Leaderboard

Fretting in progress... Fretting complete: The neck starting to take shape: The inevitable trail fitting:

I always wanted a Strat with a single humbucker, after purchasing a Squier Bullet Strat HSS and some modding, I’m pleased with the outcome

Fender used it a lot on the Mexican line, at least until the "upgrades" that took the Standard to the Player Series. I think they're alder now, but the Standard models were poplar for years on end. I have a feeling some of the Squier range were poplar at a time when they switched from plywood to solid, though last I looked many of them were now Agathis (something in the mahogany family, I believe). Leo of course didn't much care what wood he used as long as it was available and hit the build budget; the first Teles were pine, then ash then alder... Course, the wood in a sense matters much less with a Fender style, given many of their pickups are mounted either in steel (Tele Bridge) or in plastic (Strat guard)... Basswood is another, softer wood that gets used a lot in the Far East. As I recall, a lot of Japanese guitars, including many Fenders, are basswood. It used to be particularly popular for a lot of Japanese and Korean superstrat types. I think it was prized for being light as well. Nuno Bettencourt had guitars in his sig line made from it - if memory serves, he was quite a tiny guy, so a hefty Les Paul would not have been histhing so much..

Fretboard slotted glued on and radiused. That's my left foot BTW. Dots fitted and I've started staining the fretboard, the dots will show up better once I've snaded and finished the board. The inevitable trial fitting.

Pianos are mostly made from poplar , much of which is a bit soft. It's quite variable so I only use the more dense stuff. For necks I use oak or beech that comes up occasionally. I read somewhere that Danelectro used poplar a lot.

With the rotary pickup selector, I needed to check what the specification needed to be. At the least, the following settings were going to be needed: Bridge only Bridge + middle (maybe out of phase) Bridge + neck Neck + middle (maybe out of phase) Neck only Normally for a three pickup strat style layout, a 2 pole rotary switch is enough. The neck and bridge pickups can share a pole because they aren't in use at the same time. But in my set up above, I would need at least a 3 pole switch, one for each pickup because I was combining bridge and neck. However, when the low pass filters were taken into consideration, there was also the challenge of how to sum three pickups into two channel eq. Luckily, a four pole rotary switch would probably work, if I summed the four poles into two sides. Each pair of poles into one of the two filters. But there was still the challenge of how to manage the middle pickup in the settings. Again that would be possible if I assigned two of the four poles to it and had the middle pickup switch from one channel to the other, depending on whether it was summed with the neck or bridge pickup. This arrangement does have the disadvantage of upsetting the filter settings with a pickup shift from position 2 to 4 but that would only really be felt if I was playing it live and I have no plans to do that. This is a proof of concept, a prototype which I'll use almost exclusively at home and it's main trick is going to be position 3 anyway so I put together a circuit diagram (without phase switching for positions 2 and 4) as proof of concept where position 1 was now just the piezo and all the others were moved forward by one. Lustihand also advised that in their latest edition circuits, separate boost switches were no longer needed, the boost was activated by push pull pots so there was a welcome visual simplicity and logic to the layout despite despite it being pretty versatile. But while I was browsing on the Stewmac website, I noted they offered 6 position rotary switches with four poles and I started to wonder whether that might be useful. Then I remembered I had a spare Graphtec acoustiphonic preamp left over from my Shuker Headless bass and a quick search of the Graphtec website revealed they offered piezo saddles for the Wilkinson VS100 series bridges. That got me thinking about a clean piezo/acoustic type sound for one of the six positions so I threw it into the diagram and it seemed to work. It would sit with the overall mission of the guitar for cleans. And I also had a spare hexaphonic PCB which opened up the possibilities of pitch-to-MIDI. Hmmm.