Guitars, basses and other noisemakers (1 Viewer)

Guitar in a grotto.

You might want to consider doing some light wet-sanding with 1,000 grit or even finer after each coat. Spray paint has more texture than you'd think.
 
I know it's going to have a little "orange peel" when it's done and I'll probably knock that down with with some wet sanding. But I'm not sanding between coats. I'm just happy to get the coats on with no drips. So far so good.

The finish on the guitar was not great in the first place. Gibson doesn't even fill the grain on guitars that cost less than a thousand dollars anymore, and mahogany really needs to be filled to be flat. I really like the thin modern finishes, but I'm in the minority. Most people think they're cheap and not very durable. Which they are. But I think guitars sound better without those thick, glossy plastic finishes strangling them.
 
For what it's worth, when Lennon sanded down his Epiphone Casino during the White Album period, he claimed that it sounded better; more open, or something to that effect.
 
I played a stripped guitar for a few years and really loved the feel of that thing. The raw neck was great. While it lasted. You might think raw wood on a neck would slow you down, but I didn't find that to be the case.

Whether that guitar sounded better stripped was probably anybody's guess, since I had DiMarzio Super Distortions in it and played it through a Marshall with the gain at 10. In that situation the wood is probably not much of a factor in the sound.

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I know the Les Paul Special that I have now - with the very thin, not-grain-filled, flat modern finish - sounds great though. My dog already started taking the finish off of that, and my arm is continuing the job.
 
I'm with you. That '67 Guild I picked up had some serious neck wear, plus a ding or two, so I took some dark tung oil and 0000 steel wool to that neck and worked it over pretty good. I've actually done the same thing to all my non-painted neck backs.
 
I once had a black '68 Strat with the big "Hendrix era" headstock and the maple cap neck just like Jimi's Band of Gypsies strat. Black was a rare enough color for 60's Strats and when I bought it at Rudy's on 48th street in around 1984 ($650.00) they gave me the usual crap about how it once belonged to Jimi, but I think they said that about all late 60's maple cap strats so I never paid it any attention.

One day I decided to strip the black and have a natural wood stratocaster. Later on I brought it to have fret work done on it and the guy showed me where the nut had once been inverted (lefty) as well as a slight cigarette burn on the bottom of the headstock where a lefty would have tucked a smoke in while playing. All speculation, of course, and it didn't matter anyway because Karma caught up with me for stripping the original black finish: the guitar was stolen shortly after and fifteen years later these guitars started fetching upwards of $15k without any Hendrix provenance.

With that said, this is one of my favorite guitars of all time: Paul Kossoff's '59 Les Paul with sunburst stripped off. This was his main guitar when he was in Free.

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Do you remember Koss's amazing finger vibrato? Check this video for a glimpse.

 
That naked Kossoff Les Paul is wonderful.
Karma caught up with me for stripping the original black finish: the guitar was stolen shortly after and fifteen years later these guitars started fetching upwards of $15k without any Hendrix provenance.
I don't think you suffered any bad karma for losing the finish. Though, obviously, collector-types would disagree. What did it look like under the paint though? Usually the guitars painted black (or any solid color, I guess) were put together from the less beautiful hunks of wood they had laying around.

I had a 1969 "Olympic white" (a.k.a. off-white or cream) Strat that I bought 5 or 6 years before yours for the same amount - 6 or 700 bucks. I never kept any guitars for 15 or 20 years, so I never would have enjoyed selling it at an inflated price.

But if you think your Karma was bad for removing the paint, imagine what mine was for routing the '69 for a bridge humbucker. Or "gouging," I should probably say. I think I opened up the hole with a chisel. I want to say I did that before the first Van Halen album came out, but I'm not 100% sure of the timeline there. It's quite possible I was "inspired" by Van Halen's Charvel. Either way, it sounded like shit when I was done with it.
 
I don't think you suffered any bad karma for losing the finish. Though, obviously, collector-types would disagree. What did it look like under the paint though? Usually the guitars painted black (or any solid color, I guess) were put together from the less beautiful hunks of wood they had laying around.

I had a 1969 "Olympic white" (a.k.a. off-white or cream) Strat that I bought 5 or 6 years before yours for the same amount - 6 or 700 bucks. .

It had a RED undercoat! It looked so nice when it was halfway stripped that I probably should have left it like that -- a beautiful red and black mess. The wood was perfect beneath. I had always been told the same as you: the darker opaque finishes were used for the worst chunks of wood. The wisdom used to be that the sunburst strats were better because they had to use better wood with the grain visible to the eye. Today, any custom color including black or white is worth close to double of any sunburst from the vintage era. So much so that forgers have perfected the art of faking Pre-CBS Strat finishes.

