Benjamin Strange

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."

Most commented posts

  1. Barnett Customs — 2 comments
  2. Spotting a fake guitar — 2 comments
  3. Fretwork on a Gene Simmons Punisher bass. — 2 comments
  4. Making a guitar nut from scratch — 1 comment
  5. Shielding a guitar — 1 comment

Author's posts

Fretless conversion

Go fretless USA! Seriously, is there anything cooler than a fretless bass? I was an exclusively fretless player for years – first doing a fretless conversion on my old Peavy B-Quad 4, and later defretting my number one bass, my 1974 Ovation Magnum. Urban myth may say that Jaco yanked the frets out of his bass …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/fretless-conversion-2/

New music from my musical project, UFO Death Cult.

If I may interrupt this guitar repair blog with a shameless plug: I present to you, my friends, the newest work from my musical project, UFO Death Cult. I’ve been working on this record off and on for the past 3 years, and quite simply, it’s the most difficult thing I have ever done. I …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/new-music-from-my-musical-project-ufo-death-cult/

Say hello to Scott!

Hey, everybody – I’ve got somebody I’d like you to meet. This handsome fella here is my good friend, Mr. Scott Morgan, from Helsinki, Finland. Scott is an amazing guitar tech and luthier, who deserves the credit/blame for getting me into this whole fixing guitars thing. I met Scott way back in my Werlein’s for …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/say-hello-to-scott/

Removing and replacing a fretboard

Removing and replacing a fretboard – sounds terrifying, doesn’t it? Yes, it can be complicated, and it needs to be done with extreme precision, but it isn’t a scary of a project as it sounds. I recently completed a giant project on an old Silvertone acoustic guitar, which had previously been rehabilitated elsewhere. The neck had …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/removing-replacing-fretboard/

National Resonator neck reset

I do a fair bit of neck resets in my shop. It’s a pretty common job, and just about every acoustic guitar needs a neck reset during it’s lifetime – the strings pull the neck forward, and eventually the neck/body joint needs to be re-carved to get the neck back to the proper angle. I …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/national-resonator-neck-reset/

1952 Gibson Les Paul neck reset

Oh man, I’m sure to catch hell for this one – it’s not every day that somebody does a massive modification to one of the rarest of vintage guitars out there. Yes, I’ll admit it: I just completed a neck reset on a 1952 Gibson Les Paul. First, a little history: Gibson introduced the Les …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/1952-gibson-les-paul-neck-reset/

Teisco Del Rey rescue!

It’s amazing to think that almost 10 years after Hurricane Katrina forever altered the city of New Orleans, I’m still fixing up guitars that were damaged by the storm. Recently my buddy John Lisi brought me an old Teisco Del Rey EV-2T that had spent a few weeks floating in the flood waters that destroyed his home in …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/teisco-del-rey-rescue/

Bridge plate overlay

I deal with a lot of bellied guitar tops in my shop. Many acoustic guitars develop a bulge at the bridge, where the string tension has pulled the top up and caused the action to be excessively high. This is extremely common and usually isn’t something worth worrying about too much – it’s usually a …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/bridge-plate-overlay/

Rickenbacker broken truss rod repair

I have a love/hate relationship with Rickenbackers. As a bassist, I absolutely LOVE the way they sound: many of my favorite records feature a Rick bass (such as King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, and Tool’s Undertow). But, I really dislike many of Rickenbacker’s design elements, such as their folded truss rod system they used back …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/rickenbacker-broken-truss-rod-repair/

Installing a Roland GK 3 Pickup

Last week I took on a rather scary task: installing a Roland GK 3 Pickup into an expensive PRS guitar. Usually I’m asked to install these into people’s secondary, beater guitars – not their prized main instrument. Since installing a GK pickup typically requires some significant routing and electronics worth, it requires a brave soul …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/installing-roland-gk-3-pickup/

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