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/
Oct 11 2013
To paraphrase one of my favorite bits from Bill Hicks: your custom shop guitar is not special. I constantly see guitars from so-called custom shops that are only sometimes wonderful instruments, but they mostimes come with a hefty price tag, upwards of thousands of dollars. For what? A generic neck screwed onto a generic body, with …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/assembling-custom-guitar/
Oct 09 2013
Here’s how to an inlay job bass-ackwards. A few weeks ago, I refretted Kirk’s Les Paul with stainless steel jumbo fretwire. It came out beautifully, and his Les Paul plays better than ever. This week, he came back and asked me to replace the trapezoidal inlays. D’oh! This is exactly the wrong way to go …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/replacing-inlays-les-paul/
Oct 04 2013
Here’s an airline horror story for you: on a recent trip to the Philippines, David’s beloved Gibson ES-135 had it’s neck broken off. Unfortunately, David had signed a waiver stating that the airline wasn’t responsible for the damage, which apparently is an increasingly common practice on international flights. Bummer – fixing a broken Gibson neck can …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/fixing-broken-gibson-neck/
Oct 01 2013
Let’s face it: professional guitar techs don’t exactly have a stellar reputation. Many of us (myself included) have gone in to some shop somewhere and and paid good money to have our instrument worked on, only to have it come back even worse than before. While I don’t think that every self-proclaimed guitar expert out …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/maxed-truss-rod/
Sep 28 2013
I do a lot of wiring in my shop. I like it – for some reason I find a hot soldering iron soothing. Unfortunately, EMG pickups are attempting to take away my love of soldering with their so-called solderless connections. EMG has been moving towards solderless connections on all their stuff since 2009, and for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.strangeguitarworks.com/emg-solderless-wiring/
