Luke 18: Let the little children come to me, and have their faces properly rocked off.

I've got a little bit of down-time, so I figured I'd show everyone what I'm working with for the upcoming retreat: Luke 18. For some background, this is the first time in about a year that I've gotten to lead a band, and it's also the first major time that I'm going to be leading from electric. It's going to be me, my friend Bob on bass, and one of the teens, Matt, on drums. I've actually been really impressed with both of them. They're not professionals by any stretch, but they've both got better-than-average skill, and their hearts are in the right place. Not that I'm the one to judge their hearts. Or anything for that matter.

You know what? I probably should have just said "takes direction well." But that sounds a whole lot less like a worship leader, and a whole lot more like a dictator. Either way, neither of them is playing for attention or to show off, which is all I ask!

Since I'm going to be the sole guitarist, I'll be switching between acoustic and electric. On acoustic, there's nothing too new. It's going to be my Breedlove AC-25 -> Fishman Aura Pedal -> soundboard, with or without my Countryman DI depending on if it's necessary or not. With a bass player and a drummer, I won't need to add in any effects to fill up the sonic space, but the Fishman really is something, and it adds a lot of quality to the sound chain. It makes things sound way better when I'm just doodling around, and it adds a little extra something when everyone's playing.

As for the electric side, we have:


->


->


This is probably what I'd consider to be the essentials. I also have a volume pedal and a wah that could go in front of the pedal board, but I don't know if I'm going to be playing electric on Mighty to Save, which is currently the only conceivable use of a wah in a 3-piece worship band that I can think of, or at least the only use I've figured out yet. The volume pedal could work, but again, that's much more of a tool for cool electric additions to the songs, like swelling into delay to make a pad or just swelling in general. It might still make an appearance, but I like what I can do with this board.

And for those of you paying attention, you'll notice a few additions. My current chain is Parts-o-Caster -> Digitech Hardwire tuner -> Fulltone Fulldrive 2 (MOSFET), running at 12 volts -> Boss DS-1 -> Voodoo Labs Tremolo -> Boss DD-7 (with tap tempo) -> Fender Blues Jr. I got the tuner for Christmas, which is a life-saver, and I got the Fulldrive in a trade. If by trade, I mean that I traded $100 for a Fulldrive. Once again, in the battle of Craigslist vs. My Bank Account, Craigslist wins. But good Lord, does that Fulldrive sound incredible. I've been using it solely in the "Vintage" (a.k.a. "Mid-humped", a.k.a. "Tubescreamer") setting, and it's playing a vital tonal part in Our God is Greater (wait for that one to come out on the Passion CD - it's going to be huge!) and How He Loves, where I'm actually using the boost section to get the lead-line between chorus and verse. The DS-1 is being used constantly, too. Our "theme song" for the weekend is Let God Arise, and I'm sure you all know how much of a distortion-hog that song is. We're also doing You Are My Joy and Your Name High, both of which are using a lesser setting on the DS-1. The delay is, well, delay, and it makes the earth better. As for the tremolo, I keep trying to take it off my board because I've yet to use it, but I'm constantly thinking "I could use it someday...", and so it hasn't left. But also, there's not really anything else I'd put in that spot right now, so while it's taking up space and adding cable-length, it is true-bypass so at least it's not adding anything when I don't want it to add anything.

I've been really impressed with my Strat, too. Bear with me, because I'm still new to this whole "electric guitar" thing, but it's incredibly versatile. The middle pickup might actually be my favorite, but then I can go to the neck when I need a more hollow sound, or the bridge when I need more bite. In combination with my overdrive/distortion pedals, I can comp pretty much any sound I need. I do still want to own something with humbuckers, and a "real" Telecaster (I've heard incredibly, surprisingly good things about the Squier Classic Vibe, but haven't found one to play yet) since I'm enamored with the Tele's neck pickup, but I think my G&L may be on the way out, since I just don't play it very often anymore. My little Frankenstein's Monster of a guitar is making it happen. It desperately needs a full setup and fret-job (for instance, the high e string actually gets stuck on one of the high frets when I strum too hard) so maybe that will happen before the retreat.

And the Blues Jr. is tone in a box. It's small enough to drive to distortion without killing everyone in the room, but just the right loudness to keep up with my drummer. And, it's got a nice pleasant reverb so I don't have to keep the Verbzilla on my board, though reverb is probably going to be completely unnecessary during the weekend.

The Parts-o-caster: Part VI - Finishing Touches!

Here we go folks. The moment you (or, at least, I) have all been waiting for; the majority of the work is done, so now it's time to screw in the last few bits and plug this baby in to see if it's as soulful as it is in my head, unless of course, what's in my head is all that matters. Which may be the case.

