that's the most normal guitar there, and the only thing I can think of that's of any interest is that the thing's a solid colour. Not a surprise, considering that they had started doing solid-colour finishes at this point, starting off with stuff like Surf Green and Fiesta Red, what the boys called "Fullerton Red", after ol' Georgey-boy, who I mentioned earlier. He'll come back in later.

Also of note in this year, and something especially incredible, at least from Fender: the first solid-body electric violin. Yes, seriously, Fender made electric violins in the late 1950s. They also got reissued later down the line, but that's not until the late '60s, and we've got at least 10 years to get through before we're there.

Now, we're on 1959. Fender's got a patent on a new pedal steel design, which he's still making and doing very well with at this point, and the Jazzmaster has finally entered full-scale production. Does it live up to its name? Does it actually master the jazz market and bring Fender some jazz musicians? Quite simply, no. It doesn't even come close. Why? Well, one thing you need to know about guitarists and musicians is that we are creatures of habit and tradition. Most will go with known factors over unknowns, and Fender just threw all of that out of the window and said to the jazz players, "Here, try this! I promise it won't suck!", all while trying to not look like the cat that crapped on the carpet.

However, Fender lived in southern California, just southeast of Los Angeles. What comes to mind when you think of late '50s, early '60s Cali? Surfing. Yeah, that's right, kick up Misirlou, DIck Dale's here. ...Okay, so maybe not Misirlou, that was released 1962, and we've only just reached 1960. But anyway, Dick Dale was enlisted by Fender himself to test new equipment coming out of the factory from Fender's brain, up to the point where Fender had stated in interviews, "When it can withstand the barrage of punishment from Dick Dale, then it is fit for human consumption."

That quote was about an amplifier, of all things. The reason is that Dale liked to play loud. Not just loud, but loud, like "hear yourself playing over the screaming crowd" loud, to the point where he would regularly break amps by overloading them consistently. Fender then went with Freddie Tavarez, who had previously helped him prototype out the Stratocaster, to the James B. Lansing speaker company to ask for a custom 15" speaker, leading to the JBL D130F, the speaker that was then used in the Fender Showman amp, the first amp that Dale could not explode through the power of high-volume surf rock.

Fender also released a new electric bass unto the world in 1960 - the J-Bass, or Jazz Bass. Like the Jazzmaster, it was envisioned to worm its way into the jazz scene and uproot the traditional. Interestingly enough, though it didn't do as intended, it worked nonetheless, and Jazz Basses are one of the more used basses out there, compared to Gibson's offerings that seem to be hen's teeth by comparison, or Rickenbacker's which have their place, but are usually relegated to use by players wishing to emulate the sounds of Geddy Lee, Macca, Lemmy or the late, great Chris Squire.

The J-Bass, meanwhile, seems to have been used by everyone and their mums, offering some of the most versatile tones imaginable. John Entwistle recorded the bass solo of My Generation using a Jazz Bass strung with LaBella nylon tapewound strings, rather than the roundwound thin strings that came stock on Danelectro Longhorn basses at the time (and weren't available separately). Depending on the source, Entwistle may have played using a pick, or he may have used 3-finger technique, who the fuck knows. Hell, considering when the song was produced (1965), it may have been Betsy, the Jazz Bass now owned by Guy Pratt.

That's far and away past our current range, but something I'd like to mention - a lot of this has been jumping around the timeline, which is something I quite like to do with these posts. After all, what's the fun in talking about your hyperfixations and sticking to a rigid timeline? So anyway, back to 1960. The Jazz Bass was originally produced with stacked volume and tone knobs, probably the earliest recorded use of dual-gang or "stacked" potentiometers in commercial guitars. They got phased out in 1962, though, so any vintage J-Bass with said stacked pots are worth tens of thousands of your choice of currency.

This isn't even me talking out of my ass. Thanks to one guy in Emeryville, California selling one on Reverb, I can show you:

Now, okay, it's not that good a photo. But look at the knobs. See how there's only two? And not only that, see how there's skirting around the bottom? That's the stacked pots in action. I don't know which level does which, because I've not actually had experience with this specific style of J-Bass, only the later style with individual volumes and a master tone. Presumably, though, the knurled part is the volume, and the skirt is the tone.

You may also notice that there's covers over the pickup and the bridge. That's not just something on the J-Basses from 1960-1961. This is something Fender did for every guitar he made until a model later down the line. Every guitar that Fender made from 1943 up until around 1964, all of them had pickup covers, sometimes referred to as "ashtray" covers, which makes sense considering how prevalent smoking was in this era.

Moving on, the year is now 1962- *record scratch sfx*

Wait a second - why are we skipping 1961?

Because no guitars got released in 1961. Some patents got applied for in 1961, but neither were approved until a few years later, so they aren't of relevance.

But something did get released in 1961! The Bass VI!

I assure you, I did not intend to miss this out. I'm writing this bit when I'm partway through the point when Fender sold the company to CBS; everything after this was written before this specific bit is. I forgot about the Bass VI until now. If you couldn't tell by this point, I'm scatterbrained as fuck. So, let's quickly rectify things.

The Bass VI was released in 1961, and it was niche at best. Originally, it was styled like a Jazzmaster in terms of design and controls, but in 1963, it got an aesthetics update to bring it in line with the Jaguar instead. Originally, it looked like this (image credit: RetroFret):

That's unique-to-the-instrument pickups, master volume and tone (using the Jazz Bass' later style of knob), only 3 pickup switches instead of the 4 it'd later be, and no headstock decal. Meanwhile, the rework looks more like this:

4 switches, Jag-style pickups, and everything else basically the same. Interestingly enough, this is one of two 6-string basses Fender has on offer nowadays. The other is a Squier offering that's a little more contrabass than this.

Now that that's sorted, back to your regularly scheduled timeline-hopping. *reverse record scratch sfx*

I did miss out some student models from the list, like the Duo-Sonic and the Musicmaster, both released in 1956. Both looked much like something we'll get to later, but make no mistake when you look them up - they are both normally bouted, neither have an offset waist.

But anyway, 1962. The Jazzmaster is... sustaining, but it's not exactly popular with the intended market. Jazz players really like those jazz guitars, don't they? "But Dale and his contemporaries like it," goes Fender's thought process, "why don't we try appealing to them?" And thus, prototyping begins for this brilliant thing to release in '62:

This is the Fender Jaguar, and it was entirely aimed at surf music players in the ads. It's not like that was the original intent; the Jaguar was marketed at the same tier as the Jazzmaster, the top-of-the-line feature-laden tier that was meant to draw people to Fender and away from Gibson.

Now, I've played a Jaguar before, and I speak from experience when I say, they are cool as shit. There is one massive issue, though, and that's the fact that they do not like being set up properly. They'll stay set up properly, but they will give you the greatest grab-bag of grief you've ever experienced in the process of setting a guitar up. There's also a few nitpicks I had with it, but those are mainly from not knowing how a Jag's circuitry works. Coming from blade switches, I had no idea how the fuck this thing worked, which way the switch had to be for "on", and which it had to be for "off". Other than that, though, I had the time of my fucking life playing that thing.

But anyway, this peaked surf music player's interest massively. It wasn't as popular as the Strat or Tele, but it definitely still had its day. The ads featured beach theming, but it didn't get publicised much by surf rockers outside of the odd appearance of Carl Wilson in one of the early publicity photos. In essence, it was a guitar that the target audience enjoyed, but didn't try and promote. It didn't survive the '70s CBS era, though, even with the introduction of custom colours, block inlays, bound neck, and all that, it just didn't get popular enough, and it got axed from production in 1975.

It got better, though, don't worry.

Also of note in 1962, the

Anyway, 1963... last year of the old Musicmaster... Brian May's started on the Red Special... Nope, can't think of anything big. Let's check the patents... Ooh! Electric piano...

Hmm, I wonder what these are about, as if I didn't know. Yep, this is about the Rhodes, the counterpart to the other famous electric piano, the Wurlitzer. This is a tine piano, while the Wurlitzer is a reed piano. But, we're on about guitars here, so piano's out of the wheelhouse. This'll stay out of the tags, I'm too much of a guitar player to know stuff about the Rhodes and Wurli, even if they operate like how electro-acoustic guitars do nowadays.

Also in 1963, Fender's "broom handle" bracing method had its patent applied for, but that wouldn't be published until 1967, so that's not of importance here.

Moving on, we reach 1964, FINALLY. This is when a very interesting model of guitar was released: the Fender Mustang, which looked quite like this:

Now, there's one really famous name associated with this guitar, a Seattle-based player sadly no longer with us. Kurt Cobain didn't use a pre-CBS Mustang. No, he used a 1969 Competition Blue Mustang, with matching headstock, in a quite famous left-handed configuration. And yes, he actually was left-handed. It's "common knowledge" that he was right-handed and learned lefty, but no, he was always left-handed, but he was forced to learn to write right-handed, because '70s America is as '70s America does.

Anyway, the Mustang lead to more things: the Musicmaster and Duo-Sonic models both got redesigns using the Mustang's neck and body. "But wait! How does that work? Did they not have shorter scale lengths?" Well, yes they did. You see, the Mustang had 2 sub-variants when it released: a 24" scale length, and a 22.5" scale length. These were produced at the same time as each other, with both being offered in the short scale or the shorter scale. As such, the Duo-Sonic II and Musicmaster II (named with a II to distinguish them from the original, non-offset models) were produced from 1964 until 1969, at which point, they were axed from production, in favour of the Bronco and more deluxe version of the Mustang... is what I would say, if the Musicmaster hadn't lasted until 1982. See, the crazy thing is that these were made from surplus materials. Surplus gets added to constantly. That means they went on for as long as they could, using whatever they had left. We'll get onto that after we talk about Fender selling his company to CBS.

So anyway, we're still in 1964, and Fender's approached by a guy named Porky. No, he's not a pig, his actual name is Quilla Freeman. He'd done his own bit of tinkering with his guitar, and he wanted to present an idea to Fender. A four-pickup guitar with minimal interference between each pickup, and with each pickup actually sunken into the body of the guitar, and hidden by the pickguard. This is what would later become known as the Fender Marauder, specifically the Type I. Freeman and Quilla developed some interesting ideas about this, and Fender even put in a patent application for his design for the hidden pickups around this time:

Once again, your eyes do not deceive you, that is 16 individual pole pieces. Per pickup. That's 64 total pole pieces. Also of interest is that the patent features 4 knobs, presumably rotary switches to turn each pickup off, on, or out-of-phase, the thumbwheels from the rhythm circuit functioning as master volume/tone controls, and a Jazzmaster/Jaguar tremolo. It's not as if Fender's options for tremolo systems are limited, at this point in time, he's the only one making good reliable ones, but this is especially interesting.

