New Orleans, LA
I am a bassist, guitar tech, and founder of Strange Guitarworks. When not working on guitars, I create experimental music under the moniker of UFO Death Cult, utilizing microtonal instruments of my own design. "Intonation is a social construct."
Jan 16 2024
Today, I’m going after one of my least favorite features on the world’s most popular guitar: I’m making a case against Fender’s Micro-Tilt. Fender introduced the Micro-Tilt in the early 70’s, and this has been causing problems with their necks for over 50 years. This was designed to angle a bolt-on neck back in the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/the-case-against-fenders-micro-tilt/
Nov 13 2023
I’m a fretless guy. My first foray into fretless bass was back in 2001, when I yanked the frets out of the carbon-fiber neck on my Peavey B-Quad4. Over the years I’ve rarely owned a fretted bass, and have gone deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole of fretless playing – so much now that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/fretting-a-fretless-bass/
Sep 18 2023
If you had asked us a year ago if a multiscale guitar could be PLEKed, we would have said “Not yet!” The PLEK machine was designed for parallel frets, and for many years doing a PLEK job on a multiscale (or fanned fret) instrument simply wasn’t possible. But the good people at PLEK are always …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/pleking-a-multiscale-guitar/
Jul 24 2023
“Intonation is a social construct”. I’m not sure if I coined this phrase or inadvertently appropriated it, but I do say it often. All music is out of tune – it’s a mathematical impossibility for any three notes to be perfectly in tune with each other at the same time. That’s just science. We all …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/gibson-frets-in-the-wrong-place-fixed/
Jan 13 2023
Ten years ago I was fired for the first time in my life. I was blindsided, in complete and utter shock, and I suddenly found myself unemployed and quickly going broke in San Francisco. I had been becoming increasingly disillusioned with San Francisco, and had been yearning to move back to the city that most …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/ten-years/
Jan 28 2022
When I was 17 years old, I had already become bored of the same-old, same-old approach to guitar design. My jaded teenage eyes were already sick of seeing Strats and Teles over and over and over again. I thought these were grandpa guitars, and I yearned for something new. Then I discovered the Parker Fly, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/replacing-the-output-jack-on-a-parker-fly/
Oct 27 2021
Left handed people have never had it easy. Lefties have been burned at the stake, bump elbows with righties at the dinner table, and struggled with scissors in elementary school art class. Left handed people also have limited options finding a guitar that suits them. Left handed people comprise of 10% of the population, yet …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/converting-an-acoustic-guitar-to-left-handed/
Apr 13 2021
Whammy. Whang bar. Vibrato bridge. Wiggle stick. No matter what you call it, they are going to knock your guitar out of tune if it’s not set up properly. The main culprit for guitars going out of tune is the nut– strings catch and bind in there, and they don’t return to pitch. While a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/installing-fender-lsr-roller-nut/
Apr 07 2021
I have been playing bass guitar 29 years, and for almost that entire time I’ve been an exclusively fretless player. I first defretted my bass in 1998, after only playing for five years. I remember that ordeal quite well: I yanked the frets out of my Peavey B-Quad, and filled the slots in with bondo, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/defretting-a-bass-guitar/
Jan 12 2021
What is a PLEK machine? What does a PLEK machine do? Is the PLEK machine worth it? There are lots of questions out there regarding this machine, and even more bad answers. Who in 2021 would believe that the internet would be rampant with mis-information? The PLEK machine is a complex tool, and I will …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/the-secret-of-the-plek-machine/
