Bend Me, Shape Me

I've been told in the past that I have a feel for wood; whatever the heck that means... I do love a little double entendre now and then but that being said, I think deep down everyone has a 'feel for wood'. If we didn't, humans would never have developed simple tools in the first place. Mind you, I guess you could have had a better 'feel for bone' than a 'feel for wood', but inherently I think every person has some hidden sense for shape. It`s how we pick out what we like - what chair we want to sit in; what bike we want to ride; even the people we want to sleep with to some extent.

Having finished building the Frankenjaguar and moving on to another guitar project; my lovely new Jagmaster that I'm retrofitting, I've had a chance to think about what I've really been doing for the last several months. Mostly I've been touching things; touching things and deciding if I like how they feel.

I think that's basically the one major job you have when you are building a guitar, at least after you make sure that everything is lined up properly. The profile of a neck can make or break an instrument. It can make you fall in love or want to give up playing altogether.
What I've found, having profiled a few necks now, it that it's not knowing what shape the neck has to take from the start, but feeling and removing the impedances that stop that neck from being playable.

I don't think I would ever want to profile a neck for another person. I think everyone's hand tells them exactly what shape a neck should be and what is the single best playing shape for one person can be a disaster for another. So my advice for neck profiling would be to know your hands. Know what feels comfortable to them, and do your best to shape a neck to fit that level of comfort. Go back and reshape over a period of a couple weeks. When it feels like it's almost right, put it down for a couple days then go back and see if there are any little spots that don't feel entirely, perfectly comfortable, then grind those beasties off.

This is a difficult thing to do when you don't feel entirely confident, but if you trust in that sense of your hand, the confidence will come. It can be a bit scary to grab a bastard file or a rasp and just start scraping away on something you've just sunk your savings into, but it feels amazing when you've finished and put a little bit of yourself into what you play. It definitely pays off. That being said, if you can find a junker guitar for a couple hundred bucks and go to town on that one first, your confidence will grow very quickly, and you may decide you like that junker guitar better than the one you just payed $1000 for. These things do happen...

I think it would have been easier to write about the guitar building process as I was doing it, but looking back at how it went together is kind of fun. I get so involved in building things and working on them, that most of the time I forget to document them. So goes my head I guess. Building a guitar is a lot like making music. Sometimes the best moments can't be documented and have to just be experienced right then and there.

Taming the Feral Wolverine

So in order to write about this guitar building process, I have to backtrack a little. I started working on my guitar a few months ago. I've dubbed it the Frankenjaguar because it's based on a Fender Jaguar body style. I own a 1963 Fender Jaguar already, but as much as i love it, it's a total surf guitar. I've always had different tonal aspirations than it is capable of providing. So this year I bit the bullet and decided to build the guitar I actually wanted.

Now, I don't think Fender realized they were designing a guitar for the female body when they issued it, but man, do I ever love its shape. It's the most comfortable guitar I've ever played. I think that's why I've stuck with mine for years, in spite of our irreconcilable sonic differences. Most other guitars have nearly driven me to become a modern day Amazonian. (So, on a side note, if you ever want to start playing guitar and are a little top heavy like I am, I seriously suggest thinking about a Jaguar or Jazzmaster style body. Your frustration levels will be infinitely lower.)

With that in mind, I knew I wanted a Jaguar body, but what to do about the tone? A standard Jag body is usually made of alder, which is great for a clean bright sound. It's like the vanilla of tone woods, but I've always loved the depth of character and warmth that mahogany has, so I eventually opted for a black korina body, which is a similar species to the conventional mahoganies, but is rumoured to have an even warmer, deeper tone, and I have to say, at this point in the process, I haven't been disappointed.

So before you go thinking I'm some insane superwoman who goes chopping down trees and wielding them into guitars with my bare hands, I'll have you know I ordered my guitar body and neck through a company in the US called Warmoth. As much as I'd love to cut and shape my own body one day, the idea of practicing my plunge router and tummy cut skills on expensive hardwood was a little too terrifying to fathom. Warmoth makes beautifully executed custom bodies and necks, and for a project like this there wasn't a lot of sense in reinventing the wheel.