Now, as you can probably expect, this guitar is shrouded in so many layers of mystery, it may as well be impossible to figure it out. It's also not known why Fender's company bailed on the project, because yeah, that happened. As such, it's all a massive mystery as to why there was no official production-model Fender Marauder until 2010, of which I've made my feelings very clear.

Now you see why I want to build one.

Anyway, 1965 has finally arrived, and the Beatles are playing Strats on Help!, to absolutely no one's surprise. In January, Fender officially sold his company to CBS, and signed his 10-year non-compete clause that prevented him from working for another guitar company until 1976. But we don't care about the bureaucracy of CBS. What we're here for is the guitars, and Fender's insane madness. For example, Fender's appearance in the 12-string business. Rickenbacker had only just entered the genre 2 years earlier, and had quite famously gotten George and John on board, giving them a 360/12 and a 325/12 respectively. But CBS!Fender wanted onto that gravy train.

So Leo's still working for the company at this point, as far as I can tell. He was certainly still a consultant on board at the company, and thusly, anything he came up with became something to try out. Two examples I want to give, both very interesting, are the Bass V and the Electric XII. Let's start with the latter first because that's the most interesting. This also allows me to talk about 2 patents that I've otherwise left alone, mainly because they were filed in 1961, and they only really apply to this guitar.

The Electric XII, as the name implies, is a 12 string guitar. In 1965/66, there were only 18 guitar models, total, that were electric 12 strings being sold, brand new. How do I know this? I spent 2 straight hours in the early morning of February 1st trawling through US patents and vintage guitar catalogs that had been scanned and digitised, and I came up with this list organised by brand:

Fender: Electric XII, Coronado XII

Gibson: ES-335-12, Firebird V-12, EDS-1275

Rickenbacker: 360/12, 366/12 (I know the 370s existed, but they are not distinct enough to be separate models here)

Gretsch: 6075, 6076

Epiphone: Riviera 12, Wilshire 12

Guild: Starfire SF-XII

Vox: Bouzouki, Phantom XII, Tempest XII

Goya: 1209

Hagstrom: F12-S

Danelectro: Bellzouki

Now, the majority of these guitars were just conversions or modifications of previously existing guitars. The only one that may not have been, but I'm not sure enough on, is the Bellzouki, but the one I can absolutely tell you for a fact was not in the slightest a modified guitar is the Electric XII. The Coronado XII is actually a variant of the general Coronado model, which had 3 styles: the I, II and XII. The Coronado's not relevant right now, the Electric XII is.

The Electric XII was purposely built and designed by Fender to capitalise on the folk rock movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, with it being aimed at bands like the Byrds... whose guitarist was Jim McGuinn, an avid user of Rickenbackers, to the point where he still uses them to this day. Seriously. He even owns a ridiculously rare Rickenbacker 331/12LS (one of two known to even exist, which is wild, considering this is what the other was listed for back in 2016; they should probably, and probably do, go for more), a guitar for which no photo currently exists, thus I cannot confirm its existence. McGuinn, however, can be best and most easily seen in this cover of Eight Miles High he published 1 year ago (as of writing this) playing a 341/12LS. This is something I had never heard of, so this is brand new information to me. But this isn't about the 341/12LS, or the 331/12LS, this is about the Electric XII.

So, did it have Fender's desired impact? Did it work? It may surprise you to hear this, considering how Fender's not exactly garnered much in the way of support for the unconventional designs he's made up to this point, but it worked! Gene Clark (of the Byrds, the very same band whose lead guitarist famously exclusively used a Rickenbacker) was seen using an Electric XII in a televised appearance in May 1965, and even long after its discontinuation, Tom Petty, famous for using a 620/12, used the thing for the first leg of the 2006 NA tour he embarked on. Arguably the most interesting and famous users, however, are Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page, all 3 household names even outside the realm of guitar.

Alas, its success was not to last, and it was put to ground in 1969, with surplus bodies and necks being reused for a different guitar: the Fender Maverick, otherwise know as the "Fender Custom", entirely different to the Fender Custom Shop that would come much later. These were 6-string guitars, as opposed to 12, and look... kinda weird? I don't know what to think of them, I'll let you, the reader, decide for yourself:

...okay yeah, nah, I'm decided now, they look fucking wrong. That neck looks wrong without 12 strings or tuners on it; the whole point of the hockey stick was to allow for more tuners without elongating the headstock, or incorporating planetary tuners. And the body, God, the body. It looks lopsided. It's had a chunk taken out of the bottom bit by the output jack, the bridge is just slightly too far from the pickguard, the upper horn's too short and got cut off. By comparison, here's what the XII looked like (note: not all the units produced had matching headstocks; this one just got real damn lucky):

This is far better in my opinion. Anyway, remember how I mentioned the Coronado earlier? Yeah, it's relevant now.

So, the Coronado. It's not the most well known of Fender's designs. Hell, it's not the craziest either. But, it's interesting. Fender didn't have a semi-hollow or fully hollow offering up to this point; prior to 1966, there was no such thing as a "Fender semi-hollow", and frankly, it's not a surprise - they're hard things to make! But, along came Mr. Roger Rossmeisl, a name known far and away for the other California-based company, Rickenbacker.

Rossmeisl probably thought his talents would go to waste at the company. But, Fender proved otherwise, as they put him to work straight away, trying to capitalise on the high-profile usage of hollow-bodied electrics (the Epiphone Casino) by big bands such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks. It came in the aforementioned 3 variants: I, II and XII. The I featured a singular neck pickup, the appropriate amount of controls, and no vibrato unit as standard, but could be ordered with a vibrato if one was wanted. Interestingly enough, unlike the Casino, it featured a more traditional floating bridge on both units, as opposed to a fixed bridge such as an ABR-1, which, if anything, makes it more like the 1983 NAMM Crest that I mentioned in the Ideas Archive post. Here's the Coronado I, with and without vibrato, if you wanted to see it without having to trawl through all of Google's search results:

Now, the Coronado II, on the other hand, is the "premium" or, to use a Gibson term, "deluxe" version of the Coronado. If you're confused about that, let me do a quick summary: deluxe just means 2 pickups. That's what the D stands for in something like ES-175D. If there's a T, that's thinline. In short, E230-TD, the Casino's internal model number, stands for Epiphone Casino Thinline Deluxe. While this implies the existence of a large-bodied Casino, don't get your hopes up, a large-body Casino does not exist. Believe me, I've looked for one before, they do not exist.

Anyway, back to the CII. The Coronado II is the premium version for a reason: it has 2 pickups, both DeArmond-made single coils (DeArmond is the company that made the DynaSonic for Gretsch back in the 1940s), and it features that vibrato unit I mentioned earlier, which according to the patent, functions like a Bigsby mixed with the Mustang's trem system. It doesn't appear to have been a stock feature, but rather an extra, as can be attested to by these photos of vintage versions (credits: TheGuitarStore and RetroFret... again):

Interestingly enough, these do actually have some design variation between them! On the one with the fixed tailpiece, the bridge is left floating, and thus acts as a standard jazz guitar's bridge would. Meanwhile, the one with the vibrato has a top-mounted fixed bridge, more akin to the Epiphone Casino, but has a longer, bolt-on neck, making the guitar more of a mix between the Casino and its big brother, the ES-330.

The lower horn toggle switch will also come back later, on a favourite model of mine. You'll see. But first, the Coronado XII. This one is interesting, as, like previously mentioned, this was one of 18 models of electric 12 string on offer in the mid-to-late 1960s. It's also, as far as I can tell, the only one that's entirely a hollow body; the only one I haven't got a fully conclusive answer on is the Goya 1209, and that's because it's a Goya, they're kinda weird. It's kinda like Teisco Guitars, because those were happening at this point.

Back to the Coronado XII, the fact that it's a fully hollow body tells me something so incredibly interesting: you could, in theory, get some Lennon-style feedback on this 12 string, if you used it correctly. I wouldn't recommend it though, 12 strings like to continue feeding back once they've started. Anyway, here's what a Coronado XII looks like, with the bonus of a very figured top:

Yes, the headstock is the same as the Electric XII's, it's colloquially known as the "hockey stick", due to the bend at the very top of it looking like the head of a hockey stick. This nickname was actually acknowledged in the descripion of the Squier Jazzmaster XII on Fender's website, but its design comes back all the way to here. More modern Fender XII's will have a curved over upper part, but no hockey stick head.

Anyway, we're finally at 1967. Although the Coronado XII technically existed in 1966, it entered full production in 1967, and ran until 1972. It's actually one of the few things Fender has done that Gibson hasn't up to this point, and even now: a 12-string hollow-body electric. Both sides have done things the other hasn't, actually, because Fender haven't ever done a semi-hollow 12, like how Gibson hasn't done a fully-hollow 12. Who knows, maybe that'll change.

Back on topic, for the next 3 years, nothing of note happens in terms of Fender guitars. The big CBS headstock got introduced and used on some models, but in terms of actual models, none really reared their heads until 1969. Remember Rossmeisl? Yeah, he's still at Fender at this point, and he's now been tasked with making something... a little special. You see, back in the summer, Fender signed a deal (represented by Don Randall, the marketing genius who named the Strat, Tele and Esquire) with Apple Corps., to send the Fab Four a load of brand new Fender equipment.

Now, the late '60s saw 3 models, all brand new, come out for the world to enjoy. Only one still sees regular production to this day: the Telecaster Thinline. The other two are very difficult to explain. You see, Rossmeisl and Philip Kubicki, Rossmeisl's apprentice and later a maker of boutique basses in the US, were charged with making 2 new models of guitar: one was to be sold as regular, with a few prototypes sent out to artists, plus one kept for historical purposes, and for the other, only two would ever exist from the original production, both being the prototypes. These were the Rosewood Telecaster, and Rosewood Stratocaster.

The Rosewood Tele and Strat both started their production cycles in 1968, and before you ask, no, that's not just "rosewood fretboard" or "rosewood neck", like you can get in the Mod Shop. No, it's an entirely rosewood guitar, 2 entire slabs for the body just to make it thick enough. And fuck me, the history on these things are wild. There were 2 prototypes made for each, as stated above - one would go to an artist who definitely used Fender guitars, and one would stay as a prototype for display, so as to say "We made this real!"

The Rosewood Tele made its way into the hands of George Harrison, who used it extensively for the Get Back Sessions, which would later become Let It Be, while the Rosewood Strat was intended for the hands of Jimi Hendrix. The issue with the Rosewood Strat is that the rosewood they used for it turned out to be far too oily to work with; not in a prohibitive way, merely that it had quite a higher-than-average concentration of oil in the wood, which mean that, by the time it was ready, Hendrix had sadly passed away.

