guitar

191 Articles

Making One Fender From Another

October 17, 2026 by 11 Comments

There’s a tendency among cherished brands to licence their name and logo onto all sorts of novelty items in order to make a quick buck. Joining this trend is the guitar maker Fender, who have lent their name to a chopping board in the shape of their famous Telecaster. The existence of such a product seems to have been a direct challenge to [Not A Luthier], who promptly bought one and turned it into a real guitar. It’s a genuine Fender, but is it a genuine Fender guitar? Not really, but it’s an entertaining build.

The chopping board isn’t made of great material, instead it’s a set of strips of wood, we’re guessing probably bamboo or rubberwood, glued together. It’s robust, but noticeably thinner than the guitar whose shape it takes, and with a not-great finish. The build is not too different from any other electric guitar build we’ve seen, with the main challenge being that the bridge and pickups need spacers underneath them to compensate for the reduced thickness of the wood.

The video is below the break and makes for a soothing watch as an in-depth guitar build, complete with a moment of drilling all the way through the board and fabricating a plug to hide the evidence. The final guitar seems to sound alright, but we’re not guitarists so maybe a more practiced ear should judge. The genuine Fender logo is still proudly on it so it’s a Fender of sorts, but just like with the chopping board, it’s best value is in novelty.

Meanwhile if guitar builds are a thing, we’ve had a few in the past.

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Miniaturized, Working Replica Of Vintage Leslie Speaker

September 3, 2026 by 15 Comments

Few pieces of vintage audio gear from the turn of the century (the previous one) inspire the kind of devotion that a Leslie speaker does. Sure, there are plenty of pieces that are rarer or more valuable, but the Leslie speaker has such a big following because of its uniqueness of physically moving sound around a room. Two rotating devices in the speaker physically direct the sound around the cabinet with musician-controlled speed, and this sound remains extremely difficult to reproduce faithfully without the moving components. But originals are enormous and meant for organs, so [Eric] built a 40% replica with a few modern touches for his guitar.

The build starts with a CAD model, where [Eric] works towards making the most accurate enclosure for his speaker as possible. The CAD model heads out to a CNC machine which can care most of the details into the wood, and he eventually is able to finish it, although it took a few tries with stains and paintbrushes of various types. For the speakers themselves, he’s using modern versions including modern brushless motors to drive the rotating elements. Like the original speaker, the high range of sound is sent through a rotating set of horns, of which one is only a counterweight, and the low range is directed out of the bottom of the cabinet through a large rotating drum. Both rotating elements here are 3D printed, and with everything put together and wired up [Eric] has a much more portable, faithful recreation of the original Leslie speaker.

There are some upgrades in the wiring too, which makes it work better with a guitar rather than for an organ. It’s also much lighter, and was a hit when he took it to let a few other guitarists to play as well. It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Leslie’s movement recreated for guitar, but it is the most alike to the classic 1930s-era speaker we’ve seen so far.

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A guitar stands magically on it's end in the foreground of a snowy sunrise. A large 3D-printed robot is attached to the fretboard, and a smaller robot sits over the sound hole.

Twin Guitar-Playing Robots Will Work For Tab

August 14, 2026 by 12 Comments

Remember Animusic? They were these incredible animated music videos with original tunes being played by computer-generated robots. Well, the MegCell Pulse might be the coolest robots-playing-music thing we’ve seen since Animusic.

Built by [Bruce] over six years’ time, this futuristic wonder features two robots working in concert to play acoustic guitar, just like a pair of human hands would. You just feed them digital tablature, and off go the fraternal twins, with one doing the fretting, and the other doing the plucking via six individual plectrum. It’s digital music producing analog sound from a physical instrument.

How does MegCell Pulse work? It’s essentially a system of gears, magnetic actuators, and arms, contained in a 3D-printed structure. The only real limitations are that it can’t traverse the entire fretboard, nor can it slide between frets. That said, you can absolutely buy one for your own guitar via [Bruce]’s modestly-goaled Kickstarter.

The kicker here is that you can’t buy an assembled MegCell Pulse; you must print and build it yourself. Back on the upside, the most expensive supporting tier is a mere $100. For that price, you get the complete digital plans. That includes 3D print files, an assembly guide, the control software, and a parts list. Be sure to check out the demo videos embedded after the break.

We have certainly seen robots playing guitars before, although admittedly, it’s been a minute.

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Luthier Crafts Guitar From Cardboard

March 27, 2026 by 18 Comments

The people at Signal Snowboards are well known not only for producing quality snowboards, but doing one-off builds out of unusual and perhaps questionable materials just to see what’s possible. From pennies to glass, if it can go on their press (and sometimes even if it can’t) they’ll build a snowboard out of it. At some point, they were challenged to build different types of boards from paper products which resulted in a few interesting final products, but this pushed them to see what else they could build from paper and are now here with an acoustic guitar fashioned almost entirely from cardboard.

