The Guitar Designer's Workshop

Friday and Freezing in New Hartford

Oh, how quickly things can change. A few days ago we were taking our breaks out in the warm sun in shirtsleeves. I'd even caught myself thinking that winter in New England wasn't so bad after all. Today the mercury plunged to around 13 degrees and the whipping wind took my breath away as I walked towards The Workshop door. Nevertheless, inside things were heating up just fine.

Inside, enjoying a mild 70 degrees at 45% humidity, the guys were cranking up some T-Birds and getting down to business. Ferdinand had gotten the Brazilian rosewood fingerboard on the Vector III neck and Tom had completed the first layer of binding on the headstock. here it is with Tom's carefully matched flame maple rod cover.

Over on the assembly bench Todd was putting the Klusons onto a Taladega Pro that he'd just buffed out yesterday. I like the way the knobs look on this model.

Using a straight edge Todd makes sure that the machine heads are aligned and straight before drilling the final holes and screwing things down.

This photo shows the unique sculpted heel area on the Tal Pro. Todd has done a masterful job of leveling the lacquer—you can just about read a book in the reflection. The fact that the finish is a mere .007" thick makes it all the more impressive.

Back in the wood shop Tom has moved on to the task of joining some African Limba and bringing it to the proper thickness for a neck blank. The customer has specified very straight grain wood similar to what we used on the Special K limited edition—only this won't be a solid body.

There's so much fun stuff around here, we've all forgotten about the cold outside.

Mid-Week Workshop Report

Wow. It's hard to believe that it's only Wednesday. There's been a lot of activity here in The Workshop already this week, and it feels like more time has gone by than actually has. Yesterday a couple of really interesting custom orders hit the shop floor—one with a really cool wiring set-up, so stay tuned for that one. Jon Herington checked in and reminded us about some upcoming gigs with the Jon Herington Band. On top of that, I just finished speaking with one of our really good clients (who has over thirty of our guitars) about a particularly challenging treatment that will set the bar pretty high for the guys in the shop.

Back on the bench, Dave has finished routing the cavity on the Vector III. You can see the areas that are slated to receive threaded inserts to accept the cover-plate fasteners, which will be stainless machine screws.

 He's taken a slice of the Vector III body material and is fashioning it into the back-cavity cover. The trick is to find the matching grain and get it lined it up with the grain on the guitar body. Then Dave makes  a pencil outline and takes it to the bandsaw.  After roughing it out, he'll sand it by hand to get the exact fit before drilling the counterbored holes.

Around the corner, Todd has an Aztec Gold Standard model on the buffing wheel. Getting one of these babies polished takes a lot of skill because of the angles, and a lot of time because of the amount of surface area. This and the Vector are two of the hardest guitars to get right. Other guitars are much easier to buff—the curved surfaces hide imperfections from the untrained eye, but straight lines and flat surfaces will test the skill of any finisher. Lucky for us, Todd is one of the best.

I thought I was done with the phone for the day. I was about to go into the spray booth to shoot some new color samples when I got another call. 

This time it's from a pro player who is raving about his new guitar and wants another one just like it—with a few tweaks. We'll show you how that one turns out too.

Thursday Update

Just a couple of quick looks into The Workshop today. It's been a busy week so far, and things are moving along well. In the mill, Ferdinand is busy slitting binding while over in the finishing area Todd is putting the polish on a "stock" Monaco Elite finished in Aztec Gold. As much as we love to do the intricate custom work, some clients still want our guitars just as we designed them. After curing for a minimum of seven days, the first step is stripping off the fingerboard mask. In this shot, Todd is cleaning up any excess lacquer with an Xacto knife before he sands and buffs.

 After over an hour of sanding, down to a 1500P grit, our man Todd takes it to the wheels for another hour of polishing. He's going to work with this one for the rest of the afternoon—taking it through assembly, wiring and finally set up.

Around the corner and just within shouting distance Tom has routed the Vector III fingerboard for inlay and binding. Tomorrow we'll catch up with him on more of that job.

 Meanwhile, Dave is plotting out the control cavity and planning to make the back cover. This is going to be a matched mahogany part with stainless steel mounting screws—more on that later. See you then!

 

More Pearl Progress

Today finds Dave cutting more shell and fitting it to the Vector, but let's turn back the clock first to see how the top gets cut for a guitar as big as this one.

 First we resaw the billet to a workable thickness. Because the top on a Vector or Standard is only about a tenth of an inch thick, we start with a fairly thin piece. Then comes the hard part. Here's Dave at the mighty Northfield saw going slowly to get the straightest cut. We've got a wide-blade Hitachi but the throat won't go up enough for a piece this large so Dave uses patience and skill to saw straight.