Harrison didn't keep his for long, either, giving it quite hastily away to Delaney Bramlett in the 1970s. It stayed in Bramlett's possession until 2003, at which point it was bought back by Olivia, George's widow, during an auction for $434,750, a figure which, when adjusted for inflation, is now $745,437.94. For my fellow Brits out there, that's a figure of £270,936.20, which becomes £536,847.76 in today's money. In short, much moneys were spent on this guitar!

The Rosewood Strat prototype not intended for Hendrix was much maligned as well, as its location is entirely unknown; not even Fender has it! The Rosewood Tele prototype seems to still exist, though I may have been wrong about the "plus one for historical purposes". I'm not going to sugarcoat that bit, sometimes I get stuff flat-out wrong, and if I'm too esconced in a point, I can't just, y'know, go back and change it without writing something new, and it's all this massive kerfuffle that I despise and tend to avoid.

So, to avoid exactly that, and more issues on top, let's just get visuals out of the way. 1 Rosewood Strat, and 3 Rosewood Teles - the top right is the 2022 reissue of the Tele that George got (differentiated from production by a chambered body and an Om symbol on the neck plate), the bottom left is the Tele that Elvis got, and the bottom right is a production model from 1969, courtesy of ATBGuitars:

Anyway, now we're past that, let's go back to that personal favourite of mine, the Telecaster Thinline (hey, that rhymed!) The Tele Thinline is a much easier unit to understand in comparison to the Rosewood guitars you see above. It's also really interesting. To start with, it's really interesting to find that, as per usual, these were made in exactly the opposite way that you think. They didn't make these by taking some off the top, routing out the body, then gluing a top on.

They made this by scaling up Rossmeisl's original method: routing out sections both sides from the back, then gluing a "thin" sheet onto the back. If you know where to look, you can see the depth at which the back was removed, and where the new sheet rests, as with this example, courtesy of GuitarPoint... is what I would say if I had any more space to put images.

Alas, I appear to have hit the Tumblr limit, and how lucky am I that I had enough space for the quartet of rosewood models! As always with these things, it's a minor inconvenience, but I have a backup solution: hyperlinks! Here's the image, in hyperlink form. This is how I'll be showing things off from this point on.

Now, where was I... Ah, yes! The Telecaster Thinline is the first semi-hollow offering Fender ever made. But considering that "semi-hollow" usually means "big-bodied guitar with a centre block and two cavities on either side with as many f-holes". The exception here is precisely the guitar we're talking about: Fender were the first guitar company to do something like this, and considering how it's a model that still sees some popularity, I'd say it's going pretty well.

So, we're finally moving on to the '70s, starting with 1970, because of course, where we get the introduction of Rossmeisl's fifth and sixth guitars for Fender: the Montego, and the Hand Carved Ltd., both of which are more traditional jazz guitars than the Coronado or Jazzmaster. As one could reasonably expect of such a guitar from Fender, it quite solidly crashed and burned. They're some of the few guitars that Fender has never reissued, and I mean never reissued, these were only produced in the '70s, and in small number, because they never took off.

Also in 1970, the Fretless Precision bass. Quite an ironic name, no? The P-Bass was so named due to the frets, so going back to fretless seems like a bit of a step back, even if it's better than people tearing the frets out themselves and fucking up the fretboard in the process.

But anyway, we move to 1971. Remember how a few paragraphs ago I mentioned the head-adjust truss rod? Yeah, that comes into effect here. This is what's referred to as the "bullet" truss rod, so named for the adjustment screw looking like the "slug" of a bullet (for those unsure what I mean, bullets come in two main parts - the slug, and the casing). To avoid confusing myself on the matter further, I'm going to move onto my favourite part of this era of Fender design: the Wide Range humbucker.

The Wide Range was designed for Fender in or around 1971 by one Seth Lover. Yes, that Seth Lover, the one who designed the PAF for Gibson in 1954/55. Unlike the PAF, though, the Wide Range was constructed in such a way that resulted in them being tonally closer to Fender's single coils than Gibson's humbuckers, due to being built with the easier-to-machine CuNiFe magnetic alloy as opposed to the usual AlNiCo alloy, which is harder to machine into screw-type pole pieces. The downside to using CuNiFe over AlNiCo is that, by comparison, AlNiCo is "hotter" than CuNiFe, meaning that to compensate for the lower output, more winds had to be added into the construction, which resulted in a larger pickup and a need for a larger casing.

...that's the largest paragraph I've written, I'm sure. Then again, I did do some heavy rambling earlier on in the post, so I could be wrong. Now, where was I. Oh yes! The interesting thing is that the Wide Range was implemented into 4 models, all of which ceased production after 1979, and the original Wide Range design ceased produciton in 1979 as well, with reissues made in later years being made with either ceramic magnets or AlNiCo instead of CuNiFe. At least, until 2020, when Fender reintroduced CuNiFe Wide Range humbuckers. So, all of you with MIM or MIJ guitars with Wide Range humbuckers in them, know that they're normal humbuckers shoved in a Wide Range casing using wax to hold them in place.

Really, you'd never be able to get the high end of a '70s Wide Range-equipped guitar out of a modern reissue because of the electronics, being that the ones with a Wide Range in use were wired up with a 1MΩ potentiometer instead of the reissue standard 250KΩ potentiometer, likely supplied by Chicago Telephone Supply, the company that was, and still is, the usual supplier for electric potentiometers for all the top-tier guitar brands. Yes, this does mean that when "US electronics" is advertised as a feature of the guitar, it means that the main controls for the electronics are US-made.

Regardless of who supplied the damn pots, because that's of no concern here, why is 250K so much of an issue in comparison to 1M? Well, let's do a small tangent into resistance values used by guitars. According to Seymour Duncan (one of the biggest aftermarket pickup manufacturers out there, on par with Bartolini, DiMarzio and EMG), there's 5 common potentiometer ratings, with each having different uses depending on the pickup, those ratings being 25K, 100K, 250K, 500K and 1M. A potentiometer, as you probably already know, or could probably already guess, especially if you've worked with or have modded guitars before, is a variable resistor that changes the signal at the output depending on the setting of each pot on the guitar. For example, a 1972 Telecaster equipped with Wide Range humbuckers, which narrows it down to a '70s-style Thinline, would have been wired up using two 1 megaohm potentiometers, which allow for a more open and brighter top end and sound, due to the higher resistance values in both the volume and tone pot. With these pot, it would have likely been wired with .017 or .022μF capacitors, to counterbalance the harsh, biting, treble-y high end.

If you couldn't guess, guitar wiring is so very complicated. Alas, I do stuff with it anyway, so oh well!

Anyway, as the Wide Range took up the entire year in this explanation (yes, that's the excuse I'm using), let's move to 1972, where the Wide Range was actually put into use, and some patents were granted, such as this one - the B-Bender, for which more information can be found here. Fender didn't invent it, that accolade goes to Gene Parsons and Clarence White of Nashville West and the Byrds respectively, but Fender modified the device's design in order to simplify the mass production of it, and then made a prototype of that design as a proof of concept. However, as he was merely the consultant at Fender at this time, the most he could do was suggest that such a design be put into place, and nothing further.

As a result (which you could probably guess, considering it's CBS), the model was never put into full production, and that's as far as we go with the B-Bender. It did get licensed out to a different company, but it's really niche as a concept - I mean, why would you use a guitar that had a mechanism dedicated to raising the pitch of one string out of six, and it's controlled by pulling on the strap button of all things!

Look, I get you can't just modify the bridge construction to add something like the Hipshot Xtender or the D Tuna (yes, that's how you spell it), but carving out tons of body wood and using the strap button??? Why?! Was it so hard to add a mechanism or something that didn't get rid of valuable tonewood?

With that grievance out of the way, let's see what else happened for Fender in 1972. He was a silent partner for Music Man the previous year, or as it was originally known, Tri-Sonix (yes, with an X - Xtreme Kool Letterz in effect in an alternate use to normal). There's another Rhodes patent, this one in relevance to a "tone generator", something of which I have no clue about. Let's check 1973.

...all I'm seeing is the Tele Deluxe. The Thinline and Custom came out in 1972, but the Deluxe got sent to '73 presumably because of it being a radical departure from the usual Tele design. I mean, a Telecaster with a large headstock? No way they thought that would go down well, not least because it's kinda antithetical to how the headstocks are siloed nowadays. But that's not all. The Tele Deluxe also, in my opinion, inspired Norlin-era Gibson to do something with the Les Paul shape a few years later, in 1980 to be specific. Ever heard of the Gibson Sonex? If not, look it up. Once you've done that, look up a photo of a '73 Tele Deluxe, and then try to convince me that pickguard was not directly copied or at least wasn't a heavy inspiration for them.

Moving on, 1974. Yes, I'm skipping to 1974. The last patent I could make head or tail of was the B-Bender, the last 10 of 59 are just specific design elements being patented in different countries like Canada, Japan or Germany. I'm pretty sure I'm just running through the motions slowly at this point, at least until I can move onto the next few companies.

I guess this is what Leo must have felt like.

Anyway, '74 is when Leo finally gave Music Man that specific name, after changing it from Tri-Sonix to Musitek. Like I said, Xtreme Kool Letterz. '74 was also the 20th anniversary of the Strat, and nothing was done to celebrate that. '79 Strats did celebrate the 25th anniversary though, and the '80-'83 "The Strat" did massive things with it such as 100-micron gold plating. ONE HUNDRED. MICRONS. That is 0.1mm of gold, or about the thickness/diameter of the average strand of human hair. On EVERYTHING that was remotely made of metal, including the scratchplate screws. The FTC only needs 0.381-0.5 microns for something to be gold-plated, and CBS went "fuck it, go big or go home" and did 100. I'm pretty sure they actually lost money making those things.

Anyway, 1975 now, though I did deviate slightly to talk about the "The Strat" models. Yes, it's called "The Strat", like how Norlin made the Gibson The Les Paul from '76 to '79 (technically '80, but I don't know if they actually get counted). The difference is that it's so much easier to find information on the The Strat than it is for the The Les Paul. Guess that's what good documentation does for this sorta thing. Back on topic, Fender's non-compete clause is up, and we're steamrolling into Music Man. And I mean steamrolling, Fender was named the president of Music Man basically as soon as his non-compete expired.

And, by 1976, the other important company was started: CLF Research. This was Fender's way of mass-producing bodies and necks for sale by whichever company. Interestingly enough, this means that CLF Research acted a lot like Schecter did originally; they were both even founded in the same year, in the same state of the US. By June, guitar production had started up, and by August, basses followed suit, the instruments themselves being jointly designed by Fender, and one of the founders, Forrest White.

