Monday, August 10, 2015

Making a Slide Guitar (with grade 8 woodworking skills)

I went to a dance (yeah, I know, but it was a school fundraiser), and a rockabilly band was playing.  It was a four piece band: singer/rhythm guitar, lead guitar, stand up bass, and drums.  They were a fun band and really swung.  For a couple of numbers, the lead guitar player pulled up a very basic-looking lap slide guitar, and it sounded really good.  I've tried playing slide on a regular guitar and it hasn't gone well, so I was wondering if a lap guitar would be better for me.  To my wife's chagrin, I kind of stopped dancing after that because I wanted to watch this guy play, but I also wanted to figure out how this guitar was made.  It didn't look hard: a plank, strings, and a pickup.

The next few days were spent trying to find out about slide guitar construction (and being nice to my wife).  On the internet, there wasn't that much information about lap slides, (but there is a lot of advice about being nice to your wife), so I just jumped in.  Doing a little inventory, I found I had a lot of the parts I needed, left over from previous mods, and I just needed some wood, a few electronic parts and a bridge.

The Body
I bought a nice piece of maple that I was going to cut in half and glue together like a sandwich so it would be nice a strong.  But I realized my tuners were not going to fit through two layers of wood, so I made sure the top layer extended beyond the bottom layer.   I still had to rout a bit of the thickness out so the pegs would clear the top.

I used tuners from an old Gibson Marauder.

Like the Marauder, I cut the headstock on an angle
 for a straighter, less-binding string pull.

The Bridge and Electronics
I bought a top-mounted bridge online and installed it on the end of the body.  I routed and drilled out places for the pickup and electronics.  I mounted them on some pieces of hardboard which was cheap, available, and easy to cut.  I didn't have a knob so I drilled out a red die, like on some hot-rodded rockabilly guitars. 
The pickup is a leftover stacked Dimarzio. 

The Frets
Okay, here is where I totally cheated.  A real woodworker gave me a nice thin piece of cherry for the fretboard, and I read about fret distance calculators and scale lengths.  It looked way too complicated.  Wanting to get on with it, I just photocopied the neck of a student guitar.  It was nice and wide, and the 24" scale made it nice and easy to place the nut.  The nut is an aluminum nut cover used to convert regular guitars into high-action slide guitars. 

The fret markers are happy face stickers, 



The "Finished" Product
I strung the guitar up with some Ernie Ball regular slinky strings that I had, tuned it to open G, and plugged it in.  Amazingly, it worked!  I used a lug from a socket wrench set as my slide (until I bought some actual slides).  The fret markers are surprisingly true, so when I put the slide over the frets, the guitar is actually in tune.  The Dimarzio has a lot of bite when I crank up the gain on my amp.  I had to run a ground wire to get rid of a little hum. 

I actually did this project a few years ago which you might be able to tell by the dust in the pictures.  A lot of the things I thought were going to be temporary, (e.g. the unfinished finish, the paper fretboard, etc.) have stayed, so far.  I drilled a hole and strung some leather through it so I could hang the guitar. 

Clyde the Slide
looks kind of like a Chapman Stick.
 
 

I name all of my guitars, and old Clyde is still doing well.  But I'll save more recent activities for future posts.  

Saturday, August 8, 2015

The Embers: the song I want played at my funeral.

I refound the song I want played at my funeral.  It is called, "The Embers" and it was written by Billy Cowsill and Jeffrey Hatcher.  The version I know is by Jim Byrnes from his Fresh Horses CD.*

I first heard the song when Byrnes played it at a concert I attended at the Terry Fox theatre.  I don't know if it was poorly promoted or not, but there were maybe twelve people in attendance.  Byrnes, Jesse Zubot, and Steve Dawson still put on a great, intimate show.  When they played "The Embers", it was one of those magical moments.  Maybe it was because there were so few people, it felt moving and personal, like coming across a unicorn in a forest, and you look around like, "Is anyone else seeing this?"  During the performance, Dawson played a slow slide solo on his Weissenborn which unfortunately is not on the CD, but captured somewhat in my memory.  I bought the CD at the end of the show, and the trio signed it. 

Lyrically, the song does not capture my view on love and life, but it does have the right feel for my view on love and death.





*It might be out of print, so you can find it in the first binder of CDs in the computer room.