Big Jack's CBG in Big City Rhythm & Blues

5-1-2010

I'm happy to report that a pic of Big Jack Johnson playing the CBG I made for him appeared in the April/May 2010 issue of Big City Rhythm & Blues magazine.

Gibson L-1 Completed

3-30-2010

The Gibson is finally complete. Here are some pics of the new kerfing and the back going on.

Then the sides were completely scraped/sanded bare and stained with a matching stain. Colortone stains from Stewmac made the matching easy.

Along the way I had to learn how to French Polish since that's what they used for finish at that time the guitar was built. Nitrocellulose lacquer didn't come along until the 1930's or so.

I read a number of different instructions for how to French Polish. This is another one of those things that seems to be shrouded in mystery. The best instruction I found was the DVD, French Polishing For Guitarmakers 2.0 by Ronald Louis Fernandez, available for rental from Smartflix; then, of course, a lot of practicing.

If you use Everclear (aka pure grain alchohol) to the dissolve the shellac, it won't have any odor. You can even work on a guitar in the living room in front of the tv.

The other interesting thing about shellac is the finish doesn't crack like nitro. Even after 90 years, the finish on this guitar was smooth.

Here are some final pics (right).

Custom Pickup Winder

8-30-09

After going through two makeshift winders, one made from a record player and the other from a drill press, I felt serious and passionate enough about pickup making to spend the major portion of last year designing and building my current winder.

I got a lot of inspiration from the Designed2wind website and also Jason Lollar's pickup winder book. I also added a few twists of my own, such as the speed control and the hand operated traverse.

Little Purple Travel Bass

7-29-09

This was another project for Kimski who travels a lot and needed a bass that could easily go with her.

I took another stab at a short scale rubber string bass, this time without a cigar box, due to space constraints. This bass will fit right in a suitcase! The overall length is about 24 inches.

This time I used used Road Toad Pahoehoe strings which I had been hearing good things about, and I'm glad I did. These are the bomb. They're not sticky like regular Ashbory strings and they so far seem tough and like they will not break easily. And they sound great.

The bass has dual piezos hidden under the bridge, and one volume knob. The body is pine (I'm still on a pine kick), and the fingerboard is granadillo (a good alternative to rosewood). The bass is fretless, so the "frets" that you see on the fingerboard are actually lines done in maple.

11-1-08

Big Jack Finally Gets His CBG

A couple of years ago, I built a CBG for Clarksdale, MS blues musician Big Jack Johnson, but he never got it because it was stolen in transit. Everyone was so disappointed. So I finally built him another one and gave it to him personally at the ultimate juke joint - Red's in Clarksdale, MS. Big Jack was so very appreciative and thrilled to receive it, that he asked me to autograph it, and then he played it during his gig. He was blown away by how great it sounded and the crowd (a national/international group there for the Arkansas Heritage Blues Fest) was blown away too. One of our friends reported that after we left, the crowd asked Big Jack to play it again, which he did. I also heard another report from Big Jack's agent that he is touring with it.

Technical specs - three strings, maple neck, granadillo fingerboard, 24-3/4" scale, bone nut, granadillo bridge, brass tailpiece, handwound P-90 style pickup with three polepieces, volume knob. Don Sebastian box with a Sonny Boy Cornmeal bag glued on both sides. (Sonny Boy is a locally produced cornmeal named after Sonny Boy Williamson.) I also made him a nice hardshell case from a former rifle case to protect it during touring.

Blues Photos by Don McGhee

Blues Photos by Don McGhee

3-26-08

Gibson L-1 Repair Project

An L-1 is the model of guitar that Robert Johnson used.

I'd never had the opportunity to see an L-1 in person so I thought it would be cool to pick one up from eBay that needed a little TLC, fix it up, then resell it.

This particular one dates from 1918. It had one very long side crack that stretched around most of the left side and some smaller cracks on the right side. The left crack had opened up almost an inch wide. The sides were also bulging out forcing the back off in two places near the neck. I believe the previous owner had kept this in an attic where it had gotten very hot and dried out the wood. Unfortunately I don't have any "before" pictures.

I let the guitar sit in my basement getting humidified. Every month or so, I would check on it. When the crack closed up to about a half an inch I as able to start working on it. I glued the cracks shut, then had to remove the back to be able to reach in and reinforce the cracks. (see pic on right)

You can see the new side braces which are lighter colored than the original braces.

To tame the side bulging, the guitar has been placed in "the rack", which is a series of clamps that press the sides together. (Thanks to Frank Ford of frets.com for this great repair tip!) It will have to sit like this for several weeks or a month until the sides go back where they are supposed to. Then the back can be glued back on.

Stayed tuned for more on this project!

11-28-07

Stratotone Copy (with improvements!)