I also had an Olympic White '70 maple neck strat that I traded a few years ago for a '58 Gibson double-cut TV Jr. Olympic white is the color to have due to the Woodstock Strat being white. Adding a humbucker route to a strat is a risky task but when it works you are handsomely rewarded.

I once had a fake LP Custom...Well, one day, a guy I used to jam with found a rat skeleton on a glue trap. He took the whole skeleton and crazy glued it to the front of my guitar. Thank god Slash came along right around then making LPs so popular again I was able to sell that hideous thing rat and all.
 
How about this for some humbucker blasphemy: '59 LP Special.

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What about this '53 Les Paul gold top that was presumably too heavy for its frail owner.

Read 'em and weep...

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It had a leather back that was tacked onto the wood with brass upholstery tacks.

Here is another '59 special. With a rather Van Halenesque neck repair...

59SpecialBasketCase2k.jpg
 
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Speaking of stripped guitars one last time, here is one of my favorites -- a '59 burst owned by a guy I know. It was a factory black 1959 Les Paul, one of only two known. The owner saw that there was flamed maple underneath the black finish (the single most significant factor to collectors), he proceeded to strip the black and found this:

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Getting back to black finishes being used at the factory to hide bad wood, this lends credence to that theory:

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Notice the near side of the bridge pup route, the guy working the router must have slipped, creating that gouge you can see. Not wanting to waste inventory they decided to fill in the gouge and paint the whole thing black.
 
So much for the long tenon in that '59 Special. :(

And the other ones - with the "Van Halenesque" neck repair - and the "weight-relieved" gold top - I don't even know what to say about those. People are creative, I'll give 'em that.

The black '59 story is funny. One of two known! Ha. I guess it's not really funny, but it is. Makes sense though that the black ones were a result of a mistake on the top. Or at least that one seems to be. It's also funny because those "flame" or "quilt" tops - ugh, I don't even like them. I know they were all the rage years ago, but they're so common now on the more expensive Les Pauls, and they just look tacky to me.

I could look at and talk about guitars all day. I think I missed my calling, I should be running a guitar shop somewhere. Maybe I still will. Just me sitting there with half a dozen guitars and any time someone comes in to buy one I won't sell it. That would be a cool job. I wouldn't make any money, but it would be cool.
 
Speaking of stripped guitars one last time, here is one of my favorites -- a '59 burst owned by a guy I know. It was a factory black 1959 Les Paul, one of only two known.
If indeed there are only two known, Robert Fripp has the other and he used it on all of the '69-'74 recordings. (This will no doubt please mjp to no end.) :eek:
 
I think Fripp played Les Paul Customs. They were all black (hence the nickname, Black Beauty). The sunbursts were all Standards.
 
Correct. Pre-'61 all LP Standards were Gold (until '58) and Sunburst ('58-'60). The customs were all black until the 70s when Gibson went all Leo Fender on us and started making every guitar in every color.

I could run a guitar store like Red ran a bookstore (I never met him, I only know the lore). After the first day the customers would wear thin. I'd be running them off in droves: "Goddammit! I told you, if you don't stop playing that damn Nirvana riff I'm gonna put a capo on your nuts until you sing higher than Joni Mitchell."

But it would be fun.
 
I could run a guitar store like Red ran a bookstore...
Yeah, that sounds about right for me too.

Then over on the Les Paul forum, they'd talk about our stores for years...

"I only went there once, that guy was an asshole!"
"I was in there when I was 20 years old and broke and he gave me a guitar!"
"I never had a problem with him, but I bought a lot of expensive things..."

;)
 
Not exactly a precise color match, but it'll do. I'll post the finished product when it's finished. I have some foam buffing wheel pad things and finishing polish coming next week, and the body will be dry for 5-7 days by then. Should be enough time. I know the longer the better with nitrocellulose.

Speaking of nitrocellulose paint, that stuff must be magic, or the nozzles that came with the can must be great, because the paint went on really easily. Like I said, I'm usually a streaky, drippy menace with a rattle can, so I was surprised at how well it came out. The marker "art" is completely covered. I did four or five coats over a few days. The can is still half full, so it could have easily done a whole guitar.

I got the paint here, if anyone is ever in need of a nitro bomb. (Let's see if the NSA finds that text.)

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The painty, buffy part is done, and now it's nice and smooth like a baby's ass.

Can I say that? It's not weird that I know how smooth a baby's ass is...I had four younger siblings...you couldn't avoid baby ass in the house I grew up in...I don't condone any of you checking a baby's ass for smoothness. It's unseemly if it's not your baby, and not altogether normal even if it is. Thank you.

Now for the no-fun part of putting it all back together.

Vixen-again.jpg
 
See, you can't kill a Junior. You can leave it in a park for two days and it'll be fine. Run it over with a car, leave it in a dog house while you go on vacation. Doesn't matter. Just wipe it off and plug it in. FTW.