Now you can see why they call it book-match—it opens up just like a book (kids, ask your parents what a book is). Finally it gets machined to thickness after being bonded together, then glued down onto the mahogany back. You can see the pencil outline that determines the final shape.

A few feet away, Tom is cutting the maple truss rod cover out on the overarm router. He's taken a slice of the headstock maple from the exact place where the cover will go, and is now shaping it with a form he's made from mahogany.

Dave has already shaped the body out and routed the cavities for the pickups, electronics and neck pocket. Besides Todd's smiling face, in this shot we can see that there is a plug in the neck socket to protect it from tear out and breakage. That's right—three humbuckers!

Back to the present, Dave continues to cut the pearl after having completed the inside black binding layer. He starts with large pieces and draws his rough line with a pencil.

After cutting on the jigsaw he'll sand the piece to shape—continually checking it against the guitar for fit.

Look at the size of that pearl piece. Most shops will just lay a bunch of small rectangles around a curve, but we like to give our customers the big pieces. It's more costly, but when you take the Pepsi Challenge, you'll know where that extra money went!

At the next bench, Ferdinand is laying the first layer of black binding on the headstock in preparation for the same shell treatment. This guitar will get mother of pearl all the way around!

Wow that's a lot of progress and it's only Tuesday. Next time we'll take a look at the backplate treatment because it's pretty cool too. See you then.

The Week Begins with Change

The big snowstorm never really materialized. Instead, we got about an inch of slush that barely threatened to make the Monday morning commute a little more interesting. Out here in the woods we deal with whatever nature dishes out, but by mid-morning the temperature was rising and the sun had melted everything—only big puddles in front of the shop were left.

 Inside, Todd has a Standard in '59 burst on the buffing wheel. The top is quilt maple with a huge figure. He'll spend the morning buffing and then assembling it before getting it on the set up bench.

 Meanwhile,  Dave had already shaped the Vector project body and was ready to begin with the routing. The control layout was there just as we'd planned it a few days ago but just for good measure I double checked the clearances on the real article. The pickguard is just for reference. At the right of the photo you can see that Tom's neck is taking shape too.

 After running the shape around the pin router twice to get the stepped channels for the purfling and outside binding, Dave began the task of building up the layers. Because this guitar will get pearl purfling, we put a thin strip of black on the inside against the figured maple top. This sets it off from the body color and really makes it "pop".

 Here Dave is tacking down the strip of black as he test fits it around the guitar and makes the miter joints at the "shoulders". It's a laborious task, building everything up by hand but the results are well worth it.

 Back over in Todd's world, things have really gone well. This Standard has a great neck and plays like a dream. The guitar is light and chords ring out some crazy harpsichord on steroids!

 Here's a few more shots of the finished guitar. We'll let it sit for a day and then check it one more time before it gets packed up and sent off to its owner. Sometimes they're hard to let go.

Not a bad start to the week!  

Hunkered Down and Handmade

Sometimes a year is a short time and other times, it's a lifetime. This week the music industry has its big convention in Anaheim, California. It's called the NAMM show and most music biz-types are there right now doing deals and shaking hands—pumping up the sales for the coming season. 

 Over the years I've attended almost every trade show that there is to go to. Anaheim, Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, Tokyo, Toronto, London, Frankfurt—I'm sure I've forgotten some. The last time I added up all the days I've spent traveling to, from and being at trade shows, it came to over a year's worth of my life. That's a lot of time. Every time I go, one thing occurs to me; been there, seen that. They say history repeats itself, so keeping that in mind I only go every three or so years now. Besides, we've got work to do.

 The day started with a little planning session. Dave and I had plotted out the control layout for a customer's dream Vector model a few days ago, so now it was time to turn up the heat on the rest of the build.

 Here I'm making sure that the control layout will provide enough hand clearance for volume swells by mapping the locations out on a mockup and physically trying it. Sure, we can draw all this stuff in AutoCad but nothing beats the old mockup for the final determination.

 We checked the clearances for the three mini switches that will control the splitting of the humbucker coils. This is just like the original Chaparral models that I designed about the same time John Mayer joined the Cub Scouts.

 Tom is busy with the neck and fingerboard for this Vector, which is getting a really nice piece of Brazilian rosewood, surrounded by mother of pearl. The next step is for Tom to hand-cut the shell to go around the body and headstock, so we'll check back on that in a few days. Here's a look at the rod cover he's fabricated from the same figured maple as he used on the peghead face. He's layered it with a piece of ivoroid to make it stand out from the faceplate too—nice touch Tom!

