I turned 44 this year. I haven't been playing guitar for most of my life, although I took several years of lessons while I was a teenager.
At that time, I was pretty lazy, which means that despite all the lessons I took, I never really got anywhere. From that time, I still own a Yamaha acoustic guitar, and despite having moved across Germany many times (since my lessons, I moved around like 15 times, from the southern part of Germany, to Berlin, within Berlin, and to the western part of Germany), I never sold or gave this guitar away.
Meanwhile, I have a son who unfortunately doesn't live with me but with his mother. He's been playing guitar for 3 years now, and he's making so much progress, it is hard to believe.
Past christmas, while my son was with me, a very close friend of mine who is also playing the guitar, was visiting me as well.
My son and him played a lot, and eventually I got hooked and decided that I wanted to learn as well.
My son has been playing the acoustic guitar, but he wants to switch to electric guitar for some time already. He has a teacher who doesn't even teach him to play with a pick but pure fingerpicking, and he wanted to find a new teacher so that he would be playing more the kind of music he is looking for.
At that time, past christmas, there was a local music store that filed for insolvency, and they had all these bargains. I took my son to the store, and eventually I bought him a cheap used electric guitar and an amp. I didn't know anything about electric guitars, so we just got what looked nice and didn't cost much... Two weeks later, I went back and bought myself an electric guitar as well.
I started playing, but quickly found out that my old guitar wasn't really what I wanted to play, but the electric guitar was also quite tricky as strings were so narrow together...
:D
Mid February this year I started taking lessons again, and eventually I made up my mind that I would like to own a Western guitar (- does this term exist in English language? In Germany, it differentiates steel-string guitars that may have an amp from "clasical" nylon string guitars).
I strolled around in different stores and on the internet, played a lot of instruments, and eventually figured that I wanted to have a Taylor, either a 114, a 214 or a 314 with cutaway and amp.
Of course it turns out they are really expensive, so in order to be able to afford it, I went and sold my old canoe which has been sitting unused for 10 years.
I got much less money for it than I expected or hoped for, so I put some extra on top, waited until there was a Taylor road show in one of the nearby cities, and got a lovely 214ce Deluxe Koa, which I have been playing and loving since. So now I'm practicing, primarily on my Taylor, and every now and then on my electric guitar.
Then, when it was my birthday in Spring, my wife had the lovely idea to give me a guitar building workshop attendance as a present, but it turns out it would have been too expensive.
The workshop would have cost approx. EUR 2,500, would have taken 2 full weeks from morning to evening, materials included with a max. of 2 participants. I would have build my own acoustic guitar from scratch under close supervision of a master luthier.
And as much as I would have loved to do this (not sure where to take the time for this though), actually I don't even know enought o be sure what kind of guitar I would like to build, what shape, what wood, what finish, what characteristics....
Anyway, I loved the idea of building my own guitar, and I never got rid of the idea to do this.
At the same time, whenever I picked up my electric guitar, I was a bit unhappy about the way it sounded. My guitar teacher already tried to improve the sound by adjusting intonation for me, but something always bothered me, without me being able to really tell what it was.
That's when I started reading about characteristics of different electric guitars, designs, pickups and so on, in order to find out what kind of sound I would like.
This turned out to be a bit tricky, as as far as my current knowledge goes, electric guitar sounds are influenced by so many different aspects like pickups, pickup positions, amps etc.
And obviously, it is pretty embarassing to not be able to play the guitar but walk into a store anyway and ask to play hundrets of different guitars and amps and combinations, not knowing what to look for.
My main issue was trying to understand the differences in sound from different pickups, starting from understanding what singlecoils and humbuckers are, what a P90 is, and how they influence differences in sound.
Luckily, after a lot of reading and watching YouTube videos, I came across the page of a german online store for guitars and parts - here they had spent the effort to prepare a special electric guitar that would allow them to place different pickups, and record the sound, so that one could listen to the differences.
Once again, thanks to the great folks from Rockinger for this tremendous help!
This is the link (it's in German, but you will be able to determine the pickups anyway - scroll down the page for the listing of the different sound files):
http://www.rockinger.com/index.php?page=ROC_Info_Pickups
I finally found out that I really like the sound of the Telecaster singlecoils, something like the Fender Texas Special Set for Tele, or the Fender Vintage Noisless Set for Tele.
(Sounds like this:)
Texas Special:
http://www.rockinger.com/PublishedFiles/11_FTST.mp3
Vintage Noisless:
http://www.rockinger.com/PublishedFiles/07_FVNT.mp3
I then started reading a lot about the Telecaster, and got all confused about the various models. Also, I didn't really like the design so much as to me it still looks loke someone just jigsawed the shape out of a plain wooden board.... (Sorry, to all you Telecaster purists out there...!)
Looking at the price tags of the nicer telecasters, and still having in mind building my own guitar I then thought that it should be possible to build my own guitar from parts, putting together components that I like and making modifications as per my preference regarding the shape and overall looks.
Obviously, there are a lot of kits out there, ranging from really cheap to quite expensive (as per my standards, especially if you are not sure if whatever you are putting together will ever be finished...)
Initially, I opted for a fairly cheap kit, but then again, I wanted to have a certain wood, I wanted a particular inlay in the neck etc.
So finally I ended up buying individual parts that I liked - of course not being aware of all the incompatibilities that I would get into...
Of course at that time, I knew nothing about the relationship between the length of the neck and number of frets with the overall scale length, nothing about standard neck width, nothing about pickup positioning etc.
Chosing a guitar shape like the Telecaster where the bridge position is dependent on the cutout for the bridge pickup (or better: vice versa), certainly didn't make it any easier....
Anyway. I'm learning as I go along, and I have started this journey and overcome some first obstacles already.
This blog is to document my progress, and maybe it can help you in your own project, maybe preventing you from making some of the mistakes I have done and will be doing...
Predrilled holes for the neck screws:
Very cheap plastic nut - I will replace this:
