Decide
Once the guitar body shape is fully carved, next steps will mostly depend on the composition of parts that’ll make up the full instrument. Several decades of electric guitar innovation lead to countless configurations in this domain. Before I dive into the choice of specific components for my build, I’ll lay out the overall anatomy of an electric guitar. Additionally, it’ll be worth discussing options for parts, as to derive my humble attempt in designing visual and sound characteristics for my first guitar build.
This is a fairly long post, so if you only care about a list of parts, jump down to the bottom.
Neck
Arguably, the most important part that’ll define how a guitar plays is its neck. The strings run along the fretboard. Frets are the metal pieces, portioning the board. They are set into at half tone intervals. So as a player places her fingers on the fretboard, played notes depend on the base note of strings hit and the frets they are pressed onto. At the top of the neck is a headstock. The shape of the headstock is often considered the face of the guitar. As such, it is a strong design characteristic for a guitar make and model. Mechanics are attached here to help wind your guitar strings and tune the instrument. Placement of mechanics is also variable in electric guitars. Some headstocks fix tuning mechanics exclusively on one side of the headstock and others symmetrically on both. Even asymmetrical arrangements can be found.
The headstock is tilted or sunken down slightly from the fretboard to increase the tension of all strings resting in the nut, which directs the strings across the fretboard. A nut also ensures strings don’t slip off the neck and it can be considered the zero-fret. There is no uni-sized neck. Thickness and width of a neck comes in a variety of shapes and styles, which mostly reflect different playing preferences. Even the length of the neck can vary.
Similarly, there’s no unified composition for the material of a guitar neck. It can be made of one solid piece of wood, such that frets are integrated into the neck material, or a secondary piece of wood can be glued onto the neck serving as the fretboard. You can even play a fretless neck, which allows for the placement of fingers anywhere on the board for endless tonal variations.
In any case, crafting a neck is a very delicate task. A lack in precision will directly affect playability and trueness of pitch.
Even though there are a lot of instructions online that show you how to build your own neck, I felt like I’d want to save this challenge for another project. So instead, I bought a factory neck. In order to be able to define my own guitar’s face, I got a paddle neck (see parts list at the bottom). Those offer the flexibility to carve your own headstock shape, while they also provide a fully functional fretboard and predefined holes to attach mechanics.
There are also differences in connecting the neck and body of a guitar. As in acoustic guitar building, necks can be glued into the body, or they can be bolted into a neck pocket. Some guitars offer a set-through composition. This either means the entire instrument is made from the same chunk of wood, or a centerpiece runs from the top of the headstock to the bottom of the body. For the latter solution, ‘wings’ are attached to the sides of the center piece to compose the full shape.
The core argument for both architectures in contrast to bolt on neck guitars is that they provide a better resonance of sound through your instrument. Stemming from this, set-through or glued necks will likely deliver a juicier sound. On the other hand, the construction of bolt on neck guitars is much more straightforward. So choosing this approach will likely be a no brainer for most inexperienced builders.
Bridge
Once we follow the strings down the neck and passing over the body, we’ll see them resting on the bridge. We can distinguish two main types of bridges - fixed and floating. Floating bridges can make use of a tremolo system, which is a spring based setup integrated in the back of the guitar. A so-called whammy bar acts as a handle that can be moved to modulate the sound of a guitar by spanning and releasing pressure on the spring system, which in turn moves the bridge. Fixed bridges come in a variety of shapes, too. The main difference here would be that some of them are composed of two components, with one being a saddle for the strings to rest on and the other being a tailpiece holding the strings. Both are sunk into the instrument body to a) support concave body tops and b) provide a better transmission of resonance.
While tremolos and fancy bridges are pretty cool, keeping things simple will ease the effort for a successful build. Going for a fixed hard-tail bridge seems like a reasonable choice in this respect. Hard-tail bridges are made from one component that can simply be screwed onto the body.