I'm sure people who don't play the guitar are scratching their heads about how emotional she was about its loss (and return). "It's just a guitar, go buy another one." I don't know why we get so attached to those machines. It's unnatural. But stealing someone's guitar is some evil shit.
 
All right, it's finished. Looks a lot better. I still don't like soldering. Or painting. But it looks a lot better.

And I see by the time stamp on the "before" photo that I've had this thing for two years. If you'd asked me I would have estimated 9 or 10 months. A year at most. Just goes to show...something.

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2016-07-03-Vixen-001.jpg
 
Looks great.

I'm wondering if you can tell me something: I notice that the bridge on that has the "saddles" in a three and three configuration with the result being that the vibrational length of the G string is longer than that of the D string. Why is it that some guitars have saddles with consistently decreasing vibrational lengths (except for those with compensated B string saddles) as one goes from low to high, and what is it about your guitar here that requires the three and three configuration?

As long as you're answering questions, as I see it, this configuration would seem to be most compatible with a plain G string as opposed to a wound G string. That way, the wound and plain strings would be grouped much like the saddles. But maybe that doesn't matter at all. Or does it?
 
what is it about your guitar here that requires the three and three configuration?
It isn't just this guitar, it's pretty much consistent on every 3 tuners on a side (of the headstock) guitar (as opposed to a Strat or Tele with all the tuners on one side).

It's always going to be slightly different with every set of strings, but I almost always end up with a similar shape after intonation:

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The low E and G strings always wants to be longer. I couldn't tell you the technical reasons for that.

The early Les Pauls and Juniors, etc., had a wraparound tailpiece with no compensation, just a straight bar, and once you've tried to tune one of those you appreciate the compensation.

this configuration would seem to be most compatible with a plain G string as opposed to a wound G string.
I've never played an electric guitar with a wound G string. Maybe in those heavy gauges you use a wound G is common. For the rest of us, the 99%, it's very uncommon. ;)
 
The low E and G strings always wants to be longer. I couldn't tell you the technical reasons for that.
But that's not the case on acoustic guitars, other than the compensated B string bridges on some (and most acoustics are three and three tuners/headstock). Now, maybe I haven't played high enough up the neck on an acoustic to notice that the intonation suffers on the G string, but on all of my basses, it's even spacing decrease from low to high on 4-, 5-, and 6-bangers.
 
Expensive flat top acoustic guitars often have individually carved bridges (individual to each guitar, I mean) to improve intonation. I don't know why they don't always have some kind of universal carved bridge for inexpensive or mid range acoustics (like on the Vixen above), but I'd suspect it's just because there's more room for sloppy or slightly off intonation on an acoustic instrument with a big sound box like that. All that reverberation.

I don't know. I don't build 'em, I just play 'em.

Kind of.
 
I'm going to research this and report back. For what it's worth, which is likely sweet FA.

OK; here's something that appears to be of good source quality that gets to the issue:

http://www.lmii.com/scale-length-intonation

Search on "At first glance we might see" on this page to get to the G string compensation on electrics relative to the B string compensation on acoustics. It would seem that wound G strings on electrics may not work well with the three and three saddle configuration we've been discussing. I generally prefer wound G strings on electric, although yes, they are only available on the heavier gauge sets. This article also indicates that the secondary vibrations are lesser with heavier gauge strings, so I may try some 12s to replace my 13s. It's time for an en masse string change anyway; something I've been avoiding.
 
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I prefer a wound G because I'm somewhat addicted to the feel of the string biting into my finger. The wound strings having a much more satisfying bite than the non-wound. I normally go for a set of 10s with the wound G. I never have a problem bending the wound G to a minor third, which is the objection to using one that I often hear from people who don't use them. I think it improves tuning stability and I hear a sonic advantage when chording on an electric with a wound G that to my ears is absent without one.

I knew an old blues player years ago who played in many of the pubs where I lived, he used a wound G and would bend the G, D, A, and low E strings to ridiculous intervals; when his calluses would rip off from his fingertips he would bend down, pick it up and crazy glue it right back and keep playing.
 
This guitar, known as the Sabionari, was made in 1679 by Antonio Stradivari. It's the last surviving Stradivarius guitar. Well, there are actually five survivors, but this is the only playable one.

 
When I was eleven or twelve, I put steel strings on my classical guitar because I got tired of the soft sounds. My teacher was shocked, and as you can imagine, that guitar didn't last very long.

Recently I've learned that now there are steel strings (Thomastik, f.i.) which you can put on a classical guitar without damaging it.
 
Cool!

After putting the steel strings on it the guitar lessons didn't last very long either. My parents had to buy me an electric guitar, and I made a hell of a racket and ruined my father's amplifier. Around that time most people began to hate me, but I hated them too, so everything was balanced.
 

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