Here, I'm installing those cool knobs that started this whole thing off. Standard volume/tone knobs just kind of get pushed on, using friction to stay secure. Not that they need much more than that, since there's not a lot of force being applied to those knobs. At least, not along an axis that would cause the knob to pop off. But these knobs have a tiny screw in them that just needs to be tightened.

I turned the pots to the fully "closed" position, or the position that they'd be at 0, if these were standard knobs, and lined the knob up so that it was pointing straight towards the pickups. Pictures make a whole lot more sense. Then, I tightened the screw, and there you have it.

The switch tip gets pushed on, and that one is pretty self explanatory.

Then I screwed on the strap buttons. Strap locks are supposed to be cool. These aren't Strap locks. I've never used them, but I may someday because my guitars always seem to fall off of their straps right when I'm not paying any attention. None of my guitars have made it all the way to the floor yet, knock on wood...

Then, I screwed in the string tree. My neck came with two, but some reading confirmed that the second one does basically nothing good, so I went without it, just putting on the one over the B and high E strings.

And speaking of strings, the next step is to string 'er up. Ernie Ball 9's, simply because I don't know any better.

Lastly, I screw in the tremolo arm, and booyah. I've never owned a guitar with a working tremolo system (though it's well-documented that what the tremolo system on a Stratocaster is doing is not, in fact, tremolo, but Vibrato), so I'm excited to add this whole new dimension to my playing. Or, I could just block it if I don't ever end up using it.

And yes, she sounds gorgeous. Not my playing, mind you. That's still pretty atrocious. But have you ever played a guitar that you couldn't fail to make good tone on? Merely possessing this guitar has given me the drive to do scales everyday in an effort to get better, and this is from a guitarist who learned chords three years ago and almost nothing since. Which is equally atrocious.

And so, work done, here are the obligatory glamor shots!

Finished and in the case.

Aww, the whole family!

My cool, artsy shot.


And finally, the finished product!

The Parts-o-caster: Part V - Electronics

Ok, a quick confession. I did not completely hand-build this Strat. The most important part where I took a "shortcut" was in ordering the pickups and electronics. At the outset of this project, I had approximately 0 experience in soldering. I wasn't about to buy individual pickups, tone pots, wire, etc., and wire them all up. Sure, I could follow wiring diagrams, but if something went wrong, I'd be completely lost and probably very discouraged. So I found this website, Picker's Parts. The coolest thing about them is that I could custom-order a pre-wired pickguard to be however I wanted. And since I was looking for a late 60's sound, their default "Nico's Vintage" pickup was exactly what I was looking for. I chose the slightly upgraded 5-way switch (American), and a short time later, I had the most important part of my new guitar.

Here are the pickups and electronics, removed from the pickguard. I had a lot of relicing to do, so I had to remove them. What I will say is that the pickguard itself was easily the most frustrating, work-intensive part of the whole process, as you'll see. After having soaked the pickup covers in tea for several days, I found that they had actually swelled a little. I was able to jam them over the pickups, but getting them into the pickguard itself required some quick filing.

After finally getting the pickups into the pickguard, I tried to put the tone pots and the switch in. Lo and behold, those holes were a little small, too. A bit more filing...

So then I put the tone pots and the switch in, doing the requisite screwing and wrenching. But then, what should I notice, but that the holes pre-drilled onto the body did not sync up perfectly with the holes in the pickguard. And, what's more, having gotten the guts onto the pickguard and trying to get everything to fit together, the body's neck joint wasn't exactly to Fender specs. After about an hour of filing, fitting, and more filing, I finally was able to shape the pickguard's neck pocket so that it would fit. Unfortunately, this left the area of the pickguard around the neck looking rather ragged and amateur. And then, on top of that, I still had some more holes to drill to attach the pickguard.

My advice, and something I would not hesitate to do if I built a second guitar, is to pick out a body that doesn't have any holes drilled in it yet. Sure, it will take you a little longer to drill the 20-ish holes required to get your guitar together, but it will save you a lot of time trying to get the pickguard to work. Incidentally, the pickguard I have is also the modern, 11-screw variant, and I would definitely go for the 8-screw, vintage style pickguard, if only for continuity's sake. Either way, the more wood that is in your guitar, the better.

Next, we need to do a little soldering. The standard wiring for a Strat has three wires going from the pickguard to other parts of the guitar: a hot and ground wire going to the input jack, and an additional ground wire going to the tremolo assembly, and thus, every metal part of the guitar. Up first, the tremolo ground.

