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I like to experiment with materials, designs, and techniques outside of conventional luthiery to build low-cost, high-quality, fully-functional, and attractive electric guitars and basses. What I am not interested in is doing the same old thing the same old way it has been done for decades.
This site is arranged in four main sections:
- Home is where you are at now.
- Projects contains details on all the instruments I have built, and some other related subjects.
- Laboratory contains tools, techniques, and designs used in my projects.
- Blog - anything else I feel like writing about: carpentry, programming, music, etc
This site is aimed at the home hobbyist, and particularly the first-time builder. So welcome to the lab. See what's on the slab. I hope you find this site interesting and informative.
Navigating This Site
Main navigation is at the right left around here somewhere. First there is a "breadcrumb trail" showing where you are, with "up-links". This is followed by a list of child pages, or "down-links". Around that is a list of sibling pages, or "side-links". There is also an overall
Site Map
, as well as indexes for each major section. Finally, the search box works surprisingly well, or just hit the Random link.
If you are on a small 'mobile' device like a phone or tablet, the main navigation collapses to a button at the upper-right, with the rest at the bottom. The button opens a condensed popup menu. The mysterious unlabeled checkbox in the menu is a 'pin' that holds it open as you navigate between pages. You can force 'mobile' mode on a larger device by making the browser window narrow. In any case, the layout is optimized to make the best use of the available screen space.
History
This site was assembled from a mass of material I had previously posted on Talk_ass. This is seven years of material - over 200 pages and a gigabyte of images, and ongoing. Just getting it all back up was a huge task.
I cringe whenever I see a new major version number of WordPress - what did they break this time? But you can't hold back the tide, so with some trepidation I installed it on a test site, and to my surprise, I found nothing wrong. The changes are all on the back-end, and completely unnecessary, like animated menus. The people in charge must be six-year-olds in need of entertainment.
Then I tested the editor, and not at all to my surprise I found they had broken it in a way that shows just how little they test things or care. Fortunately I was able to fix it with a little more of my own code. That is the risk you take when you use a platform like WordPress. Someday they may break something I can't fix.
Of course, they also added support for AI. At least that is disabled by default, and it is going to stay that way. I am not even curious, crusty old curmudgeon that I am.
I doubt there is anything very special about those piezos. My experience is that you need the right mounting and electronics to make a piezo sound good, and it has very little to do with the sensor itself, which is just a little bit of semiconductor.
More: "Tonewood" ...
21" neck, adjustable bridge with piezo saddle, active electronics. EBay body. Now has metal-wound strings.
More: Stratocaster Uke Bass ...