The instruments themselves first showed up in the 1976 catalog, being a 2-pickup guitar known as the StingRay 1, and the other being a 1-humbucker bass - the StingRay bass. Two things were unique about the bass, which I'm focusing on purely because I know far more about the bass rather than the guitar, those being that it was the original active electronics production bass. Seriously. Even with those 8 massive-ass pole pieces in the pickup, it was an active bass. The other, far less interesting, unique thing about the bass is the tuning configuration: 3+1.

"Wait, 3+1? The fuck does that mean?" Well, I'll tell you. It means 3 on the top, and 1 on the bottom, reportedly to eliminate "dead spots", which, let me tell you now, that is fucking bullshit. Dead spots on a neck don't come from the tuners, they come from the frets. Changing up the way the tuners are positioned does jack shit to improve or hurt "dead spots". But anyway, back to the active electronics, the preamp was mainly designed by the other founder, Tom Walker. The pre-amp is why there's 4 knobs on the control plate: 2 are your volume and tone, and the other two control the 2-band fixed-frequency EQ.

Meanwhile, back at Fender, the last model from the original company that I'll mention, the Starcaster. The Starcaster is... interesting. It's Fender's ES-335, as you could probably guess, and I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure it's the first 22-fret, 25.5" scale neck that Fender (the company) ever made. It's got 2 Wide Range humbuckers wired up to 1Meg pots (you remember that tangent from a few paragraphs ago?) with individual volume and tone pots. There's also a master volume pot. Just because. That's the one thing that reissues don't get right, other than the bridge being a 6-saddle string-through hardtail thing rather than a Tune-O-Matic and stopbar tailpiece. Makes me wonder if anyone's ever installed a Bigsby on one of those things.

Anyway, back to Music Man, and mostly leaving the Fender company alone altogether, '76-'79 was mostly uneventful for Fender, but there was a bit of an issue that slowly got worse as that period went on. You see, CLF and Music Man were treated as entirely different companies, and thus were controlled by the company's respective founders. Fender made the instruments, and then shipped them to Music Man for inspection and testing, while Music Man made their amplifiers and accessories in house. This is where that issue I mentioned comes in - every time there was a flaw or defect in the finish of a body or a neck, the guitar was shipped back to CLF for refinishing, and payment would be withheld until the finish was deemed good enough. Not so bad on paper, and, if anything, it's a good arrangement.

Except no it isn't! Due to "fibers" in the finish, a high percentage of instruments were sent back for refinishing. Now, that would be bad enough on its own; a large batch of guitars rejected for finish blemishes can at least be sold as a factory second or B-stock, but in this case, because Fender had no actual control over the Music Man brand name, he couldn't actually sell them, so the refinishing had to be done. Again, this would be fine, except the payment was withheld until the finish quality was deemed "acceptable", which is vague up the wall. If anything, "acceptable" is open to large variances in interpretation, and is thusly unreliable. As you could probably guess by now, this opened up a rift between Fender and Music Man.

This rift culminated in an all-out no-holds-barred office fist fight between Walker and Fender over who was at fault, after it was discovered that a whole batch of guitars had defective necks with truss rods that were installed in the inverse position. Considering they had head-adjust truss rods, this likely means that they were installed as a heel-adjust truss rod would be. Not exactly an easy fix.

As a result of this rift, ties were cut between Music Man and Fender in November of 1979. Fender, as a result, started his fourth company, G&L, with old buddies George Fullerton and Dale Hyatt, making guitars that were much like the old designs he came up with. But instead of doing new guitars exactly the same as the old guitars, his passion for innovation never ceased, and so he constantly aimed to make his guitars better than before.

There's a lot of ways he further innovated on his previous designs. Remember the Electric XII's split-coil pickups? Fender modified the design of those, and turned them into one integrated unit, which he then used on the Comanche model, the unique version of G&L's Strat. I'm not calling it a copy, because can you really call something a copy if it's by the same guy who came up with the original?

In general, though, G&L was partially Leo's excuse to just innovate further, allowing him to do or rectify things that he felt could be done better in one way or another, which can be best seen through the sheer amount of weird and/or interesting things he did with the hardware of the guitars. This includes the:

Magnetic Field Design (MFD) pickups, which are a ceramic bar magnet, combined with individually adjustible pole pieces made of iron, allowing for the setting of each string's output level per pickup. The only other way I could think of this even remotely being replicable on a different guitar would be hexaphonic pickups. As in, pickups that have 6 different signal outputs.

Dual-Fulcrum Vibrato, basically the 2-point synch trem that Fender introduced in 1986, but also taking some inspiration from the Floyd Rose floating tremolo system, in that it allows for the pitch of a note or chord to be raised as well as lowered, rather than only being lowered like the synch trem. I prefer to think of it as the step between a synch trem and the Floyd Rose, in that it's not meant to be set up or used as a floating trem, but it can do both up and down motions.

PTB Tone System, stands for Passive Treble and Bass, gives you 2 master tone controls - one rolls off the treble, as you would expect for a tone control, but the other instead removes low-end frequencies, actually giving the player something approaching a 2-band EQ, like one would have on the StringRay basses. Pretty neat, right? I certainly think so.

Saddle-Lock Bridge, which allows the saddles to resonate like one solid mass by tightening one Allen screw in the side of the bridge, which presses the saddles together. It also makes the string spacing more consistent, and because the bridges used are set into the body slightly, combined with the string-through nature, there's an increased amount of sustain as well, which is admittedly a relic of the '80s, in terms of wants, but it's at least something!

So, Leo's allowed to run wild with ideas. Admittedly, I have no frame of reference for how popular G&L guitars are. I mean, they certainly seem popular, but that's only by the measure that G&L are still around, rather than bankrupt. Like I say, they make Fender-style guitars, which some would term copies, but I don't due to the logic stated above: how can the man who made these shapes copy them?

This is what Leo did for most of the last 11 years of his life. In 1979, his first wife Esther passed due to cancer, and he remarried in 1980, marrying his second wife, who took his last name, becoming Phyllis Fender. She was actually named an honorary chairman of G&L after marrying Leo. Unfortunately, she also became his widow in 1991, after Leo passed due to complications with Parkinson's, which is the only thing that stopped him from working. Even after suffering a series of minor strokes, he continued to work.

But, nothing good ever lasts, and alas, neither did his life. His wife's did though, she only passed in 2020. But her late husband, that Leo Fender, and his buddies George and Dale, they sure had their own impacts. I'm sure there's an area of California where it's Fullerton Red and not Fiesta Red, but that's not important. Leo remained a household name in the guitar world for long after his death, winning a Technical Grammy Award in 2009, and the G&L USA guitars are, to this day, made in Fullerton, California, on the street named in his honour: Fender Avenue.

This took way too long to complete. I've been working on this on and off since December 3rd, at least, that's what the date stamp at the top of the draft says. Luckily, got it ready in time for Christmas. Consider it my gift to the guitar community. I hope you enjoyed, have a happy Christmas, Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrate, and were enlightened by this post. I'm pretty sure this entire post is just over 71k characters total, an achievement in and of itself for me, so if you didn't learn at least something from this, I'm impressed.

[the-takosader]

[the-takosader]

it's easy being a guitarist who likes rush, guitars are expensive but you can use any to play rush songs. try being a DRUMMER who's a fan of rush. now that's hard.

but fr i love rush yay

Depending on what you get and how you get it, it could be expensive, but at the same time, it's also worth it to learn to build your own guitars and basses! I've got enough ideas in my head for this shit.

On the drum side of things, though, I'd never be able to match Neil. The Professor was VERY skilled, as can be shown by the many drum covers available on YouTube, and now he keeps time for the universe.

Good to have found another Rush fan on here, though!

[the-takosader]

Holy shit, the image the body is made of is the album cover of 2112. @mitzo, you are based.

The full image:

don't worry guys, i'll handle things from here

[the-takosader]

While we're in the prep phase for the Crusader...

...let's go through the Ideas Archive, explore the stuff that's shelved, canned or otherwise not happening right now. This'll be the new pinned post, so I'll use this as a place to put everything I'm currently working on, and what I might do at some point.

Current:

The Crusader, a mix of Burns Double Six, PRS CE24 and Rickenbacker 4001, combined with influences from Hamer, Gibson and Fender. Note: this build is currently in the wood prep phase (stripping pieces of mahogany and sapele door for use in the guitar body and neck) as of 21/11/2024, and will likely take a year at my current progression rate.

Shelved:

Fender Marauder Build (yes, I still want to do this. The Crusader evolved from this, so it's still on the cards)

Casino Humbucker Mod

G6122 Country Gentleman '62 Style

Crest Replica (NEW!)

Telecaster Bass VI (kit body, custom neck)

Lennon Les Paul Jr. Replica (kitbash)

Höfner Violin Bass from scratch

Canned:

Lerxst 355 Replica

Acoustic Rickenbacker 360/12C63

Telecaster-Shaped Red Special (TSRS)

Plausible:

A non-specific doubleneck.

Resonator acoustic (kit build)

Completed:

Fretless Stratocaster

Cherry XII/Tele-Shaped Rickenbacker (TSR)

So, let's review top to bottom.

The Crusader:

I don't need to explain this much, I've already made a long-ass post about this. As said above, it's a mix of a Burns Double Six, PRS CE24 and Rickenbacker 4001 combined with influences from Hamer, Gibson and Fender.

The design is set in stone, aside from the exaggeration of the upper horn. You'd understand if there was a picture around here of the Burns. In the meantime, I'll get on with describing the others.

Fender Marauder Build:

Not the wackiest idea here, not by a long shot. As previously described, the Marauder is the culmination of Fender's offset guitars, featuring the switching of a Jaguar, the lead-rhythm circuit of a Jazzmaster, parts of the trem system of a Mustang, modified to fit with the pickguard and general aesthetics of a Jag. It even gave the Starcaster, the only semi-hollow by my reckoning that Fender still produces, it's headstock, something Fender afficionados call the "running shoe", at least, that's what my aunt calls it. Considering the contour gets filled in by paint, it's not hard to see her point.

The issue with doing this one is that barely anyone does Marauder vibrato plates. And to do this from scratch? Yeah, I need to find someone who would do the specific metal pieces I'd need, that being the Jag-style metal plate for the lead-rhythm circuit, the switch plate for the pickup switches, the extra long control plate, and that Marauder vibrato plate.

Yeah, if I ever find somewhere that does metal parts out of aluminium or something, I'm gonna get them to do the metal parts of this. Next item on the list!