Two long screws secure the tremolo spring plate to the guitar. Later, once the tremolo springs are on the guitar, the depth of these screws will dictate the height of the bridge, but for now, a close-enough approach is all that's needed. With that in place, I ran one grounding wire (black is ground, white is hot) through the guitar and soldered it to the plate.

That done, I attached the trem springs to the hooks, stretching them a little. They weren't anywhere near as tight as they would be with strings on, and again, the screws will need to be adjusted once you get some tension on the springs, but this is the first step.

Lastly, we have the other two wires to attach. On the advice of more of the internets, I twisted the two remaining wires together to get a natural shielding effect to cut back on a little hum inherent in single-coil guitars, and fed them through the hole going to the jack.

A quick word on hum in a single-coil guitar. A lot of people go to the trouble to put a lot of shielding on the cavity of the guitar, maybe use humbuckers, and pretty much do whatever they can to eliminate the hum. But I believe that an important part of the vintage sound that I'm going for is that hum. I twisted the wires because I figured that it made sense to do that little thing, something that likely would have been done in constructing vintage guitars anyway. In the end, this guitar with or without twisted wires was really not all that noisy, as it's coils aren't terribly hot in comparison with some pickups available.

Quick soldering, white to the tip, black to the sleeve, and we're done. Someone online said that it doesn't matter which wire goes with which part of the jack. They are very wrong. I actually miswired the jack at first, and when I went to plug things in, all I got was a horribly un-grounded sound. Nothing but noise. In fact, I think that the picture I have is the miswired first attempt. But a little more soldering work, and things are clean and clear!

Two screws securing the jack plate to the guitar, and we're 95% done!

The Parts-o-caster: Part IV - Body

Having done all of that strenuous work on the neck, it's time for some body work!

Here, we have the body all by itself. It's a little deceiving with the flash, as the blue sunburst is a lot more subtle under natural lighting. Regardless, it really is beautiful. Originally I was looking at a natural finish, but I stumbled upon this one and it took me back to a blue-burst Strat I saw when I was shopping for my first electric guitar. I like that this isn't a super-common finish, and that it really works with the other colors in this project.

The body itself is Alder. Though I looked at a lot of other woods, I wanted a classic sound, and it definitely delivered.

So to start, I first assembled the bridge. It's a standard, modern-style floating tremolo, and the first step was to put the bridge saddles onto the bridge plate. That's just a simple matter of threading the screw through the holes and sliding on the springs, followed by the saddles. Intonation will be adjusted later by adjusting these screws, but I just gave them a ballpark depth.

Next, I attached the bridge to the body itself by screwing in the six screws along the front. Following the advice of a lot of people when it came to actually making the tremolo work and do so stably, I tightened down the screws on the end, leaving about 1/8 of an inch of play in each of the other ones. This gives the bridge some room to move so that the tremolo can do it's job, but it also gives the bridge the needed stability to keep things in tune. But we'll come back to the rest of the tremolo assembly a little later on...

The only other major bit of work to be done to the body is attaching the neck. It's a very, very simple process. The neck and body are both of the 4-bolt variety, so there was no extra drilling or hole-filling to do. The body's neck pocket had "Mickey Mouse ears", meaning that it was routed with rounded corners, a lot like the ears on that famous rodent. What's good about that is that it accepts pretty much any after-market neck that you could want. What's bad is that it makes getting a tight fit pretty much impossible, which means that you lose a little sustain and tone. But apart from making my own body, I don't really see a good way around this.

And so, I simply fit the neck into the pocket, flipped the whole thing over and bolted the neck plate to the body. Again, I was careful to tighten the bolts pretty evenly so as not to warp anything, and voila!

Next post, the guts.

The Parts-o-caster: Part III - Neck Work

The fretboard. Perhaps the most important part of any guitar. Every electric I've owned (that's right, all two of them) has had a maple fretboard, despite how much I really like how rosewood looks and feels, so for this project, rosewood it is! Besides which, the darker color really lends a lot of vintage cred, as it doesn't have that bleached-white look of a new maple fretboard.


(Despite the Fender sticker from 1957, that's a new neck. I put the sticker on myself, since getting a blank neck and a sticker cost me around $120 total, whereas a genuine Fender neck from the 1950's would have run upwards of $600. And of course, if I was aging the pickup covers, I had to make it look like a '50's strat. I mean come on! Continuity! Though, in retrospect, I should have matched the headstock closer to a '69 Strat, given the pickups. But that's a few posts away...)