For my neck I chose a 24" scale Fender Jazzmaster-style maple neck with a dark Indian rosewood fretboard, partially for tone quality; partially because it's pretty. Another reason I've always loved my Jaguar is the smaller scale neck. This is a good thing because I have tiny little hands. Some finger spans are still physically impossible for me.

A few weeks later, my magical boxes arrived.

I pulled the parts out, held them together and thought, "Man, this is gonna be easy!"

... um, yeah...

And you would think that too, until you bolted the neck and body together and held the thing. Not that I was completely unaware of this before I started working on it, but there's a whole lot of work that goes into building and finishing a guitar even after the body and neck are cut and assembled. All beautiful guitars start out looking nice but feeling a bit like feral wolverines. They are about as uncomfortable as the agony of playing your first F Chord. And that's a really good way to look at the process. It's like learning how to play all over again. You can't trust anything but your hands and there are days when you feel like you are making no progress whatsoever. That first day holding the beginning of my new guitar was like the first time I ever played guitar at all — absolutely awful.

Hooters and Tweeters

When I was thirteen, I built a ribbon tweeter* out of magnets and tinfoil for my grade 8 science project. I gave a presentation on how I built it and then hooked it up to a receiver to prove that it worked. All things considered it sounded pretty awesome. I was really proud and my inner geek was giddy, at least up until the point that my science teacher uttered those 8 little words… “That’s a pretty good job, for a girl…”

Crap like that used to make me so angry that based on a more than a few occasions I nearly dropped out of high school. Now I kind of take it in stride.

It doesn’t mean that back in my show promotion days I didn’t get pissed off for being overcharged by $50 every time I used to rent a P.A. system from a certain local rental company who’s name shall remain anonymous. It just meant that I learned to work the system. Man voice orders P.A.; Tits McGee picks it up. “Oh, well you told my boyfriend it was $95 and he only gave me $100.” And if all else fails, act really confused; like Victoria Jackson/Anna Faris confused. Eventually they will practically pay you to leave. Better to float with the current as quickly as possible than waste your time trying to change it.

I guess, to an extent, I have an odd skill set based on some random idea of conventional gender standards, whatever that means. It’s something I forget about a lot, at least until someone else brings it up or I have to wade through inept and condescending staff at a local electronics store. I’ve been playing with power tools since I was twelve and I grew up in a house where that was pretty normal. My sister does the exact same thing. I think we were just raised to be independent and follow our passions. For some reason, we both had a passion for building things and playing really loud music. I’m grateful we got to grow up like that.

The perpetual underestimation that goes along with being a big-tittied blonde used to bother me, and I won’t even get started on the ramifications of being ‘a chick in a band’ suffice to say that I have a hernia and bad back based on my young unwillingness to accept chivalry of any kind. Over the years, I’ve just kind of learned to look at it as a game and wait for the funny looks that occasionally pop up on people’s faces as they try to figure me out. I no longer take any of it to heart.

So, to get to the point, I’m currently building a guitar. I’ve played around with them for years: changing tuners, switching bridges etc, but this is the first time I’ve leapt in from start to finish. There have been a few people who have pointed out how cool/weird/what-have-you that is over the last few months, and even suggested I start blogging about it.
So that’s what I’m going to do.

This is also part of the reason that there isn’t any of Bells and Cannons (my new band) music up just yet. I really want to finish this beastie before we jump back into the studio.

I really love how my guitar is turning out. It’s starting to sound the way I’ve always wanted my guitar to sound. It makes me want to run around and hoot and holler I'm having so much fun. And all in all, I think I’m doing a pretty good job, for a girl…


And, as a side note, while I have a general disdain for new white guy Rn'B, I am so utterly grateful that chicks like Chantel McGregor exist.


Stay tuned for updates!

*That’s a type of speaker for all you non-audiophiles out there.