Casino Humbucker Mod:

This one should be self-explanatory - take an Epiphone Casino, stick some P90-sized humbuckers in there. The only caveat is that they have to be hidden and mounted via dogear P90 covers, which isn't too much of an ask; this guy in Manchester does custom pickups, even hand-winds them. Certainly sounds appealing, may go for those. Next one!

G6122 Country Gentleman:

Yeah, uh... this one's shelved with good reason.

For context, the G6122, more commonly known as the Country Gentleman, is one of Gretsch's most famous guitar models, up there with the Duo-Jet, the Tennessean (now Tennessee Rose) and the one that Malcolm Young gutted and modded for his purposes as the rhythm guitarist of AC/DC. Gretsch list it as the "Jet" but I have no clue if that's a different model to the Duo-Jet or it's a variation, or whatever.

My aim with this would be to make as accurate a recreation of the Country Gent as I could with the documentation and information present on the internet. That means making it with 3-ply maple veneer top, back and sides, utilisng the thumbnail inlays on an ebony fingerboard, slotted for 24.6" (24.75" if you measure from the middle of the nut), with the same style of tuner, the little plaque on the headstock, the vinyl/leather pad on the back of the body covering a backplate access hatch, and all around trying to recreate this mad thing.

The only downside is the cost, because I'd need to source TV Jones Filter'Trons (not hard), maple veneer (harder), Grover Imperials or lookalikes (very hard!), and figure out how to make a veneer press, and how to shape the slightly arched top and back in a 3-ply veneer, not to mention the Bigsby, all the spare parts, the flip-up foam mutes that Jimmie Webster came up with (and also patented).

In short, the entire project is shelved. For the foreseeable future, until I can source all this stuff myself. Onto the next one!

Crest Replica:

This is a new one, inspired by an admittedly newfound appreciation for the Gibson Crest.

...oh right, I should explain what that is.

The Gibson Crest, as a name, refers to 2 different models, respectively produced around the late 1950s to early 1960s and between 1969 and 1972, with a one-off model of the latter style produced in 1983 for that year's Winter NAMM show. Said model is in the possession of guitar collector and YouTuber Trogly, who runs the eponymous Trogly's Guitar Show on YouTube. At first, I thought he was a bit of a knob, or at least a bit naïve, but as it turns out, his show's a good way to pass the time, and satiates the GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) that guitarists seem to get pretty damn often (as far as I know).

The former is estimated to have been produced a total of no more than six times, each custom orders put in by Gibson salesman-clinician and budding guitarist, Andy Nelson. Due to the nature of being entirely custom orders, no one knows the exact specs as they would obviously vary between examples as each guitarist would want something unique.

The body shape is assumed to be reminiscent of a similar model that Gibson were producing around this time: the L-5CT, that being a jazz archtop around the thickness of a Gibson Byrdland, but with a Venetian cutaway, a singular humbucker, a toggle switch next to the cutaway on "deluxe" models (models with 2 pickups as stock) and a trapeze tailpiece paired with a "floating" or freely moveable bridge.

One example of the original Crest, however, had a thinline single-cutaway body with a Florentine cutaway, as opposed to the Venetian cutaway of the L-5CT. It featured a carved spruce top, maple back and sides, with a 7-ply bound top, and a 3-ply bound back, as well as a pickguard made not of plastic, but of alternating dark and light plies of maple.

Now, that's interesting, because (and this is a personal side tangent because this guitar is so very unknown because of Google's overuse of SEO and keywords) the only other guitar Gibson produced with a wooden pickguard that I can think of is the Gibson The Les Paul, produced between 1976 and 1980, and that was only because the way Norlin-era Gison constructed these things, everything was either wooden or metal, with plastic being used as little and as sparingly as possible. The switch tip was rosewood, the binding for the body was rosewood, the veneer on the headstock was rosewood as opposed to holly, the knobs were rosewood, the pickup rings were rosewood. About the only thing I can find that wasn't wooden or metal is the inlays, which are actual abalone, and the binding for the headstock, which appears to be plastic, though this might not be the case.

Point is, the guitar was designed with one main principle in mind: "Can it be rosewood? Yes? Make it rosewood." That's why they now go for around £35k and rarely ever sell.

But anyway back to the Nelson Crest. Yes, that's what I'm calling it, it's better than calling it Crest 1 or Crest Custom. The example I'm drawing from here had bound f-holes, was stained cherry red like most of the ES models around the time, and had an HS pickup layout, with the usual number of volume and tone controls, and a toggle switch in the usual mounting place for an ES model guitar, that being near the treble-side f-hole.

According to the source I'm getting all this from (an article on the Gruhn's Guitars website), it also had a Switchmaster tone switch and was wired for stereo output. The floating bridge, as it was an archtop, was mounted on a rosewood "foot" which was inlaid with mother-of-pearl decorations. The bridge itself, meanwhile, was your bog standard late '50s, early '60s Gibson ABR-1 without retaining wire for the saddles, while the tailpiece has the diamond ornamentation seen on a Casino/ES-330 while also incorporating a shield and coat-of-arms motif.

This motif is continued on the absolutely gigantic headstock, which had individual Grover Imperial tuners, and an inlay featuring a coat of arms with three Moorish crescents on the shield. The fretboard is given the top-level treatment of the era, as is to be expected of a custom build, with 3-ply binding all-around, and Super 400 inlays up to the 17th fret, unsurprising for an archtop. The truss rod cover, meanwhile, is a sort of merger between the typical shape for a Gibson, and the art deco movement which was starting up in the early '60s, with it being a trapezoid interpretation of the standard Gibson bell shape.

This is one of the few images I can find of the original style of Crest, in all its resplendent late 1950s glory:

As you can see, it's basically everything I mentioned above, down to the cherry red stain.

So, that's the Nelson Crest, in all of its custom and stupidly insane glory. It'd be an interesting challenge to replicate that thing, but that's not the one I want to replicate, not by a long shot.

The Crest that I do want to replicate, however, is more reminiscent of a short-neck ES-330 or, to be more conforming to normality here, the Epiphone Casino. This has its own subsets, referred to as Crest Gold or Crest Silver, for the style of the hardware, those being either gold or "brushed silver". Assuming I was mad enough to build this, I would have to either source vintage-accurate parts or get someone to make them custom.

As you can probably guess, neither sound appealing! However, ignoring that, let's get down to business. What is the Gibson Crest, in this latter format?

The Gibson Crest, in the 1969-72 styling, is a double-cutaway ES-style guitar, as you can probably guess. Now, a double-cut ES-style isn't surprising, both CMI and Norlin loved making those. The surprise comes from the features, starting with the short neck, with the join at the 15th fret. Now, normally, that's weird for an ES-style, they all have long necks, with a meeting with the body at the 19th fret. Why does this one have such a short neck?

Well, it's because it's a hollow-bodied guitar, like the ES-330 or Casino. Then again, that is no excuse, considering the ES-330 and Casino both had long necks at this time, even if the Casino returned to the short neck, dragging the 330 along with it whether it liked it or not (kinda miffed about that, I like upper fret access, taking it away on an electric guitar like the Casino is just annoying).

But anyway, the Crest has this short neck, and that's where the similarities to most ES models end. The toggle switch is placed where the first iteration of the 347 would place the coil-split switch, that being the lower horn, and that's about it for known similarities, with the other features being more reminiscent of the original Nelson Crest rather than an ES-330 or similar guitar from Gibson/Norlin.

Let's start with the pickups, which are mini-humbuckers, most certainly an interesting choice; apparently, the reason they chose P90s as the pickups for the 330 and Casino is because it was a "budget" model, and not because they were fucking cowards. That last bit's not important, though, so we can come back to it at a different time.

As with the Nelson Crest, the Crest Gold and Silver have a floating bridge akin to an archtop, though I cannot for the life of me remember if they're an ABR-1 like the original, or a pre-compensated bridge. It doesn't much matter either way, because the fact of the matter is that this guitar has some nice details to it. A 7-ply bound top, with a 3-ply bound back separated by a decorative strip, and a large heel cap which has a strap button screwed into it.

The electronics are the interesting thing. As noted above, the toggle switch was placed in the location where an ES-347's coil-split switch went, which may even be where they got the idea for that, but as is also noted above, the thing has 2 mini-humbuckers with individual volume and tone controls, and treble-side adjustment screws that go through the pickguard.

None of this is nearly as impactful as what the thing was made of, though, because I have been keeping that bit entirely shtum for surprise factor. Y'see, the Crest was made almost exclusively out of Brazilian rosewood veneer, which, for a time, was entirely phased out of Gibson as a wood option, before even becoming a protected wood by the Washington Convention. Trade in it is restricted, even now, and that means it is incredibly hard to get hold of it, even in veneer form.

Does this mean I am shit out of luck? Well, if I wanted to recreate the thing using the exact same wood, yes. If, however, I wanted to recreate the guitar with just any species in the family Dalbergia, rather than specifically Dalbergia nigra (note: that's the scientific name for Brazilian rosewood), I am not, in fact, shit out of luck, as most other species of rosewood (any wood in the family Dalbergia) is not restricted, and has not been under restriction for almost 5 years.

Here's a photo from Gary's Classic Guitars in case you were having difficulty visualising this thing:

I'll be including images like these for projects that are either replicas, or I feel need the image in some way or another.

So, the rosewood veneer isn't a problem. Why is it still a shelved project, then? Well, the fact of the matter is that we live in a capitalist society. Things cost money, both for the item itself and the labour required to produce it. In short, wood is expensive, and I don't have the money yet. You may notice that "too expensive" is a running theme, even in cases where half of the expense is the guitar itself.

To avoid getting depressing, let's move on (finally)!

Tele Bass VI:

So, you may be wondering, "why's this one shelved?"

The thing is, it wasn't intentionally shelved. It's just that I can't really do anything with it without finishing the Crusader first. I need fret wire, wood for the neck, a nut, and a truss rod. Not that many things, but it's also what I need for the Crusader, and in the case of that, I at least have the wood for the neck, and a nut, but that still leaves me without a truss rod and fret wire (which I also need for my acoustic because it's got fret sprout, but that's neither here nor there).

I was intending a maple neck for it, anyway, and I need maple for the fretboard of the Crusader. Maybe I'll be able to sort that at some point. Moving on!

Lennon Les Paul Jr.:

This one's hard to call "shelved" seeing as I've done jack shit with it for 3 months at this point. Do I want to do more with it? Yes, absolutely. It's just finding the werewithall to actually go do more with it. Part of it's been the stress of organising my college stuff, but part of it's also been laziness and just not being able to decide if I want to do it or not.

I'm sure you don't want me to bore you with this one, and you saw a photo of a replica on the previous pinned post, so I'll move on.

Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass Replica:

This one is very much a doozy, but it's at least sensible.

Höfner's been going for over 100 years, that's an accepted fact, something that makes sense to everyone. Their "peak" of iconicity, however, came in the form of Sir James Paul McCartney, who has used Höfner's basses since 1961. Now, since then, they've done plenty of reissues of his (two) different basses, the 1961 with its close pickups, and the 1963 with the wide, separated pickups.

So which one would I go for? That is a good question, because it's really not what I should be asking. What I should be asking in its stead is "do I want to learn Actual Violin Lutherie to make this thing", because the whole "Violin Bass" is not just a selling point, it actually is constructed like a violin. It's a chambered hollow body, like the Country Gent, but it's the size of a violin, with the construction to match, including the use of flame maple (or, to use its more apt name, fiddleback maple) for the back and sides. The top, meanwhile, is solid carved spruce.

Don't believe me about the body size? Look at this sub-model Hofner do, based on the one you can see in Get Back:

As you can see, the body is tiny in comparison to the length of the neck, especially when you compare it to an actual violin:

Look at the proportions on this, then look at the 500/1. Doesn't the neck seem so ridiculously long now? Anyway, that's gonna take some going at, and thus it's shelved for when I feel confident enough to actually do it, or at least to take a partial stab at it.

Now then, we've seen the ideas that I might get round to but aren't being done now for one reason or another. Let's look at the ones that won't be done at all, for one reason or another.

Lerxst 355 Replica:

To the average reader, that name's going to look like gibberish. To be honest, I don't blame you, the way it's pronounced feels like you're speaking gibberish as well. "Lurks-st". It sounds better if you try and put on a Canadian accent. Not full tilt Canadian, with all the "eh"-ing and being super polite, just a hint of Toronto.

Anyway, what's Lerxst? Or, more accurately, who is Lerxst? Lerxst is the nickname of Aleksandar Živojinović, a man known professionally as Alex Lifeson. He was the guitarist for Rush for as long as Rush had existed, until their semi-functional retirement after the death of their drummer Neil Peart. The remaining two members, that being Alex and the bassist Geddy, have performed together since, including at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert and at the 25th anniversary concert for South Park.

Now, Lerxst has used many a guitar over the past 50 years, from that ES-335 he used in the beginning, to the large amount of PRSes he used between 1990 and 2010. His most famous, however, is the one this one is talking about: a 1977 ES-355 built by Norlin-era Gibson. It has T-Top humbuckers (named as such due to the bobbins having a slightly raised part in the shape of a T), 22 frets on a voluted neck, a 7-ply bound top (you saw me refer to this in the Crest section; 7-ply bound top doesn't mean the top is 7 plies of veneer thick, it means the binding is 7 plies thick, and is bound around a 3-ply top of maple-poplar-maple) with a 3-ply bound back, a Maestro vibrola unit, an individual set of volume and tone controls per pickup, a simple 3-way toggle, and the key part - a varitone switch, with accompanying bypass mini-toggle for the "raw" tone unmodified by the varitone.

The output jack's also mounted to the top, but considering it's an ES model, I wouldn't think that too revolutionary. So, what's a Maestro vibrola unit when it's at home? For that, we need to explain vibrato units overall.

The history starts with Clayton "Doc" Kauffman, who devised the first ever patented vibrato system in the 1930s, fittingly named the Kauffman vibrola. This worked quite differently to vibratos that we know now, as the action of changing the pitch was much more subtle, and was done through moving the arm laterally, instead of pressing the arm down to the body. The sound was meant to mimic a slide guitar (as that's where Rickenbacker's guitars originally started), but there was an ever-so tiny but incredibly crucial detail: the tuning stability was terrible. Guitarists such as John Lennon decided to replace the Kauffman units on guitars they were installed on with other models, such as the Bigsby vibrola, the second patented vibrato unit, and the first to see widespread commercial success.

The Bigsby works in a much more conventional way, using the standard we know now: push down to lower pitch, release to return to normal. Supposedly, it has terrible stability in and of itself, but that is from players who ended up being like Floyd D. Rose, who overused the vibrato of the Bigsby, requiring that they retune. The Bigsby wasn't intended for that; instead, it was only intended to provide a slight "warble" effect to playing, what some would term a "shimmering" effect.

This, in effect, is what Gibson's vibratos were meant to provide, starting in 1961 with the Sideways vibrola. I have an opinion on these: they suck, both in function and form. They copy the function of the Kauffman nearly wholesale, and the large folded up arm in direct contact with the nitrocellulose finish(!), well. Yeah, no, not for me. The Maestro, however, looks and behaves so much better. It functions like a Bigsby would, excepting that it doesn't copy the mechanism wholesale like the Sideways does with the Kauffman.

To explain this, let's go on a small side tangent about a Bigsby vs. a Maestro vibrola, because I assure you, this is actually necessary to the guitar.

The Bigsby works by loosening tension using the leverage of the tremolo arm to cause a deepening of pitch. It's kept in place and returned to normal pitch by a spring which is compressed in the action of using the vibrato unit. The Maestro, however, uses direct leverage on a bent piece of metal to cause the same loosening of tension and lowering of pitch.

This means that the Maestro, while more primitive, is easier to work with when restringing due to the fact that the strings are threaded into the tailpiece, which is then bent, changing the angle and distance between the tuners and the ball-end of the string, thus affecting the tension. The metal returning to its standard shape (because the force required to permanently change its shape has not been applied) is what returns the guitar to standard and proper tension (as long as it's been set up correctly).

The Bigsby, meanwhile, has a specific way of threading the string through the unit before sending it down the neck to the tuner and the nut. When restringing a Bigsby, there is a massive rigamarole if you don't have a Vibramate spoiler installed. You have to thread the string down from the bridge, under the tensioning bar, then up over the string bar, around it, and slot the ball-end on the tiny little post on the underside, so it can function correctly when the arm is depressed. I honestly wish I was joking about this. I have restrung a Bigsby once, and once was all the experience I needed. Never again. I heavily advocate for people to damn well use a Vibramate spoiler on their units, even if it's just because of a personal gripe.

Back to the point where we were, about... 8 or 9 paragraphs ago, the 355 generally came stock with a Maestro vibrola in 1977, so it's no surprise that Lerxst got it on his. It's even featured on the reissues from 2008:

These are the same reissues that have a Fucked Up volute on the neck that's approximately halfway between the nut and the first fret, as opposed to in line with the nut. If I were to recreate this, I'd at least fix that.

So, it all seems possible, right? Then why is the build canned? Generally, it's the fact of the varitone, specifically the chokes. How, the literal fuck, do those things work. If I ever figure how they work, then maybe this will move from the can to the shelf. But right now? Canned. Completely and utterly.

Next, please!

Acoustic Rickenbacker 360/12c63:

This requires much less in the way of explaining. The Rickenbacker 360 is a famous guitar by most stretches of the imagination, soldiered on by its incarnations as the 360/12, used by George Harrison, the 370/12 used by Roger McGuinn, and the 330/12, used by innumerable amounts of famous guitarists like Peter Buck, Johnny Marr, Pete Townshend and The Edge.

But y'see, those are electric guitars. They've got magnetic pickups and all sorts of gubbins in there. My idea with this was to see if you could just... get rid of all that, construct a 360/12 in the double-bound style without that central block and all the electronics, and be left with an acoustic Ricky 12, complete with the compacted headstock and a piezo if I felt like it.

Knowing what I do about how Rickenbacker's shit is made, though, that would require making the body in the form of back, then sides, glued with bracing and then the top, with two sound holes. I'd then have to find somewhere to fit a pre-amp, and make sure that it's the usual thickness before then setting the neck in, which itself would be a 5-piece construction of maple with walnut center stripe and headstock wings, adding the truss rod(s) and the fretboard, before finally assembling the metal bits onto it.

Doesn't sound too hard, sure, but if you look at this example of what the Rickenbacker 360/12C63 looks like...

Yes, that is the entire thickness of the body. It's approximately an inch thick and not all that acoustically resonant. It'd be good as an experiment, but considering I'm debating over getting a standard acoustic 12 at some point, it's canned for that reason. Onto the last canned build, and the last build that's overall a hypothetical.

Telecaster-Shaped Red Special (TSRS):

I laid this whole thing out in a Notepad file back in May or June, as we were finishing up the Cherry XII, as a proposal of "maybe this can be the next build," but I scrapped it a month or so later because I fell into a trap I've fallen into so often it might as well be my home: I wanted to recreate a specific thing, without remembering the way that guitar is constructed, and really, what that guitar is built out of.

You see, the Red Special, built between 1963 and 1964 by Brian May and his father Harold, is a very interesting case of guitar design, in that it was designed to feedback in an appealing way. The internal cavities were actually carved out in a very specific way in order to allow for this, and most copies of the thing do the feedback, but struggle to do it exactly like his. He also has his own brand of guitars mainly made up of official replicas fitted with either a standard Strat-style trem system, that being the BMG Special, or the more accurate design mimicking the original's trem arm made of a knitting needle and a bicycle saddlebag holder.

Now, having only a Telecaster body, I couldn't recreate most of this. I mean, where am I going to put all this stuff? And the neck couldn't be slotted for 24" scale length. It just wouldn't have worked. 25", like the Harley Benton copy, maybe, but then I'd have to modify the body to allow for a 25" scale, and then rout out chambers for controls, the cavity, and the trem system's springs.

Looking back on it, I think I had a grand idea, but had bitten way too much off to just go and do it. If I ever do get it in my head to recreate the Red Special, even without a treble boost circuit or a treble boost pedal, I think I'm not going to try and start from a jump-off point, and just go at it from scratch.

Now then, we've gone through those that've been canned, let's look at the ones that aren't shelved or canned, but aren't currently in play. I denoted them as plausible above, but I might go at them at a slower rate than the Shelved builds.

Non-Specific Doubleneck:

When I say "non-specific" doubleneck, I don't mean "bland-name EDS-1275" like a Chibson or a Gear4Music or Harley Benton or anything like that.

For one, the EDS-1275 isn't the only doubleneck out there, nor is it the only doubleneck Gibson ever made. Rickenbacker made a 12/6 doubleneck 360, fittingly named the 362, as well as the 4080 doubleneck which was a bass on top and your option of a 480/6 or 480/12 on the bottom. That latter one was most famously used by Geddy Lee on Xanadu, as well as the former on A Passage to Bangkok (a song about smoking weed, if you didn't know).