The biggest thing I did not do, which would have been the first step, had I had the tools, is do a complete fret leveling/crowning/polishing. The action ended up being decent, but it could have been much lower had I done this. I may still take it somewhere and get it professionally set up, but it's good for now.

And so, the biggest step for getting the neck ready is getting those tuning pegs in there. I chose some vintage, nickel tuners, mainly because I didn't have a good way of relicing chrome tuners. Someone somewhere said that you can melt the chrome off and then relic the nickel below, but that seemed like a step too many, given that I was going to have to buy the tuners anyway. So, after a quick turn with a brillo pad (which I can't recommend highly enough), it's time to get them into the headstock.

I hit a snag right away, but it was not unexpected. The tuners have a collar and the tuner itself. The collar basically serves to keep the tuning peg from rubbing against the wood in the headstock. But with this neck, the collars were too small! I was prepared for something being too big, as some simple filing could fix that problem, but how should I fix something that was loose?

There were a lot of suggestions, but upon realizing that the structural integrity of the collar really wasn't all that important (the screws holding the tuners in place took all of the strain from the strings, as far as I could see), I opted for a quick, easy trick that I'd learned when making pinewood derby cars with my dad oh so many years ago. Toothpicks!

No glue, no filling holes and redrilling, no filing, no nothing. I just took half of a tooth pick, stuck the pointy side in between the collar and the headstock (picking the same point for each collar for uniformity), a few raps with a small hammer, and it was stuck tight. Now, if this were going to be under any strain at all, you would probably want more than just a miniscule amount of friction holding those pieces in there, but I trust my physics!

Break off the little bit of toothpick that's still there, and the tuning peg itself will hide the amateur carpentry.

With all of the collars in place, the next step was to get the pilot holes drilled for the tuning pegs. With any generic, Fender-ish part that you order, you have to realize that everything is going to be really close, but for the most precise work, you will need to drill. Ideally, you'll want to fill in any non-used holes, too, but I'm something of the impatient type.

I fit the tuning pegs into their respective slots, being careful to not poke the collars out of their holes, and I used a pointy instrument to make a little guide mark where each hole should go. I found something that looked like a screwdriver but with a point instead of any kind of screw-turning head, but you can use anything that is pointy and will stand up to some light tapping. A nail works pretty well. Having done that, it's on to drilling.

There's another carpenter's trick I used here to make sure I didn't drill clear out of the front of the headstock. I took some tape and wrapped the drillbit where I wanted it to stop, and then I went slowly. When the tape started brushing away the sawdust, I just backed the drillbit out, and voila. As far as where to put the tape, I just kinda eyeballed it against the screws that came with the tuning pegs.

With the holes drilled, from there it was just all about putting the tuning pegs in again (and once again, being careful to not knock the collars out) and screwing them down. And as with anything where you're using multiple screws to secure something to something else, you want to just get each screw started, and then tighten them down all at once so that they all go in smoothly and there's no torque to pull something out of alignment. The two end pegs (high and low E) both have a nice hole in them for the screws to go into, but the other ones were put in such a way that they share screws. I had a scary moment where I thought that the pegs were going to be too far apart and the middle screws weren't going to hold the pegs down, but it ended up fitting perfectly.

Also note, these aren't staggered tuning pegs. If you have tuning pegs that are staggered, then you need to keep track of which ones go where.


Next post, we get into the body of the project (Ha!).

The Parts-o-caster: Part II - Relic-ing

Ok. Relic-ed guitars. I'm not a huge fan. I see things like this, and I think, idiots will pay for anything. Do you really want a guitar that looks like it's been run over by a truck twice, and dropped a hundred times, and had cigarettes burned into it? Why would you take a new guitar, sand the neck, strip some paint and rust the metal parts, and then charge an extra $300? I mean, I guess the obvious answer is that there is a market, but why would you pay another $300 for the same guitar, just beat up?

Image. That's all it comes down to. People are obsessed with the image that they project. They want a guitar that looks like it's lived badly for 60 years when they themselves are only 16. I do firmly believe that a guitar should look the way it's been played.

That being said....I relic-ed a few parts on this project. My reasoning: Yeah, I really can't defend myself against anything that I just said. Things like pickup covers and tuning pegs, I really don't like them to be too shiny. They just don't look right. Is that an image thing? Yeah. But the psychologist in me says that, if I feel like I'm playing an old guitar, then my old, soulful guitarist inside will respond. Even if I am consciously aware that the guitar is not, in fact, as old as it claims to be. I'm doing it to trick my id, not everyone else. Is that legit?