 Over at the other end of The Workshop, Todd is doing the final assembly and setup on the 12 string Standard bass that we showed you about ten days ago. It's finally done, and it looks great.

 

The customer wanted Bartolini pickups in a passive setup.

Matching quilt headstock faceplate and the new owner's name under the logo.

Todd did a great job of blocking out the sides and making them flat as a mirror.

One heck of good day in New Hartford, and despite the cold weather we're burnin'!
 

Fabricating the Neck: Headstock Binding

In this video segment, Dave is forming the outside layer of cellulose binding over the ones he's already stacked up. Most guitars use a pre-laminated plastic binding that has all the layers already in place. The trouble with that is when it gets bent around curves, the outside layers stretch and get distorted—that's why we build ours up in stages. It's also pretty cool to get something that's done the old-school way too, don't you think? We're not worried about anyone "stealing" secrets here—do you think that a big guitar factory could do this five-hundred times a day? Well, some guitars don't have binding on them at all either, so that's even faster. This guitar will have two full days of binding and inlay work on it. Nice job Dave.

Be sure to pause the jukebox in the right-hand column before you play>>>

Building the Neck

Many of you may have heard of our "stressed neck" system—it's a way of improving strength to resist twisting without losing the resonance of a single piece neck. One component of the system is the truss rod set up, and another is the integrity of the density and orientation of the neck's grain.

Here's a short video of how even the peghead ears are cultivated from the same piece of wood as the neck shaft itself. The head and neck are essential parts of a guitars sonic fingerprint. The headstock's mass, and the way it is distributed has a big effect upon the tonality and sustain properties of the guitar. To prove this to yourself, clamp a capo at the tip of your guitar's headstock and listen (and feel) what happens. Those of you who have played a Strat with a Tele neck know what I'm talking about. How about that monster headstock on the D'Angelico? However, I digress—this is more about making sure that the headstock pieces work as one, because laminating dissimilar densities of wood together can cause unpredictable results. To avoid the pitfalls that plague most laminated necks we not only match the neck pieces, but the headstock as well.

 Be sure to pause the jukebox in the column to the right >>

Just in Time For the Holidays

A while ago we collaborated with Seymour Duncan's user forum and raffled off a prize. We offered to do a complete set-up on a guitar—any guitar! Seymour threw in a pair of custom-wound pickups that would be tailored to the needs of the owner, and they were to be installed in our shop.
 

 

Then something special happened. The winner wanted to donate the prize to another forum member who was having some medical problems, and the love just starting pouring in. The consensus was so strong from fellow forumites that the deal was sealed, and arrangements were made.

The new recipient of the set-up prize sent us his 2000 Gibson 335. That's right, we specified that we'd set up any guitar and that meant any brand—we're guitar lovers here, and that extends to all kinds. We don't usually do repair work, but restoration is where we came from so it was a bit like old times.
 
 
 

To be honest, when the guitar arrived it sounded great and played pretty well. I might have just left it as it was. It was loaded with Tom Holmes humbuckers which we've used before and they're top shelf. We'd discussed some of the issues and drawbacks of the guitars current configuration and Seymour came up with a plan. The pickups, based on the SLU neck and the Antiquity bridge were voiced to add tightness to the overall sound, and the decision to use Seymour's "Triple Shot" switching system surrounds would add a whole new world of tones to the guitar. When they arrived we noticed that they'd been engraved: "Lovebucker".
 

 

Once we'd gotten the guitar apart, the first thing we did was have Dave go over the frets and take any grooving out. He re-crowned and polished the frets up nicely. That would take care of the slight buzzing that the owner had mentioned. After cleaning and oiling the fingerboard, Dave sent it over to the other end of the room to Todd.
 

 

The next step was for Todd to make a wiring loom that would fit into the guitar, and accommodate the Triple Shot switching. I gave him some pointers on how to do a 335, and suggested a teflon coated hookup coax with a braided shield covered in white insulation. It's a nice blend of old school and new tech. The bonus is twofold: it is a small diameter and very flexible which is good for a 335 and it is already insulated so we could do away with the messy shrink tubes that Gibson uses. The result would be very tidy and not as visible through the f-hole. We also put in a new switch.
 

 

The owner and I had discussed using oil filled caps, so I gave Todd some Angelas from my stash, with a value of .010 mfd. I figured that would add some nice honk if needed, seeing how the Triple Shots would give the option of twang. The Bridge pickup had alnico II magnets so I figured things would get interesting.
 

