Aug 06 2024
We believe that your guitar’s nut is the most important lynch pin of a good setup. If it’s not cut properly, there’s no other adjustment you can make that will improve the feel of your instrument. The nut is also the most crucial aspect of keeping your guitar in tune. We’ve seen so many people …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/making-a-bone-nut-from-scratch/
May 27 2024
We all love Gibson guitars. Gibson is a seminal contributor to rock and roll history and some of their designs (like our two personal shop favorites, the Explorer and the Firebird) are among the coolest guitars ever made. Period. But it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: the Gibson headstock design. Repairing …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/repairing-a-broken-gibson-headstock-and-adding-a-volute/
Mar 04 2024
You don’t see these everyday! A while back our buddy Mark brought us his vintage Martin 0-18K (koa) for a refret, which is usually a very run-of-the-mill job for us here – except for one thing. This instrument comes from a bygone era when C.F. Martin guitars were made using bar frets. Bar frets differ …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/bar-refret-on-a-vintage-martin/
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/
Oct 03 2023
Woodworking can be a tedious process that requires patience, preparation and precision to execute well. Oftentimes we see examples of someone taking a more, uh… expeditious route. Like this guitar: someone attempted to modify this Floyd Rose cavity to fit a different style bridge that it wasn’t designed for, with less than stellar results. Maybe …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/repairing-a-floyd-rose-route/
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/
Jun 13 2023
Recently, our pal Mike Keller came into the shop with an interesting object accompanied by an interesting request. The object in question was a solid rectangular slab of blue molded epoxy with a fragment of wood suspended within, like an ancient mosquito in amber. He told us the wood was a Native American artifact – …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/bo-diddley-inspired-custom-guitar/
Mar 21 2023
If you’ve ever owned hollow-body jazz guitar with a floating bridge, you know the perils of changing the strings without accidentally moving the bridge placement. Even scarier, the bridge is also able to slide around the top of the guitar under full string tension if bumped, potentially throwing off your string alignment and intonation, causing …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/pinning-a-floating-bridge/