The last distinction to make would be the way strings are attached to a hard-tail bridge. Mainly, we can differentiate top loader VS string through bridges. A string through can commonly be seen with Telecasters. In this architecture, the strings run over the saddle and down through the body in perpedicular direction. Thus, the bridge provides holes, which are extended through the guitar body. On the backside of the instrument, ferrules are set in to hold the end of the strings in place. Top loader bridges don’t require any additional holes drilled through the body. As the name states, strings will be loaded on top of the guitar and the end is held by the tail of the bridge.
While there probably are arguments to be made about the implications on sound characteristics, I feel like the specific choice of bridge has more to do with artistic flavor. That is if you don’t take into account any added tremolo.
Pickups
The core feature of an electric guitar versus an acoustic guitar are pickups. These components are an array of magnetic pole pieces with several rounds of copper wire wound around them. As the name suggests, they pick up the changes in amplitude and frequency of a swinging string as a change of the magnetic field above their pole pieces. Changes are populated into the running current of the guitar’s electrical circuit.
Since sound is basically just a complex wave travelling through air, we can describe a note by specifying its wave frequency for tonality and the amplitude as the volume. Additionaly, any electrical circuit can add noise, either by producing it through its component composition, or by interfering external signals. We hear the composite result as the output produced through the speakers of our guitar amplifier. A variety of pickup types offer several properties to adjust the signal processing within this setup.
The most basic of them is a single coil pickup. It consists of 6 pole pieces in one line, wound up in copper thread. Single Coils have a characteristic crispy sound, that supports the highs and mids of a guitar’s sound spectrum specifically well. That said, they are also prone to pickup noise quite easily, which can lead to a humming output signal, even when no sound is being produced by the instrument. As a logical evolution to this problem, humbuckers were invented. These pickups deploy two coils of magnets in opposing polarization, which help to alleviate humming of electromagnetic interference by phase cancellation. Sounds fancy, but simply put, it just means: they stabilize the signal they pick up. It also means humbuckers produce a less precise sound and provide more focus on mids and lows. Additionally, they generate a fairly powerful output signal and are generally louder than single coils. Variations to these types of pickups can be achieved by modifying the number of copper windings, or adding active components to reduce noise or otherwise adjust the frequency signature.
Apart from the type of pickups for your guitar, it is worth considering the position and arrangement of them. A pickup placed close to the neck will receive higher input, than one placed at the bridge. That is because the amplitude of a swinging string is higher here. Classically, you would offset for this by adjusting the output volume to match between positions. Actually, modern pickups will provide this feature for you, which is why companies release variants of their products for the respective body positions. Alternatively, the distance of the pole pieces from the strings may be adjusted to achieve a similar effect. So in reality the audible difference won’t necessarily be a volume mismatch. Instead, we will perceive a clearer and more present sound for bridge pickups with more high overtones being captured. Conversely, a guitar played in neck position produces a warmer and more assertive tone.
If you’ve ever seen a classic Stratocaster guitar, you might have noticed the angled pickup in the center. Well... given what I wrote before, this just means that it leans between neck and bridge position. This leads to crispier sound for the pole pieces closer to the bridge and gaining more low range output towards the neck oriented side.
Obviously, choice of pickups and their position on the body is a question of personal preference. Luckily, guitars can have multiple pickups, so we can have several configurations within the same instrument. That is one of the reasons why collecting guitars can be so much fun.
This whole project is somewhat of an experiment. So I thought I might reflect that in my pickup choice. I wanted a guitar that offered a certain versatility. As a result, I decided to contrast a humbucker at neck position with a P-90 single coil at the bridge - yes not the other way around. That way, I was hoping to boost the crunch and crispness of playing in bridge position, while being able to quickly switch into a thicker sound.
