Feb 03 2014
Hurricane Katrina not only wrecked my beloved city of New Orleans, but it also destroyed countless musical instruments. Somewhat surprisingly, nine years later not only are there whole swaths of houses that are untouched since the storm, and there’s also tons of guitars that haven’t been fixed up yet. Last week I had one such …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/katrina-guitar-rescue/
Jan 15 2014
Sometimes a seemingly simple job becomes wildly complex in an instant. This kind of thing actually happens more often than you’d expect in this line of work – guitars are finicky things, and sometimes minor details conspire to thwart the efforts of the intrepid guitar tech. This week I was presented with a (normally) simple …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/installing-music-man-stingray-pickup/
Jan 08 2014
I’ve never really understood counterfeiters. Building a guitar takes a lot of work, and requires a ton of expensive tools – so if you’re going to build a guitar, why make a copy of somebody else’s work? I guess they think they’re going to fool a lot of people with their fake guitar, but surely …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/spotting-fake-guitar/
Dec 11 2013
The electric guitar is easily the most popular instrument of the last 100 years, and has given birth to new sounds, new forms of music, and introduced to the world the concept of “rock star”. It has also inspired endless navel gazing; an endless hunt for the perfect mousetrap. Due to it’s rather modular design, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/installing-resomax-bridge/
Nov 30 2013
Today I’d like to shine a light on a problem that many steel string acoustic guitars have, yet most people don’t notice: worn out bridge plates. The bridge plate is a flat piece of wood that sits inside the guitar, underneath the bridge, which helps support the top and is where the string’s ball ends …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/bridge-plate-repair/
Nov 21 2013
Most acoustic guitars will need a neck reset during their lifetime. Over the decades the string tension pulls the neck forward, causing the angle at which the neck joins the body to be incorrect – what we guitar techs call “underset”. An underset neck causes the string action to be very high, making it very …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/acoustic-neck-reset/
Nov 07 2013
A while back I wrote a blog detailing how to fix an acoustic guitar with a belly, which has somehow become one of the top hits on this here blog. One of the people who saw that blog post was my new friend Kip, who had a similar problem with his 1950s era Gibson that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/acoustic-guitar-debelly/
Oct 23 2013
Serious blues aficionados know the name Big Bill Broonzy. Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones and countless others cite him as a major influence. He wrote a ton of songs that have become blues classics, such as “Hey Hey”, which Eric Clapton famously covered during his Unplugged performance. Simply put, Big Bill Broonzy is …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/big-bill-broonzys-guitar-gibson-style-o/
Oct 18 2013
I don’t just fix guitars – I play ’em, too. In between bouts of guitar tech-ery, I gig with a bit around town (with John Lisi & Deltafunk, Chapel Blues, P.H. Fred & The Round Pegs, and others), and I also write and record experimental microtonal music on my own as UFO Death Cult. If …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/topic-ufo-death-cult/
Oct 15 2013
Today I completed work on a banjolele rescue. This poor thing had been sorely abused: first, somebody stacked a bunch of boxes on top of it and broke the skin, and then it sat ignored and forgotten in somebody’s repair shop for a year! Yikes! Barnaby (the banjolele’s owner) brought it to the shop, in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/banjolele/
