So, I have dusted off 15 year old plans (the age of my oldest son, incidentally) to build another guitar. Where to go? What to do? Not sure how, but a few weeks ago, I stumbled on buildingtheergonomicguitar.com and the idea was hatched. We’ll see where it goes from here, but I have at least started.<\/p>\n
Some basic design constraints:<\/p>\n
Headless design Low weight Twisted “helix” neck
\nI already have a Steinberger “Strat” style guitar that I built a long time ago and that I like a lot, so the headless design was a given. The other are ergonomic traits that just seem to make sense. <\/p>\n
My second ever guitar was built out of Jeluton after reading an interview with Allan Holdsworth in Guitar Player Magazine, so I am no stranger to light-weight designs either. I am not too fond of the Klein look, but I like the concept of the leg cutout, so I will steal that design but I will incorporate a Strat look on it for balance. <\/p>\n
Having a twisted neck seems like a great idea and I hope I can pull it off with truss rod placement and avoiding fret-outs, etc. I have built quite a few through-the-body instruments before, and I was going to do this one like that also, but in the end I think I have opted for a bolt-on neck that will be interchangeable for a regular neck. If you, dear reader, have thoughts on the “radial angle” of the truss rod and how to fit a fingerboard onto the twisted neck, please let me know. Right now, I am considering just putting the truss rod in perpendicular to the face of the guitar (i.e. not exactly 90 degrees to the fingerboard) and using a planer to make a regular but very thin fingerboard. This would allow me to twist the fingerboard and glue it into place.<\/p>\n
Next, when researching the Helix design, I found the new Lace Alumitones pickups. No idea what they sound like, but they look great and are lightweight, so I will bet on them. I was going to get a Steinberger tremolo. This South Korean company that builds replacement and license parts (www.jcustom.kr<\/a>) are about to release their own design that sounds promising. But then I found a link the Ergonomic Guitar Blog pointing to Atlansia (www.atlansia.jp<\/a>). I am sorry to say that I will have to build my own bridge now… <\/p>\n I spent all night yesterday on Google Patents so by now I have a good grasp of what to do both in terms of the neck and the bridge. I hope one can build a non-commercial one-off for personal use without patent infringement?<\/p>\n That’s it for now. Will put up some pictures eventually to show how the work progresses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, I have dusted off 15 year old plans (the age of my oldest son, incidentally) to build another guitar. Where to go? What to do? Not sure how, but a few weeks ago, I stumbled on buildingtheergonomicguitar.com and the idea was hatched. We’ll see where it goes from here, but I have at least […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/guitarworks.thestrandbergs.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}