Here's him with the former, in a surprising tuxedo (white with black plastics) finish:

And here's him using a Fireglo 4080/12 back in 2015 for the purpose of playing Xanadu:

Anyway, that's a Rickenbacker doubleneck, but they're not the only ones to do this stuff. Fender also make doublenecks. Well, "make" is a strong term. This is the only one I know about:

This is the craziest doubleneck I've ever seen. It's a basic 12/6, but actually No It's Not. You've got an Electric XII on top, which is the only "designed to be 12 string" guitar Fender made pre-CBS, and the Marauder on the bottom, with the vibrato merged into the pickguard, and the 5 pickup switches and the kill switch and everything that makes it the Marauder.

If I ever decide "okay, let's make a doubleneck," and then actually go through with it, I think I'm gonna take some design cues from all of these. I'll probably also chamber it so it's not uncomfortable to play for long periods of time, and just hide the chambering under the pickguards because that's a thing that could work.

Now, the other plausible idea.

Resonator Acoustic (kit build):

You know how I said kit builds were out of the question? Yeah, I didn't believe me either.

Resonators are a really cool relic of the pre-amplification era. Like, they're the step between electric guitars with magnetic pickups, and the acoustic guitars we all know, minus the piezoelectric undersaddle pickup. They work by passing the strings over a bridge mounted to a resonator cone, and when a string is plucked, strummed or otherwise makes a sound, the cone takes the vibrations and amplifies them entirely acoustically. They were originally made by a couple companies before Rickenbacker came along and invented the horseshoe pcikup and, by extension, the electric guitar.

Those companies were National String Instrument Corporation, and Dobro Manufacturing Company. The former was founded in 1927 by George Beauchamp (anyone who knows the history of Rickenbacker will know that name), and John Dopyera, a Slovak immigrant who came to America with his brothers and father in 1908, sensing that war would soon break out in Europe.

Smart move, fellas!

Anyway, Dopyera and his brothers, Rudy and Emil, soon left National to form their own comapny, Dobro. Dobro is a name with double meaning, in this case - while it's an abbreviation of Dopyera Brothers, it's also the word for "good" in a lot of Slavic languages, leading to the slogan "Dobro means good in any language!"

Due to Beauchamp's work with Rickenbacker, though, resonators fell off the radar in terms of popularity. After all, they'd figured out a form of amplification that didn't use lots of metal, so resonators ended up failing as a product. Or at least, they did for a while. Nowadays, you can find many brands producing resonators, usually for the specific tone resonators provide: rich and metallic. They're seen nowadays as bluegrass and country music instruments, but you can see people like Mark Knopfler using them for songs as well.

Now, this isn't referring to a specific kit build. I found one that's kinda an ES-style thing, with 21 frets, so that's probably the one I'd go for, not least because I like upper fret access, but it's all dependent on if I still want to build a resonator acoustic after the current build, or if I'd want to do something else entirely. It's an odd thing, my mind.

So, what now? The completed section? Eh, not exactly.

I would do a small piece on the Fretless and the Cherry XII each, I really would - God alone knows I love rambling about these builds enough, this post is testament to that on its own - but I don't need to. I made a full post about the creation of the Fretless, and made multiple posts in the course of building the Cherry XII, starting back in January and leading up to June.

But other than that? That's all there is to this post. There's nothing more I can really do in terms of explaining my ideas. I may have more ideas in between now and whenever I revisit this concept, I may reshuffle things, shelve one idea or can another. But as for everything else? It's in flux, constantly uncertain unitl we reach and observe it. I can't really say what I'll want to build after the Crusader, because I haven't finished the Crusader. Hell, I've barely started it.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. If something needs explaining further for one reason or another, tell me, and I'll try and explain it to the best of my ability.

[the-takosader]

So, about that "Marauder" build I was doing...

Breaking news: it is no longer a Marauder build!

For context of the people who randomly stumble across this post without all the lore and shit from my megapost back in August, first of all, hi, welcome to the blog, second of all, this was originally intended as a "recreation" or full copy of a pretty obscure mid-'60s Fender guitar that never saw full, mainstream production - the Fender Marauder.

For further context, the Fender Marauder was a guitar that got a mashup of all of Fender's offsets, plus the Stratocaster, getting the Strat's pickup layout, a pickup selection method similar to the Jag, the Jazzmaster's lead/rhythm circuit, plus a vibrato like the Mustang, and the headstock of the Starcaster, which didn't exist at that point, so it's technically that the Starcaster had the Marauder's headstock, rather than the other way around...

Where was I? Ah, yes, not doing the Fender Marauder. Yeah, no, it's not happening anymore. Instead, the build has, for lack of a better term, "pivoted", thanks to an idea my aunt gave me: doing something original.

Now, in Current Year (2024 is soon to end, and oh dear god it's almost a year since I had the idea for the Tele-Shaped Rickenbacker), originality in the guitar-building world is... not exactly a thing? There's that many Telecaster and Stratocaster copies, combined with the fact that there's only so many ways you can shape a slab of wood into a pleasant experience to play.

My solution? The academic method! And by that, I mean "instead of ripping off one guitar and calling it a day, I'm ripping off multiple guitars," or at least taking from multiple sources, as an academic should.

If you want to see more of this madness, keep reading under the cut.

You still here? Awesome. So, now that you've chosen to read on, let's go through the spec sheet that I made for this exact purpose! Surely, it can't be that incomprehensible, ri-

...oh.

Yeah, I went really in-depth. I even mentioned the fucking fretboard radius, that is how in-depth I went. Now, does this in-depth nature help? Oh yeah, certainly. Is it comprehensible? Nope. Not in the slightest. Not unless you browse Wikipedia for fun or watch way too much of Trogly's stuff.

So, a small glossary of terms, before we get into this shit properly:

Comfort carves: bits of wood removed from the body of the guitar to allow for better playing experience, originating with the Stratocaster.

Trem system: also known as a whammy bar or vibrato, this is how you get those reductions in pitch.

Coil split and coil tap: either factoring out one coil's output (split) or removing the effect of some of the windings of the coil (tap).

That's nowhere near all I've got to explain, but if any of you wanted, I'll put out a "translated" spec sheet that attempts to properly explain the shit. Anyway, where was I? Ah yes!

The build no longer being a Marauder has freed me up to do whatever I want now, which leads me to the body design (further screenshots will come from the translated spec sheet mentioned above):

So, let's discuss why those three specifically. But first, were they the original ideas? Not in the slightest! Originally, this was going to be FAR more Gibson-inspired than this, taking from the Scarred Reaper (a Jagstang style merging of the Les Paul and SG created by the aforementioned Trogly, I would recommend you watch his stuff if it wasn't so Guitar Nerd) and the SGV/ZV (that Zakk Wylde signature thing the Gibson custom shop cooked up), with maybe a single-sided headstock.

That idea's gone, DOA when further thought was brought in. The new idea, as specified in the image, is a hodge-podge of 2 guitars and a bass, all 3 of which I've played previously in some manner or form. The upper horn of a Burns Double Six, which (for those less educated in guitars, or can't just visualise a guitar from memory as soon as it's brought up in a conversation) looks like this:

Yes, the guitar body looks like that. Plays beautifully, or at least the one I played does.

So that's the source of the upper horn, even if it'd be less exaggerated than that. What about the other two? Let's start with the lower cutaway, inspired by the Rickenbacker 4001 (or 4003) bass.

Note how the fret access is incredibly good? Yeah, that's not just a thing on the bass. Rickenbacker also make/made a guitar version of this, the 480 (plus a short-lived version known as the 481 with slanted frets - not fanned, slanted), with at least 21 frets of perfectly fine access to frets, and 24 frets total on the neck.

Finally, the PRS CE24, which is being used for the lower body of the guitar:

I could go on for several paragraphs about how and why I'm going with the lower bout of a CE24 for this, or even that I'm basiclally making this a more PRS-style Strat than the John Mayer Silver Sky. But, I won't. Quite simply, I have neither the time nor the energy. Instead, what I'll do is summarise, because I can't put a second read-more link in here.

So, why is it a PRS-style Strat? Well, many reasons. I'm thinking of putting in a PRS floating trem system, doing a 10-degree headstock angle (enough to have the tension, but not enough to risk headstock breaks - looking at you, Gibson, with your 17-degree headstocks!), and, most importantly, I'm going for a 25" scale length, which effectively gives me the very basics of a PRS guitar, minus the construction and the pickups.

But continuing from there, the only thing preventing this from being a "normal" PRS build or similarly designed guitar is the pickups I'm using. They're not any of the usual fare that PRS use, not by any stretch of the imagination. What I'm planning on using is, as laid out in the spec sheet, a Fender-style Wide Range Humbucker, a reverse-wound, reverse-polarity Tri-Sonic imitator (because I don't want to try and source Burns or Adeson pickups for this, so Kent Armstrong it is), and a Tonerider Hot Classics Broadcaster bridge pickup (it's the bridge pickup specifically because a Telecaster's bridge pickup is tilted with a black bobbin). Now, dear reader, can you guess what positions I'm going to put them in?

If you guessed that I'm going to be sane and normal by putting the humbucker in the bridge, you're entirely incorrect, unfortunately! Instead, I'm going for an at least sane positioning for the Broadcaster pickup, putting that next to the trem system, or at least as close as can be within reason, that RWRP Kent Armstrong Tri-Sonic in the middle position, and the humbucker in the neck position.

The result of that, in concept, should be a fuller sound in the neck, and depending on how I wire the pickups (which will most likely be in series) a really bitey sound in the bridge, the kind that gives some levels of distortion a run for its money. A comparatively "thin" sound is to be expected, as this project is to have 24 frets, and thus a tighter pickup spacing.

The idea is similar to this guitar made for Alex Lifeson by Paul Reed Smith (yes, that's what PRS stands for), which uses an EMG in the neck, and a Signature Guitars single coil in the bridge, with Signature Guitars being a short-lived brand that Lifeson worked with in the mid-to-late '80s until the company's dissolution in 1990.

That's partially what's inspiring me on this specific pickup configuration, as I've heard the tones that this specific guitar's made, going back to at least 1991, for the solo on Dreamline. Considering the guitar's serial dates it to 1990, so it's likely he got it from PRS for the explicit purpose of recording the Roll The Bones album.

But that's not important, nor is it even the point, because damnit, I love rambling about tangential shit! Anyway, to get back to the point of this rambling, this is a PRS-style Strat in the least Strat-like manner. None of the parts I took from are a Strat, or really have any relation to it outside of the Double Six. The CE24 is inspired the double-cuts that Gibson made, and the 4001 was made back when originality was actually a thing in guitar design.

