A Guitar From Scratch

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.

15 thoughts on “A Guitar From Scratch

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

        1. 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!

    1. 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.

      1. 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…

  3. 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.

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