Well I've taken a loooong (2 year?) break from building CBG's to build this cool Stratotone copy - an actual real guitar. The story on this one is that I had the opportunity to meet Junior Watson, who is one of my favorite guitarists in the West Coast Swing/Jump Blues style. He also has an incredible ear for tone and has made a study of Harmony's, Kay's etc. in the search for that big old blues tone. His latest tone-monster is a 50's Harmony Stratotone. He showed me his Stratotone which he modified to add a second pickup. He also showed me a very interesting thing about the Stratotone, which is, it is constructed out of pine!

Apparently pine is a very underrated tone wood, similar to spruce. The original Telecaster and the Stratotone are the only production guitars ever built out of pine - and they sound great! I believe the manufacturers have avoided pine though due to the fact that it is a softwood and it dents easily. Too bad. Apparently though, there are a few luthiers and players who have caught onto the pine-tone thing, and there is a small pine movement underfoot. Check out Glendale Guitars.

Onto my Stratotone - the original has no truss rod, one pickup, and a huge baseball bat neck. Mine has a truss rod, two pickups (maintaining the cool tone bypass circuit), and a still chunky, but not so huge neck. Construction is of course, all pine. I literally went down to Lowe's and got some yellow pine lumber. Though next time I think I will try to get some white pine, as the yellow pine is really tough to work with. The hard wood in it, is actually harder than maple, etc.

Oh yes, the original Stratotone copper is ugh-ly, so I put on an orange amber stain and a clear finish and let that beautiful pine shine through.

Finally got some sound samples up!

Both pickups

Neck pickup

Bridge pickup

3-2-05

Flee's Blue Note

Flee was puzzled by the concept of what makes the blues the blues, and what is a blue note, so I built him a special CBG to illustrate the concept. This is a one stringer, with a visual scale on the fingerboard. One side of the scale shows the normal western scale - do, re, mi, etc. The other side (in blue of course) shows the pentatonic blues scale. The notes that are different from the western scale are the "blue" notes.

1-10-05

Resonator Experiment

I am currently building a quick 1-string box to experiment with various resonators from found objects. The resonators to be tried are: a quart paint can lid, a beer can, an Altoids tin, and a cat food can. I plan to make 4 luwuan lids so I can try out different resonators with the same box.

Beer can resonator sound sample

Paint can lid resonator sound sample

I'm not sure what the high-pitched ringing sound is; maybe it has something to do with the fact that there is no nut on this test unit.

It turns out the high pitched sound has something to do with using the tee-nut for a string anchor. I can damp it out if I rest my hand on the part of the string behind the bridge.

Altoids tin resonator sound sample

A new idea that occurred to me: there is a pot-pie pan inside to act as a resonator and hopefully increase volume.

Paint can lid - pot pie pan resonator sound sample

Pedal steel guitar players use a "cat can" to get a resonator type sound on their steels -

Cat food can resonator sound sample

A large paint can lid:

Large paint can lid sound sample

Results of the Resonator Experiment

I did a side-by-side audio comparison of the six resonator types. To my ear the results are thus:

1. cat food can

2. small paint can lid

3. sm. paint can lid - pot pie pan

4. altoids tin

5. large paint can lid

6. beer can

The cat food can seemed to have the most character with a lot of mid frequencies and a wah wah sort of sound. The beer can I didn't care for at all - it had a lot of harsh frequencies.

The others fell into the middle of the road - each with their own characteristics. I found it interesting that the small paint can lid had a bigger more aggressive sound than the large paint can lid;and that adding the pot pie to the small paint can lid changed its sound so much.

Construction-wise either of the paint can lids would be the easiest to make because you could still use a neck-through construction. For the others a guitar-type neck joint is required.

Beer Can Resonator

Paint Can Lid Resonator

Altoids Tin Resonator

Paint Can Lid - Pot Pie Pan Resonator

Cat Can Resonator

Large Paint Can Lid Resonator

12-3-04

Gibson ES-125

Not a CBG, but a very cool project guitar. I bought it at a guitar show about 10 years ago, and have only played it a couple of times.

It's a 1949 ES-125 with a single P-90 with non-adjustable pole-pieces. All mahogany top, back, neck and sides. The guy I bought it from said it had been hanging in a barn, and you could see it had had a hard life. When I bought it, I knew it needed some fret work and so forth. But after I got it home, what was just a loose brace turned into a major project, when all the back braces came unglued and were rattling around inside the body.

After thinking about it and researching it on and off for several years, I decided the best thing to do was to remove the back to reglue the braces. There were also numerous cracks in the back and sides. The back, neck and sides had to be stripped in order to do the work. The back did not come off easily. Fortunately the binding came off mostly in one piece, although with lots of splinters hanging on. Fast forward, several more years.

