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.