Acoustic Habits, Electric Ideas

(First published in Guitarist magazine, issue #485)

This month Alex delves into in the world of boutique electric guitar building.

Shimmering Pelham blue lacquer layered over carved mahogany body contours. The sleek mercury-like undulations of a polished Bigsby tremolo. The gloss black reflections of a pickguard hiding a nest of snaking electronics and alien gadgetry. I am in the domain of electric guitar building, and it feels a universe away from my usual world of acoustic lutherie.

I could have been forgiven for thinking that building an electric guitar would be a relatively easy affair. After all, how hard could it be to screw together two planks of wood and add six strings? Not straightforward, as it turns out. Over the past few months I’ve once again learned that it is easy to get overconfident as a guitar maker.

To my mind, the main challenge with building an electric guitar is that they are, in essence, production instruments. Unlike acoustic guitars - which were developed in the artisan workshops of the 19th Century - electric guitars are a distinctly 20th Century phenomenon, born of mass production methods and computer-controlled precision. Bringing these principles back into a small workshop is not a straightforward job.

For my own electric guitar, I wanted to design an instrument that played on ideas borrowed from my favourite instruments. A bolt-on neck seemed like a sensible idea, with the potential to calibrate the angle of the neck to work with different kinds of hardware. I opted for an angled headstock too, challenging my build with a bit of extra woodworking and ensuring that the strings would be seated firmly against the nut without the need for string trees. One of the bigger challenges is working out a satisfactory layout of the control cavities. In this case I went for a design that kept the back of the guitar clean, instead routing space for the wiring, knobs and pickups from the front, strat-style. This requires a pickguard onto which the controls are mounted, and I wanted this to play a role in the overall look of the guitar, marking a boundary between the neck and bridge pickups

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The sound you get from an acoustic guitar will be a direct result of the maker’s craftsmanship: build it better, and it will sound better. Whilst this is also somewhat true of electric guitars, at the heart of the sound of an electric guitar is the pickup winding and design. Realising I have too many tools and not enough space, I decided to draw a line under making my own pickups and instead deferred to my talented luthier pal Dave Fliski and his company Heavy Air pickups. Dave no longer makes these pickups but amongst my dwindling stock I went for the contrasting sounds of a P90 ‘Chunk’ in the neck alongside the grit of ‘Brainstormer’ humbucker in bridge position. The varying outputs have to be balanced by adjusting the heights of the pickups, with two separate volume controls for extra tweaking. Just a single master tone control gives the option of exploring a few more sounds, keeping the control panel fairly simple.

Finishing is probably the topic that most luthiers will agree can be an agonising struggle, and yet for electric guitars, it’s the flashy paintwork that really makes the instrument stand out. As someone who has only really dabbled with spraying lacquer finishes (with sometimes unpredictable results), I wanted to explore a process that would work well in a small workshop. After sealing the wood with shellac and thoroughly grain filling the pores of the mahogany with epoxy, I went for a sprayed nitrocellulose colour and french polished over the top.

Although this sort of finish doesn’t hold up like the armour plating of some factory finishes, the tactile nature of the french polished surface on the neck is glorious. I’m sure that in time this instrument’s finish will wear in a desirable way too. I can’t say that I’ve redefined the electric guitar, but I really enjoyed putting this one together. Who knows, maybe my next acoustic guitar will come out with a splash of colour too. Candy Apple Red Jumbo, anyone? Get in touch with alex@alexbishopguitars.com if you are interested in commissioning the next in this series of electric guitars