For this build, the luthiers are modeling the cardboard guitar on a 50s-era archtop jazz guitar called a Benedetto. The parts can’t all just be CNC machined out of stacks of glued-up cardboard, though. Not only because of the forces involved in their construction, but because the parts are crucial to a guitar’s sound. The top and back are pressed using custom molds to get exactly the right shape needed for a working soundboard, and the sides have another set of molds. The neck, which has the added duty of supporting the tension of the strings, gets special attention here as well. Each piece is filled with resin before being pressed in a manner surprisingly similar to producing snowboards. From there, the parts go to the luthier in Detroit.

At this point all of the parts are treated similarly to how a wood guitar might be built. The parts are trimmed down on a table saw, glued together, and then finished with a router before getting some other finishing treatments. From there the bridge, tuning pegs, pickups, and strings are added before finally getting finished up. The result is impressive, and without looking closely or being told it’s made from cardboard, it’s not obvious that it was the featured material here.

Some of the snowboards that Signal produced during their Every Third Thursday series had similar results as well, and we actually featured a few of their more tech-oriented builds around a decade ago like their LED snowboard and another one which changes music based on how the snowboard is being ridden.

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The Engineering Of A Jimi Hendrix Performance

February 26, 2026 by 32 Comments

The guitarist Jimi Hendrix had a unique sound which has influenced countless musicians over the decades. He achieved it through mastery not only of his instrument, but of the complex feedback relationship between amplifier, environment, and guitar — coupled with a series of effects pedals including some then-unique ones made for him. Musical commentators have pored over his work for decades, but a recent piece in IEEE Spectrum is particularly interesting as it examines things from a technical perspective.

It centers around an electrical simulation of Hendrix’s effects chain, and makes an assertion that’s obvious on consideration but not the usual take on a Hendrix performance; that in his hands it became a wave synthesizer rather than the instrument itself. Certainly for anyone with an interest in analogue audio electronics as they pertain to musical synthesis it helps in placing the influence of the different circuits on the sound, and in hearing the familiar performances in a new light.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen someone take a modelling approach to a guitar effects chain, indeed it’s obvious something missing from the work above is the guitar itself.

Header image: Gemeente Rotterdam (Stadsarchief) CC-0.

2025 Component Abuse Challenge: Relay Used As Guitar Pickup

November 13, 2025 by 16 Comments

We’ve all built projects that are a rats’ nest of wiring and feature creep, but the best projects in the end are usually those that use a simple solution to elegantly solve a problem. [Kauz] had been thinking about a unique type of electric guitar pickup for a while and rather than purchase an expensive option or build a complex microcontroller-based system he found his elegant solution in the form of a common electronic component.

The core of this idea is that guitar pickups are essentially coils of wire, and are surprisingly similar to the coils of wire found in electromechanical relays. [Kauz] has used six small relays, left them unmodified, and then built an amplifier circuit for each to allow the vibrations of the guitar strings to resonate in the relay coils, eventually producing a sound. Not only do the relays work perfectly well as pickups, but [Kauz] also created a mixing board that allows the six relays to be combined into two channels, allowing for options like stereo sound for different strings directly out of the guitar or for different effects to be applied to different strings.

The build also allows for some interesting options in future versions as well. [Kauz]’s plans are eventually to build this into an instrument which can output polyphonic MIDI signals, where various strings can behave as different instruments. In theory, with six circuits six different instruments can be produced, and we’re excited to see what the next versions will look and sound like. In the meantime, be sure to check out some other guitar pickups we’ve seen that use even simpler parts found lying around the workbench.

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The Cantareel Is Hurdy-Guitar Turned Inside Out

July 12, 2025 by 14 Comments

Sometimes, all you need to make something work is to come at it from a different angle from anyone else — flip the problem on its head, so to speak. That’s what [Keizo Ishibashi] did to create his Cantareel, a modified guitar that actually sounds like a hurdy-gurdy.

We wrote recently about a maker’s quest to create just such a hybrid instrument, and why it ended in failure: pressing strings onto the fretboard also pushed them tighter to the wheel, ruining the all-important tension. To recap, the spinning wheel of a hurdy-gurdy excites the strings exactly like a violin bow, and like a violin bow, the pressure has to be just right. There’s no evidence [Keizo Ishibashi] was aware of that work, but he solved the problem regardless, simply by thinking outside the box — the soundbox, that is.

Unlike a hurdy-gurdy, the Cantareel keeps its wheel outside the soundbox. The wheel also does not rub directly upon the strings: instead, it turns what appears to be a pair of o-rings. Each rosined o-ring bows 2 of the guitar’s strings, giving four strings a’ singing. (Five golden rings can only be assumed.) The outer two strings of this ex-six-string are used to hold the wheel assembly in place by feeding through holes on the mounting arms. The guitar is otherwise unmodified, making this hack reversible.

It differs from the classic hurdy-gurdy in one particular: on the Cantareel, every string is a drone string. There’s no way to keep the rubber rings from rubbing against the strings, so all four are always singing. This may just be the price you pay to get that smooth gurdy sound out of a guitar form factor. We’re not even sure it’s right to call it a price when it sounds this good.

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