But the result of all that designing, combined with a little bit of image compositing, was this:

Now, I'm aware that this design, for lack of a better term, looks like shit. It's way too stretched out, and nowhere near like realistic. In my full defense, this was made in Paint at close to midnight, so I doubt I was thinking at full brain power. I'll probably de-stretch it at some point, if I can be arsed to do so.

The neck, by comparison, doesn't look nearly as bad, but considering how hard it is to fuck up the look of a neck, it's not that big a deal. The idea of a neck is to give an anchor point for the non-ball end of the string that allows for a tension adjustment point, with the fretboard acting as the point where frets change the note/pitch the guitar plays.

As God Pythagoras Intended.

Side note, fuck that guy! He broke music 2000 years ago, and we still haven't recovered!

Back to the matter at hand, though, my compositing process for the neck was based on inlay style, number of frets, and headstock shape. Now, I mentioned above that I was doing a 2-octave neck, 24 frets total. The "neck" (by which I mean the fretboard) was taken from a Rickenbacker 360, and the headstock shape was taken from a Gibson Firebird, the last remaining relic of this thing's Gbison influences, resulting in this composite:

Please note that the transparency for all this was done in Word, which is the best I can use to get specific bits and pieces of guitars to mash up and weld together like fucking Victor Frankenstein.

The full thing, combining both neck and body composites, came out of this process looking like this...

...as you can see, very squashed, very stretched, which was not the intention, I assure you! So, as a help to my brain, and possibly to the very few people who stumble across this who know good proportioning, I squashed the width down a bit further, albeit at the cost of making the neck feel too short for the body:

I could throw a squashed down version of the body back into Paint, add the standard-sized neck, and operate from there on the image front, but there's a small issue of CBA to contend with. In short, I can't be bothered to do it.

Now, you might note that the headstock lacks tuner tips. Why? Because the Firebird had planetary tuners, what some would term "banjo tuners". The basic idea is that, to facilitate string pull, they made a new headstock design (because before this there were 3 Gibson headstock styles - open book, which was the standard one, triangle, for the Flying V and related models, and hockey stick, which only got used on the Explorer until Aldo Nova came along in 1982). This new design utilises the planetary tuners for... some reason, Idk, I can't find it. Point is, at first, this is what I was going to go with, Firebird headstock shape and all.

However, upon further rational thought, I'm just going to go with a Hamer-style headstock, specifically one like the Hamer USA Centaura, which looks like this:

I was kinda debating on putting a Floyd Rose or similar on this, being influenced by this thing, but they're not exactly cheap to install, replace or repair, so that's why the PRS trem. The one thing I'm still debating on from this is the "sweet switch", which was designed for Carlos Santana by PRS, purely because he was known for using a long cable prior to going wireless. But that's not the point.

What is the point? Fuck if I know. I've been writing this on and off over the past 2 or 3 days, I just set out to make an in-depth Tumblr post about my guitar build, and here I am talking about a Hamer and Carlos Santana. To try and steer myself back to the point, let's talk the unique bits, stuff I've only seen done... 2 or 3 times, total. In this case, I'm talking about unique pickup selection methods.

There's a couple I have in mind for this build: a rotary switch, and individual slider switches. Now, why are these unique? Because both are rare to see on production-level guitars. The former comes from PRS guitars from the '90s, which worked really well, except people couldn't figure out what pickup they were on, while the latter I've only seen in 2 different styles on a total of 3 guitar models.

Style 1 is what I'm thinking of doing: Jag style, where there's a control plate to select what pickup you're using, and you can select and swap on the fly, which is similar to the Red Special, which has 3 pickup switches and 3 phase switches - the top row is pickups, and the bottom row is the phasing. Brilliant bit of kit for a guitar built 60 years ago.

Now, the other style of switching is a bit more convoluted than that, because it's Mustang switching, which is 3-position sliders mounted horizontally above each pickup. Position closest to the bridge is off, central is on, and position closest to the neck is out of phase. Sounds like the Red Special's method but condensed into 3 switches, right?

Well, the fact of the matter is that Brian's design and build was done between 1963 and 1964, and the Mustang didn't enter production until the latter year, so it's likely but not certain to be a case of convergent design/evolution.

Each idea has its merits. While, yes, a rotary switch would be less clunky, not to mention easier to install, you then have to manually wire each and every pickup combination you want. Now, that's fine and dandy with 2 humbuckers, you can do full neck, outer coils, both pickups, inner coils, full bridge, and in fact, that's how PRS did it. The issue is doing 3 pickups, one being a humbucker, and the other two being single coils, because then you need at least 7 positions, by my measure:

Neck

Neck + Middle

Neck + Bridge

Middle

Middle + Bridge

Bridge

All 3 together.

Now, I could be missing the forest for the trees, or at least the wood for the figuring, but I'd rather avoid having to wire up 7 different positions, especially because I'm not doing any fancy pots here. By comparison, individual switching seems more appealing, as there I can just have 3 switches for neck, middle and bridge, and be done with the whole matter.

Moving on from that, we have the aesthetics of it. I don't know what finish I'm gonna go for, considering I've debated at least 6 different finishes in my head for this build since I started it. I've debated on 2-Tone Sunburst, 3-Tone Sunburst, Tobacco Burst, Sandbar Burst, deep ocean blue, whale blue, grey black, all sorts. In theory, any of these 6 I listed could be the one I go with, which is pretty obvious.

Then again, I could go with some mad bastard finish like Faded Whale Blue Smokeburst (diluted Whale Blue stain, add on top a black ring on the front, dark sides, kinda tear drop figure on the back like an old '70s silverburst, the works) and deal with the convolution of doing that on a flame top.

Maybe I'll end up doing that. Who knows.

Oh, I almost forgot! I even gave it a name: the Crusader, acknowledging that a) it's my design, and b) it was based on the Marauder. It's going to be a long road to its completion, possibly a full year (remember, this is with hand tools, no large scale machinery) instead of the 6 months it took to build the Cherry XII. Most of it's going to be either mahogany or sapele, with the odd bit of maple or ash in there, but by the end of it, I'll have something unique to call my own. You couldn't get me to give it up if you tried.

Things I didn't go into detail about:

Binding stuff

Neck heel carve

Locking tuners

Inlay style

Possibly other shit I'm forgetting

Hope you enjoyed reading my ramblings this time!

[the-takosader]

So kinda like Splatoon? Admittedly, gravity isn't changed by colours, and it's not a survival crafting game, but "temporary passages of safe hues" gives me vibes of using different weapons to get from A to B in different maps.

I need a survival crafting game where every non-starting biome is hostile to the player character's survival, but for really stupid reasons. None of this "oh, it's too hot, oh, there's no air" stuff – give me a biome where I need to craft a reinforced umbrella to avoid being randomly killed by periodic rains of eight-pound bullfrogs.

[the-takosader]

Small note, but the contribution of the "archlute" is actually a theorbo.

Theorbos are lutes of a long necked construction, with modern recreations having the bass neck fold for easier storage. Why? Because look at this thing:

[ID: a still image of multi-instrumentalist Brandon Acker playing the piece Prelude and Menuet en Rondeau on a theorbo.]

I don't exactly *know* the usual dimensions or scale length of a theorbo's bass strings, but considering he's holding that like a guitar, and the top of the neck's stretching to the next continent over, it's likely of a similar length to a double bass.

At the same time, however, the double bass' scale length is usually 40+ inches in length, the longest in normal/standard playing circles.

Anyway, contrasting this with the archlute, which doesn't have nearly as large a neck past the catgut frets (don't worry, it's not the guts of cats, it's sheep intestine instead). Archlutes are the compromise between the theorbo and the Renaissance tenor lute. As a result, it attempts to do the job of both at once, and fails horribly, lacking the powerful tenor and bass registers that the deep-bodied theorbo provides, and this is only further hindered by the shorter string length.

In summary, that photo isn't an archlute, it's a theorbo, and you can tell because of the neck stretching to the next country over. Also the theorbo is generally a superior instrument to the archlute.

the contrabass saxophone is such an absurd instrument

[the-takosader]

[the-takosader]

Both in hero gear, and casual clothing:

Both made by me in GMod

SPLATOON FANS REBLOG THIS POST WITH YOUR AGENT 4 DESIGNS I WANT TO DRAW YOUR AGENT 4'S

[the-takosader]

Y'know, I don't get the whole "guitar or bass" thing. It feels like a Splatfest that's been going on for decades at this point.

If we're being totally honest, I think that you should be allowed to play what you wanna play, and if you wanna play both, then play both.

Now, I'm not saying to go all Mike Rutherford, and make a double-neck guitar with a bass. One, that's a little overboard, and two, someone already beat you to the punch.

What I mean is more like "play what you want, when you want, I'm not stopping you," because if I can get ideas about buying and playing this thing...

...who am I to judge about you playing guitar like a bass or vice versa. Bring some of your playstyle to it!

Now, does this mean I'm abandoning the Telecaster Bass VI? No. I've not abandoned a build project yet, and I'm not starting with the bass. It might get delayed, sure. The Fretless is currently in for refinishing, and I've just started back at college again.

But other than that? I think we're still on track for the TB6 to be the next project. And then, who knows, maybe I'll actually do a scratch build. That'd be a fun thing to take up the next 2 years.

[the-takosader]

Saving for personal use

the notes are broken 😂

[the-takosader]

sometimes I remember how on the last day of my high school latin class our teacher had us gather around his laptop to show us latin memes on tumblr and my best friend and I just gaped at each other in abject horror. we couldn’t figure out if our teacher was just showing us memes on a Fun Website He Had Found or if he was a tumblr user for real. but he knew how to navigate it. years have passed but it haunts me. he could still be out here

[the-takosader]

NOW MEET THE GANG OF INTERNATIONAL SHITPOSTERS AND GAMERS I CALL MY CHAT

[the-takosader]

i think we should all start using arabic words and phrases more often because its a beautiful language and also theres not really. english equivalents that have the same vibes

theres also the comedy potential of it. you guys dont know the joy of having your muslim friend text you "hopefully the racists in our city will all get sick and cant go to the protest" and you, as a pasty white guy, responding with "inshallah they get covid"

its a one hit KO every time. its fucking hilarious. theres no english word that has the same effect.

he also once texted me that he got over a mysterious illness he came down with (i think? i cant remember the exact context) and i responded with "subhanallah he is cured"

again, one hit KO. he lost his shit.

what im saying is we gotta normalise arabic. its just a language like any other, and it has some great words. its just like saying "thank god" or whatever, but theres so much variety and nuance. its beautiful

[the-takosader]

even for the funny?

robotgirl who runs on a diesel generator with a little pullcord on her back. you agree

[the-takosader]

consider: nuclear power started by pullcord

robotgirl who runs on a diesel generator with a little pullcord on her back. you agree