 

When Todd had things pretty well buttoned up, I did my final tweaking and found that the G string saddle needed to be turned around to get it to intonate properly. There are some disadvantages to the fret spacing on these guitars—I'd almost forgotten about how I re-calibrated our positions for modern strings, but all in all it intonated a lot better when we were done.
 

 

The results were quite apparent. The guitar fingered a bit better, and chords were more true up the neck. The tightness of the Lovebuckers was readily heard, making each note ring out in chords as opposed to being slurred. Pushing a Fender Tremolux a bit in the normal channel with the guitar's volume backed off slightly allowed single notes to sound round and full with a good bit of clarity that was missing before. When two or more notes were played, a nice bit of distortion could be coaxed to color the sound and give it edge. Popping the volume up on the guitar resulted in a nice lead tone without giving up to fluttery bottom. The pickups seemed to be doing exactly what Seymour had intended. 

The Triple Shot surrounds were an interesting addition. Each bezel has two small slider switches that control the coils on the pickups. I was able to put either pickup into parallel or split coil configurations independently. Being a single-coil fan, this made the guitar come alive for me. The neck humbucker was fat and round—great for single note passages when distorted, but in the parallel mode, the chime really made me smile. The middle position with both pickups on became almost frustrating as there were so many options, all of them good, that it was hard to pick a favorite. I guess in a live or recording context, you'd know right away. Playing through my first generation Matchless DC30 really showed off what this setup could do, and I didn't want to stop.

All too soon it was time to pack up the guitar and get it out in time for Christmas, but it definitely left me thinking about a new guitar design to build. That's why I like all guitars, they open up doors to new rooms—or in this case old rooms with a new twist. Thanks to the Duncan team and the users forum (a great bunch of guitar fans) what a great story.  To our winner—be well and enjoy, my friend!

Good Morning American Guitars

I like Saturday mornings even when it means rolling into work before the sun rises. The hard part, getting out of bed, is over and now the world is mine. Out here in rural New England there isn't a lot of traffic at this hour; and there's a special kind of solitude that descends on me as I negotiate the miles of curvy two-lane road that leads to The Workshop.

 Frost crunches underfoot as I walk to the door and take out my key. I can see just the slightest hint of daylight creeping over the roof of our 175 year-old mill building, the front of which is bathed in a freakish amber glow from the sodium lamp overhead.

I glance at the clock and then hurry on my way, work-boots thumping across century-old maple floors, flipping circuit-breakers and pushing magnetic start buttons—firing up the tools of the trade before the crew arrives. 

 Today's main objective is to put a little milage on the custom orders that are in house. We like to take a week or so off around the holidays this time of year, so it's important to put the instruments into a sequence that takes advantage of the extra curing time. 

 By the time I've made my rounds, Gary is already in the spray room tacking off the B12A that Dave has just completed. There are about seven instruments in various stages that need to be attended to, and Gary will begin with the ones that get the first nitro base coats. Then there will be some to color, and some that need topcoats.

As I write this, the light outside is chasing away the dark and I'm listening to the clank of the steam pipes and the creaking of the roof as the temperature changes. Most of the world is asleep at this hour, but we're making cool stuff. Yeah, it's too early for a weekend—and I love it.

Just Because...

 
Just because. I like this guitar, and looking at it makes me happy. Just because—I can. 

Twelve String Bass Build Continues

It's been a good day in The Workshop and as you can see from this photo Dave has done a great job of blending the neck joint on our B12A build. The feathered edge where the cutaway meets the maple of the neck has turned out really well with a nice straight edge.

 
It's touchy to build a neck with a full-width tenon on an instrument that has a deep cutaway like this as the body and its binding strip has to be feathered down to nothing at the point it "disappears" at the neck. Narrow tenon necks hide the joint under a shoulder, but don't get the advantage of the added vibration transfer of this kind of joint—that's why we like to do it.

Let's just turn back the clock a few days because I want you to see the huge slab of mahogany that this bass was made from. Here, Dave and I are going over some details for another custom build that we have in the Workshop, and we're using the body blank of the B12A as a drafting table.

 
Older growth mahogany in sizes wide enough for a single piece bass or a Standard model are getting hard to come by. We've got a pretty good stash and are always accumulating more when we get a tip on some good stuff. We'll come back to this in a day or so to show you more so check back. 

