The friend for whom I built the hybrid tele earlier this year has a friend. This friend also likes guitars, and he has played the hybrid tele and liked it. He has asked me to build him a guitar, and we threw around some ideas for a guitar that will – as usual with my guitars – have some unusual features!
The two main features of this guitar will be the top and the fact that it’s a multiscale guitar. The top is a maple cap that I had in my stock and which has some subtle figuring that I think – and hope – will look stunning when it’s been stained. Regarding the scale, since we’re using a normal bridge (a Schaller Hannes), we can’t do a very extreme fanning of the frets so we’re going for 25.5″ – 26.5″.
The guy has sent me some of the hardware, including a pair of pickups that came from an Ibanez of his. These pickups have coloured covers – blue and purple – and so the plan is to stain the top with a blue-to-purple fade to match the pickups.
The woods used, apart from the maple cap, include bubinga for the body, bubinga and wenge for the neck and a Macassar ebony fretboard. Lastly, I came up with a rather unusual design for the headstock – we will see later in the build if that works out or not!
Here are a few pictures of the early stages of this build. At the time of writing, the top has been carved but there’s still a little bit of refinement needed on that before I move on to the sanding and then staining the top.
See Page Two…