My Guitar
My first real electric guitar was an Epiphone Les Paul Custom, a strange looking SG Body with three humbuckers and a cream color. It was the first thing I ever saved up for, and it still rules.
But living in NY and going to so many shows, I got inspired to start taking lessons again for the first time since high school. My weirdo guitar from high school probably wouldn’t cut it if I wanted to be a famous pop star (hah hah), so I decided to make one myself. I wanted something clean sounding, and unique.
I’ve always wanted a telecaster, so I chose that body, but opted for the classic single coil on the neck, and a kinda funky P90 in the body. Here she is all done.
Before starting the build I had to make a ton of decisions, do I want vintage tuners or standard, glossy or matte neck, nickel or brass saddles, how will the strap be secured, what kind of bridge, scalloped pickups or regular and so on. It was genuinely pretty stressful, everyone I told about the project told me it wasn’t going to work (haters).
“dude I’m all for ur hobby n shit but I feel like every time I’ve seen ppl do this on threads n stuff they fuck it up
can u set up and intonate a guitar”
Ignored them.
Unfortunately, in my fervor I didn’t do a very good job of documenting the process, so all I have is stuff I pulled off of old instagram stories.
Ordered a neck from warmouth, glossy, nickel frets, tele fit, kind of thick but not too thick. She’s a beauty. Body blank made of swamp ash.
The blank comes unrouted, it’s very important to get the neck pocket right. It has to be exactly the right place, shape, can’t be angled, depth has to be perfect so the neck will be touching the body.
To do this I got a routing template from stewmac, and router bits that work to basically trace the shape of the pocket. It’s close but has to be perfect, to shrink the size of the hole I stacked tape until the neck would require a little force to get into the pocket.
To set the depth I used a janky DIY drill press, and drilled out as much wood as I could. Took a while but I got it.
With the extremely stressful process of routing out the beck pocket done, I moved on to the easier stuff. The next step was doing the same for the pickups, basically carving out holes in the body for them to sit. I took literally no pictures until it was done, oops. Same deal though, drill press, and routing templates.
The pickups I got from a little family company in Virginia, Lindy Fralin is the name. I had placed the order, and one day I get a call from a guy, “Hey its Lindy, I’m winding your pickups right now, are these going in the same guitar? If they’re going in the same guitar I’ll wind them opposite directions to reduce the hum” I thought that was, pretty cool.
Getting the tuners into the neck was the next step. Guitar necks are expensive, and there’s not that much room for error. To do this you just have to drill really tiny and shallow holes, I chose vintage slot style tuners.
The last hole I had to route for was to house the electronics, this holds the switches, volume and tone potentiators. There’s a surprising amount of options for wiring pickups, but I chose one that would let me play each pickup individually, together in parallel, or in series. I didn’t have a template for this one, so I did it freehand. It again, was stressful. I had to also route out a way for the wires to get under the pickguard, and drill a hole through the side of the guitar to make an output.
Doing the electronics was also a big pain in the ass. When I was young my dad taught me how to solder, but it was just to fix a lamp. This required a good deal more care, and I burned a hole in my couch with the iron. I’m still not totally sure I understand what grounding is, but I touched enough wires until the buzzing went away and sound came out.
Before proceeding to painting I threw it all together to see how it looked.
At the hardware store I was looking for a way to fill the pores of the wood to get a flat finish. A man working there came up and asked if I needed help, I told him about my project.
By some cosmic alignment, he makes guitars. as his main source of income. He showed me pictures of dozens of guitars he had built over the years. He told me to use epoxy and a knife to fill the pores, and invited me over to jam, but I felt like that was a bit much.
Around this time I was struggling with a teenager infestation on my roof. I’d come home from work, go up to start working on my guitar, and a group of 8-10 HS teens would be up there. They broke a bench I had made and put up there, but I used it to hang my guitar so I could paint all sides at once. The circle of life, or something.
Painting the guitar took the longest out of any step. I believe I went through 4 cans of spray paint, sanding down to 2000 grit between drying and coats. I could feel how close I was to being done, and was pushing myself to finish. Towards the end I was skipping prior arrangements to paint and sand my guitar. It was truly deranged.
But: eventually it was finished and I put it back together. Dropped in the pickups, put everything together, put on the strings. Sound came out.
I was having a bit more buzzing than I’d like, so I wanted to take it to a professional to adjust the truss rod, because if you mess that up you are fucked.
I went to 30th street guitars, a NY institution, and talked to the desk guy about tweaking the guitar a bit. They were gonna charge me $110, which I thought was a bit much. The owner of the store came out and I asked him about it, he thought it was cool that I built the guitar so he did the work for $10. Hit it a little bit with a hammer, turned some screws, voila.
Without further ado: Here are a couple demos as to how she sounds.