Inside the Cutaway

Today's peek into The Workshop reveals Dave at work on another blended neck joint—he's getting pretty good at this. Well, that's what we do here in the shop isn't it? This one take a special kind of touch however. It's a B-12A "acoustic" bass, and the inside of the cutaway exposes the side of the neck within the joint for a considerable amount of distance.

What Dave is doing here is feathering the blend with a piece of sandpaper rolled on a dowel. This gives him precise control of the amount and location of his sanding. The reason that's important is because as he sands the cutaway back he's actually exposing the neck along a line he creates with the sanding. His goal is to make the break point between body and neck a perfectly straight line. If you think it's as easy as it looks—well, it just aint! We'll come back to this build later to see the result.

Chambered Music. An Evolution of Sound

Beginning in the late 1980s we've added chambering to our list of sound tweaking tools—and when the Artist model was launched it became mainstream with us. Those early examples of hollowed-out guitars were just solid body instruments with a pocket (or holes) cut into the mahogany back and then covered by the maple top. The Artist added the f-hole, but it wasn't until after we'd made the move to New Hartford that we really started taking the whole chambering thing to a new level. Of course, the Newport and the Improv were logical extensions of our quest, but let's concern ourselves with the semi-solid guitars for this post.
 

 

Our first change was to modify the Studio's chamber size and add the undercarve to the top. Most chambered guitars (including the original Artist models) are hollow underneath but only arched on the outside. By getting the dimension of the top over the chamber down to a consistent thickness we were able to gain some amplitude and noticeably shift the resonance of the guitar. This led to more experimentation with shape and size.
 

The Talladega is the most obvious recipient of the data that we collected—its horn-shaped form and rounded corners serve to reduce standing waves.
 

Talladega Pro Chambering

 

It's exactly the same thing speaker enclosure builders do. Our collaborations with fellow luthiers and aerospace engineers brought us up to speed on several important fronts. An in-house laser vibrometer was at our disposal as well. It's a device that lets you take a "movie" in real time of the vibration patterns on the surface of the instrument. Pretty cool stuff. In the end, the techie tricks only served to attach hard numbers to what we were learning by ear.
  

Talladega first sketch

In the case of the Talladega, we were trying to tailor the sound of the guitar to accentuate the articulation of the notes without becoming too hard or harsh. The Double-D pickup concept was going to have plenty of mids, but we wanted the guitar to be capable of the kind of twang that country and roots rock players could dig. Also, the Tally is capable of combining the two pickups in series for a big humbucking sound, but we didn't want the bottom to wash out either. The Talladega Pro is somewhat different in that it supplies a warmer, darker tone for players who are jumping to humbuckers from bolt-on Strat-type guitars. I think that in both cases, we've succeeded.

Another instrument that has benefitted from our attention to chambering is the Standard. We'd made some hollowed-out versions, mostly to reduce weight for clients, but we hadn't really attempted to "tune" it in the process. Clearly, weight was becoming an issue for some customers but we wanted to offer more as long as we were at it. 

The first version prototypes used various locations and sizes of chambers, but the thing that we kept running into was that when the chambers got big, the feedback got uncontrollable and unpredictable. What a surprise—any Jazz-box player could have foretold that. It was becoming clear that a series of smaller chambers was going to be the ticket, but just when we thought we'd got it right another problem surfaced. The Standard is a big instrument and it's relatively thin. The body is made from a single piece of mahogany and is already prone to warpage. On a smaller guitar you might not notice it, but over the wingspan of the Standard it was becoming a problem. The solution came from an unusual source.

Improv top bracing 

Over the years we've been involved with developmental luthierie with our friends and partners in the acoustic world which includes the study of bracing patterns and top stiffness. Hundreds of deflection tests and dozens of brace pattern changes must have engraved themselves into my subconcious. What we came up with is an "X" brace pattern that maintains the stiffness of the instrument's body in all directions while yielding a weight loss of about 1.4 pounds on average. The series of small chambers of varying size reduces the tendency of any single resonance to get out of control at higher volumes, yet the response time to pick attack is noticeably heightened. It looks a little like fish bones.

Standard chambering

In the end it worked so well, we've made it a "permanent" change. Well, as permanent as anything at Hamer is I guess. For the purists who want that original deep, heavy resonance of the original, we still offer that too.

SuperPro Guitar on the Level

Just a quick post at the end of another busy day. As I passed through the finishing area I caught Todd on the leveling bench with a custom order Monaco SuperPro. If you look closely, you'll see that it's just a little different than stock.

We'll have to turn back the clock on this one and give you a full rundown on the build and the back-story soon.