DIY e-guitar - Part 1 - The dream
Since quite some time I've been thinking about having an electric guitar. But not just one electric guitar, because I don't like the sound of most of them. But there was one, outstanding (it turned out there are more, but not at the pricepoint I could afford).
And that was the Epiphone/Gibson Les Paul form. It usually has a distinct fullness, warmth in its tone, probably due to a number of reasons, be it wood, design, pickups, scale length, etc.
So, all I knew I wanted a Les Paul form, or maybe not even Les Paul, just a single-cut, to be more generic. The cheapest LP guitars from thomann (EU - no taxes for me) are 100-200EUR, with fairly acceptable quality based on reviews. As for the design, I love f-holes, so the plan was either hollow-body or semi-hollow body. And I wanted to also have the option to have acoustic sound (usually done with a piezo pickup), so I found that my dream guitar would be one able to blend acoustic and electric tone making it sound like two guitars, an acoustic and an electric one played together. But guitars with all this start around 1000 EUR, and the best ones I picked varied from 3500 EUR to 8000 EUR.
Given that playing is only a hobby, I won't invest that much in a guitar.
So what can I do in this case? Just buy the cheaper solid-body, add-in a piezo pickup, and give up the f-holes/(semi-)hollow body? Well, why not do it myself? What could go wrong? Well... a lot. A whole lot of things could go wrong. And I could end up with a piece of junk and money spent in the worst case, the mid-case is an expensive guitar for decoration which is unusable for playing. The best case would be a perfectly playable single-cut electric guitar, playable with an electric amp, with some audible sound when unplugged, with a piezo pickup for an acoustic sound when amplified, even if later as an upgrade. Oooh, and did I mention customized in terms of finishing, meaning not like any other LP-copy (well, there might be similar ones out there, but maybe not).
After reading a lot I found out that electric guitars are a lot "safer" than acoustic guitars. If an acoustic guitar has intonation problems, you can not do much: the bridge is fixed, the nut is fixed, you can try truss rod adjustment and fret-job and/or refretting. But with electric you can also adjust (minor things, but probably enough to fix small intonation problems, unless the guitar built is really a badly built one) the bridge, in my case a tune-o-matic, per-string, bridge height, nut height, stop-bar height, so intonation problems usually can be solved by a proper setup, unless the body and/or neck is really badly made.
So the final goal is building my dream guitar, a single-cut, semi-hollow body electric guitar with piezo pickup. (By building I mean finishing and assembling a pre-made unfinished DIY kit, as a first step. Maybe the next guitar will be built from scratch, who knows?)
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| Gibson Les Paul High Performance 2019 |
So, all I knew I wanted a Les Paul form, or maybe not even Les Paul, just a single-cut, to be more generic. The cheapest LP guitars from thomann (EU - no taxes for me) are 100-200EUR, with fairly acceptable quality based on reviews. As for the design, I love f-holes, so the plan was either hollow-body or semi-hollow body. And I wanted to also have the option to have acoustic sound (usually done with a piezo pickup), so I found that my dream guitar would be one able to blend acoustic and electric tone making it sound like two guitars, an acoustic and an electric one played together. But guitars with all this start around 1000 EUR, and the best ones I picked varied from 3500 EUR to 8000 EUR.
 |
| PRS Hollowbody II Piezo 2017 |
So what can I do in this case? Just buy the cheaper solid-body, add-in a piezo pickup, and give up the f-holes/(semi-)hollow body? Well, why not do it myself? What could go wrong? Well... a lot. A whole lot of things could go wrong. And I could end up with a piece of junk and money spent in the worst case, the mid-case is an expensive guitar for decoration which is unusable for playing. The best case would be a perfectly playable single-cut electric guitar, playable with an electric amp, with some audible sound when unplugged, with a piezo pickup for an acoustic sound when amplified, even if later as an upgrade. Oooh, and did I mention customized in terms of finishing, meaning not like any other LP-copy (well, there might be similar ones out there, but maybe not).
After reading a lot I found out that electric guitars are a lot "safer" than acoustic guitars. If an acoustic guitar has intonation problems, you can not do much: the bridge is fixed, the nut is fixed, you can try truss rod adjustment and fret-job and/or refretting. But with electric you can also adjust (minor things, but probably enough to fix small intonation problems, unless the guitar built is really a badly built one) the bridge, in my case a tune-o-matic, per-string, bridge height, nut height, stop-bar height, so intonation problems usually can be solved by a proper setup, unless the body and/or neck is really badly made.
So the final goal is building my dream guitar, a single-cut, semi-hollow body electric guitar with piezo pickup. (By building I mean finishing and assembling a pre-made unfinished DIY kit, as a first step. Maybe the next guitar will be built from scratch, who knows?)
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