Remaining Parts
To unify all your components, you’ll have to wire them together using several smaller components. Pots, switches and capacitors are just boring enough for me not to talk about. No seriously, my knowledge and interest for electrical engineering is somewhat limited and I don’t care enough to bore you or myself with an overview here. For me it was more important to know how I’d hide the electronics inside the body in a way that would be minimally invasive to the skatewood body. Guitars often provide a pick-guard, which is that plastic plate below the strings. The purpose of this piece isn’t only to protect your instrument from taking damage inflicted by insane shredding. A lot of times it also holds your pots in place and hides the wiring chamber. Other guitars have a control plate on their back side, under which the electronics cavity resides.
The overall layout of pick-guards, electronics cavities and control plates is a question of flavor, too. My main design requirement was to maximize the visible wooden surface, while allowing an easy setup. So I decided to go for for a simple Tele control plate at the front and no pick-guard. This would mean that I’d have to “dig tunnels” for my pickup wires towards the control cavity.
Wood Choice
The choice of wood in an electrical guitar is often in the center of conversations. Picking old skate decks as a base material took away from this choice for my build. Nonetheless, I became curious what to expect on that end. So I dug through several forums and videos. You will and should probably do the same, because it is really interesting to hear what people have gathered.
If you care for my five cents, I am gonna go ahead and bluntly say: “If you are a noob like me and you are making a guitar, screw tonal properties of wood.”.
Pickups and their placement will always affect your guitar sound far more than anything else. Check out this dude, who slays his poor Strat to pieces in the name of artistic audio science. Call me ignorant, but I can barely hear a difference in the overall appearance of his sound.
Final Thoughts
It is easy to get overwhelmed with all that goes into designing and engineering a guitar. For decades, people have been devoting their life’s work to building these amazing shred handles and countless innovations have been made. Unsurprisingly, plentiful discussions surrounding the selection of any part or way of constructing a guitar can be had. It seems to me that it is most important to foremost consider the human factor when building a guitar. I am referring to personal preference and fuck-ups related to a potential lack of experience.
It’s just wishful thinking that advanced features will provide some sort of excellency or more polished sound, when approaching the first build. After all, what is endless sustain or a five percent fatter sound worth, if your instrument produces crooked notes from a half-sloppy construction?
IMHO, there is a reason why people are making godlike guitars: they have been building for ages. The core ingredient for making a legendary instrument probably is having built a ton of half-baked ones before. Us noobs should therefore be focused on getting inspired and making an informed decision towards what feels right.
Let’s just generally spend a little less time (over-) thinking and a little more time doing!
List of parts
Goeldo was recommended to me as a manufacturer for guitar parts. Their production includes not only world famous Duesenberg parts, but also a range of other in-house hardware and electronics items (göldo & Kluson). The quality and variety is top notch and I’d recommend their parts any day! You can find Goeldo parts all around the world, as many resellers stock their products. For ease of reference, I am linking to the manufacturers website for each of the items. Note that for some items I bought different variations, as to be able to test different color schemes.
With the kind help of the whole Goeldo team, I arrived at the following list of items for my build. In particular, I would like to thank Goeldo´s Heinz Rebellius for all his suggestions and support in this build! Heinz, your inspiration and interest really drove my motivation. You were an awesome mentor for this project. Before joining the Goeldo team, Heinz was long time editor for "Gitarre & Bass“ magazine and co-authored and edited “E-Gitarren: Alles über Konstruktion und Historie“ (with André Waldenmaier & Paul Day), which serves as a comprehensive fact finder for guitar building and history. Pick it up! (german language only)
Neck
Bridge
göldo "Vintage" String Ferrules / 8mm
Tuners
Pickups
Kluson "Vintage" P90 (Note: made for concave body shapes!!! I converted this to a soap bar later)
Other Electronics
Knobs & Pins
göldo DIAMOND Knob
göldo TL-Type Switch Knob / Barrel
Screws
consider buying göldo Screws / Neck / Long instead
Plates & Caps
Shield & Finish
