Leaderboard

Hi, some of you may know me and my previous projects from basschat. These are two basses made using wood from scrap pianos. At the moment I'm making a guitar from similar materials. It starts like this with panels taken from pianos , mostly pre 1920 so the wood is likely to be 100 years old. Mostly poplar with various veneers.ody The body is made by gluing several pieces together , pianos don't tend to have much wood that's thick enough. For this build I've removed the veneer and the front face of the body is made from opposing blocks with the grain at 90 degrees to the centre line. It's mostly for me to play in a punk band so I'm keeping it simple, one pickup by the bridge , vol and tone control. There will be some contouring but I haven't decided quite how much yet.

I have used ebony from the black keys but I'm not keen on ivory even if the elephant died 100 years ago. I might try some of the synthetic key covers but most of the older ones discolour , sometimes ending up muddy orange. Not sure what I'll use on this one , I'll decide when once I've selected the fingerboard.

You'll probably find most guitars have their pickups wired in parallel to one another. There are a few exceptions which are series-wired as standard (I'm led to believe Brian May's Red Special is one famous example), and quite a few guitars which come with switching to allow you to go from parallel wiring to series. Fender's Baja Telecasters are notable for having an "S1" switch, which does exactly this! As for pickup types, you're best sticking to single-coils for series wiring: two single-coils in series will tend to attenuate higher frequencies and emphasise mid-range - essentially, you've created a very spread-out humbucker, and the guitar will sound as such. Typically, humbuckers already have their two coils wired in series, so there's probably not much to be gained from sticking two of them in series with each other. Unless you're aiming for an unfeasible amount of lower-midrange woof, of course...

Another BCer here too.