You can pursue your dreams of rock superstardom with any guitar, be it from an expensive luthier, a pawn shop, or a mail order catalog. But to join the ranks of rock greats there’s one way to have a truly special instrument, which is to build it yourself. [Bensoncraft] may not be [Bryan May]’s dad or indeed [Eddie van Halen], but he has at least joined the exclusive ranks of home made guitar builders with his video “Guitar from scratch: hard mode“.
It’s a fairly long video and we’ve placed it below the break, but a compelling one as we learn just how many operations go into making an electric guitar. When he says hard mode he’s not joking, there are no pre-made parts save for the strings and he’s not following a set of plans. Everything including the tuners and pickups are made from scratch, but for a non-guitar-player it’s she sheer number of different pieces of wood that go into making the solid body and neck of the instrument that’s so interesting. Even if you’ll never make a guitar you should watch it.
We’ve never seen a guitar build quite like this one before, but we have brought you a 3D printed guitar body, and neck.
Thanks [Aaron] for the tip.
Rob Scalion helped a professional luthier build an acoustic guitar and made a YT video about it. After watching that video I’d say building an electric guitar is easy.
Scallon
I built an air guitar once.
I don’t like to brag about it, it was really nothing.
PS. Nice project, some folks are really crafty.
I like the jig for winding the pickups (with the speed control) rather than the drill, I’d have probably put in a foot pedal in there for the speed control to make it easier to keep both hands free.
I also really like the custom machine heads, but I don’t really like the blue fimo for the fret markers, maybe black would’ve been a bit nicer?
What contribution does the wood make to the sound?
(Or, how to start a war in 30 seconds)
Some say everything, some say very little. I would think Stradivarius had his own opinions that differ regarding shape and composition of materials
Objectively, the wood almost certainly does not matter. Here are some tests:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
Also, if you look around YouTube, you will find a lot of really crazy guitars, including ones made of epoxy or 3D printed plastic. They sound just like the wooden ones.
And concrete,
That’s an overly simplified test for a complex subject.
Obviously hot pickups close to the strings will overshadow most other things, but the instrument material does affect the way the string vibrate and mostly how their vibration decays.
Sustain and harmonics weren’t even mentioned there!
https://youtu.be/n02tImce3AE
An excellent opinion-free video on the subject
I don’t know. With an acoustic guitar, the wood and shape matter very much. But with an electric, the body is there to hold the rest. The pickups matter most.
Look at Bo Diddley’s guitars.
Yup. You can make an electric guitar from anything, as long as proportions and distances for strings and frets are respected. I think I’ve seen one made out of a broken stool…
Wood, shape and size matters mostly for electro-acoustic and acoustic guitars…
“If you wish to make [a guitar] from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” – Carl Sagan [almost]
True to the originals for a start I used a stick of wood and attached the rest on or under that backbone. Pickup, amps, feedback coil, Digitech processor, power bank, and speaker. Why stop at the pickup. Portable Pink Floyd.