I fixed all the back and side cracks and glued the braces back on. Then I made a batch of spool clamps for glueing the back. The back was hard to line up due to all the splinters, but it went back on ok. After a pass with a Dremel router binding bit, the binding went back on surprisingly well.

Lots of sanding evened out the color and some nasty cross grain scratches someone had put on it, trying to fix a side crack.

It still needs some more binding patches and dent filler, especially on the neck. I may end up stripping the top too.

Fast forward another year or two - I decided against stripping the top. I sprayed a shellac finish on the back and sides as a precaution against fisheye. The plan is to add some nitro lacquer on top of that. I filled the deep fingerboard divets, and refretted it. Since winter was coming on and my spray area is outdoors, I decided to assemble the guitar and get to hear what it sounds like for the first time in 10 years. It sounds so good, I can't bear to take it back apart again - I don't know when I'll get back to actually finishing it off...lol

12-3-04

Rubber String Bass

I needed a better bass sound for recording than the preset on my Boss recorder, so I decided to build a bass. Based on the same principle as the Guild Ashbory, it uses silicon rubber strings and a transducer pickup. The scale length is quite small for a bass.

I took all the paper off the box and covered it in bookmatched flame maple veneer (probably won't be doing that again - it was a lot of trouble.) But it looks pretty cool. I modified guitar tuners with spools on top to fit the thick rubber strings. I also experimented with putting two tuners at the top and two at the bottom, instead of the usual 4 at one end or the other. It makes for a nice compact, balanced package.

The strings are silicon rubber O-rings from McMaster Carr, but I discovered that the G string can't be tuned up to pitch without breaking. So at some future point, I will probably relent and get some "official" Ashbory strings, which are a little softer and stretchier.

Click here for sound sample.

12-3-04

Punch Dilip

This is a refined version of the pine neck 3 string. This one features a maple neck with a maple fingerboard. I experimented with a brass tailpiece instead of strings through the body/neck end. It also has a Rat Shack transducer just in case Dilip wants to plug in. It has a neck and tail block and kerfing for additional strength. It rings out nice and loud.

Click here for a sound sample.

8-12-04

Punch Big Jack

This one was a 10 month labor of love for blues player Big Jack Johnson. I started with a nice cedar Punch box. A guitar scale length maple neck with rosewood fingerwood, and some nice gold Kluson tuners I had laying around. There is a neck and tailblock inside the box. Bone nut and rosewood bridge.

I decided to experiment with winding a magnetic pickup, vs. using a Radio Shack transducer. The pickup was a P-90 style made for 3 strings (see below). Added a volume knob and strung it up with some 11's. The inside is shielded with about a mile of copper shielding tape. The pickup in this CBG was featured in the Pickup Workshop on cigarboxguitars.com.

The box was glued shut in the end, so I added an access hatch in the back for the electronics, and the pickup is also removeable in case it ever needs work. The peghead, pickup cover and access plate are covered in a hundred year old flamed mapled veneer I picked up many years ago from the old Star Piano factory.

I also ended up make a custom case for it out of 1/8" luwuan plywood and a firring strip frame. Lots of screws and glue hold it together. It's covered in a brown vinyl, with a brown furry interior.

Unfortunately it was STOLEN! on it's way to Big Jack, so once I collect the insurance money, I will have to build another one. If you happen to see it on Ebay or around in a pawn shop somewhere, be sure to notify me!!!

Sorry no sound sample, but it sounded GREAT! both acoustically and amplified.

8-12-04

P-90 Pickup for 3 strings

Alnico magnets and 42 gauge copper wire. It was wound on a modifed old record player, about 3 hours worth of winding at 78 rpm.

3-3-04

Punch 3-string

This was a quick thrown-together experiment in 3 string design. I used what I had laying around, which was a piece of pine firring strip for the neck. This is also a neck-through the box design. I had a another piece of pine that made a perfect fingerboard, so I glued that on. The neck comes up even with the box, which isn't so great, but you can still fret it as long as you don't go too far up the neck. The scale length was randomly determined by the length of the board, which turned out to be 21". I later added a Radio Shack piezo buzzer transducer pickup under the bridge, sitting on some cork for isolation from the body. It has a nice warm buzzy sound, but it's not very loud and doesn't stay in tune as well as I would like.

I ended up giving this one to my buddy Chris to try out until I can build him a better one.

Click here for sound sample

3-2-04

Punch 1-string

This is actually my second CBG. The first one was the same design. I took it over to show my nieces and nephews and they thought it was so cool, they wouldn't let me leave the house with it. So I left it there for them to mess around with.

It has a real Gotoh type guitar tuner, a dowel rod neck-through-the-body, a bone nut and a rosewood bridge. There is no bracing inside this one. It has a single guitar string and is meant to be played with a slide. It has a guitar-length scale.

I eventually ended up giving this one to my my pal and budding bass player Kimski, who was also quite entranced with it.