I don't know, but what's done is done. And, to be honest, I'm really happy with the finished product. Maybe that's all that matters. Maybe I just have to bite my tongue when I see people paying a thousand dollars for a guitar that's worth maybe six hundred. Maybe.

I did look pretty heavily into this, because I didn't really feel like having to buy multiples of all of my parts in case I really screwed something up. Now, I'll pass the wisdom on to you!

To be perfectly honest, the entire color scheme of my guitar may have been completely determined by this:


That's a knob from a vintage Fender amp. And I wanted it to be my tone/volume knobs. First, it looks B.A. against a white pickguard. But other than that, not having a number to look at forces me to use my ears to dial in the tone I want, and it makes it harder for me to fall into the same set of tones every time I play. Plus John Mayer did it. Don't judge me.

But yeah, mostly it just looks cool. But not with stark white pickup covers. Oh no. The problem is that this knob is not quite white, and not quite cream, but somewhere in between. So I couldn't just order matching pickup covers. And if I were going with an off-white pickup cover, a perfectly clean neck would look weird. And with an older neck, a shiny new set of tuners would just stick out like a sore thumb...

You see? This is how it starts...

First, only because it took the longest, I had to deal with those pickup covers. A lot of people suggested soaking new pickup covers in any manner of staining things, everything from coffee and tea to soy sauce, to human, umm, excrement. Yeah. So I went with tea.

I made it really strong, but before I put the covers in, I roughed them up a little with some sandpaper. Then, I soaked them, but only half-way. After all, you only see the top of a pickup cover when it's installed. Like an iceberg. It would be weird to have them unformly "exposed to the sun", or whatever it was that I was going for by doing this. I moved them around a few times, and left them in there for something like three days, checking every few hours until I thought they were done.

Now, on to the metal parts. First, the magical aging liquid. I had to go to the darkest parts of Africa to obtain this esoteric elixir.

The goal of using Vinegar is to simulate X number of years of human sweat and grime. The thing you're actually simulating is the weak acids that are in that sweat eating away at the metal. Unless it's chrome. Chrome is very good at repelling acid. So, we take non-chrome parts and soak them in a weak acid.

Some people use Hydrochloric Acid instead of Vinegar. Some people are way more extreme than me.

Of course, the really, really important parts, like the tuners and the springs, I didn't want to soak in acid. Some said it would be okay, some said it would really hurt the guitar's playability and, essentially, destroy the very thing you're trying to build, so I decided to err on the side of caution. Will it detract from the aesthetics? Yeah, probably. But the biggest goal I have here is making a guitar I can play.

So for the tuners, I just took a brillo pad to them. It really did a good job of making them look worn, but not fake. I did the same thing with the bridge plate and bridge saddles.

As for the body and the neck, I very, very (very) carefully put some dents in them. I'm actually very careful with my guitars, so I don't want to play something that looks like I couldn't take care of it. I don't know if that makes sense. But I didn't chip any paint or make any deep gouges. I just made use of the corner of the workbench to make some little dents and dings. Nothing extreme, but it had to go with the rest of the guitar.

Next, some assembly required...

The Parts-o-caster: Intro

So, I did something crazy a few weeks ago. I've had this Mexi-strat for about two years, but I never really liked it's sound. Maybe it was the wood, or the finish. Maybe it was the humbucker in the bridge position. Maybe it was just the fact that I can't play. That's always a possibility.

And so, foregoing any solution that involved putting actual work into getting better at guitar, I started buying parts to make a new Stratocaster. Now, as a quick aside, I really like a Strat. There's something undeniably cool about a guy playing one; it's iconic. But moreso than that, a Stratocaster signifies a beginning in terms of tone and options. Three uncomplicated single-coil pickups, tone knobs, and volume. Not as simple as, say, the Telecaster, but close. And a hell of a lot sexier.

Billy Corgan (I think it was Billy Corgan, not that I'm a huge 'Pumpkin's fan) said that a Stratocaster lets you be you. Clapton plays one. Mayer plays one. Hendrix played one. It's made inroads into every musical genre, even those traditionally dominated by other kinds of guitars, like country and metal. It's the AK-47 of the guitar world.

So, I figured I needed one. A guitar that would inspire me to play skillfully. A guitar that I could pick up and just feel the blues coursing through it. A guitar that, frankly, was timeless and would always be with me, even 70 years down the road when flying cars are the norm and robots are our overlords.

Sidebar: who's seen Back to the Future lately? I just watched the whole trilogy, holy crap, so much I missed when I was 6. Like how "Twin Pines Mall" becomes "Lone Pine Mall" after Marty runs over one of old man Peabody's pine trees? Brilliant!

So I want to take you on this journey. Come on along!