A Tale of Three Guitars

This is a tale of three guitars...okay, maybe four. I’ve spent the last few years making guitars for myself that are similar to the Music Man Axis style. The reason being that I have a bad back and I was trying to make the lightest guitar I could. The modified Axis body shape that I used has 13% less area than a Telecaster so guitars made in this shape are automatically lighter than Telecaster style bodies. All of the guitars I make are mostly hollow and my best effort was a basswood and spalted big leaf flame maple guitar that weighs four pounds, four ounces (including strings but not counting the strap). Last year I was doing some work on a friends Telecaster and I realized that I missed the feel of the Telecaster. So, I made myself a Telecaster style guitar.

This one is spalted, quilted, colored big leaf maple with a padauk layer and a basswood body. I took it to a couple of gigs and realized that I had a problem - I have very bad arthritis in my left hand. Only my middle finger will bend or straighten at the second knuckle. Because of this I have to play sort of classical style with my hand completely under the neck. When I went up above the 12th fret my hand whacked into the horn. Since this guitar is mostly hollow I couldn’t just shorten the horn so I decided to make a short-horn Telecaster. I looked around the interwebs and found a few but I didn’t like the designs. The one I ran into most often just had a lopped off horn. Ergonomically great, aesthetically fugly. So, I decided to design my own short-horn. This one is quilted big leaf maple over a walnut layer with a basswood body. The fret markers aren’t stickers, the marquetry inlay at the 12th fret has 24 separate pieces of wood in it.

Within a few months of making this guitar my band started having bass player problems (I think we’re like Spinal Tap except that we go through bass players instead of drummers) so I decided that we might need to go back to being an “acoustic” trio. For that I needed an acoustic/electric guitar. I already have a Carvin AC275 and it’s a great guitar but, due to my arthritis, I need a 24.07 inch scale neck (which all of these guitars have). Solution - make my own. This entailed learning a bunch of new things like how to cut a round sound hole, make a rosette, bend rosewood binding, make a 3mm top, make an acoustic bridge, and slot said bridge. I exchanged a bunch of emails with Carvin and LR Baggs and ended up with an LR Baggs Element VTC under saddle pickup. I scrapped the included battery holder and volume/tone controls and replaced them with A25K pots and a back mounted battery box. This one is made of roasted basswood and quilted big leaf maple. I used 18 or 19 different types of wood in the rosette and fleur de lis (thanks to Ocooch hardwoods for their veneer sampler).

Shorthorn Tele shaped acoustic/electric guitar

Immediately after I built this guitar we solved our bass player problem but, being bored, I decided to try something I’d always wanted to do - make a stealth guitar. That is, one with the pickups completely under the drop top. I had heard about people considering doing this and there was a bunch of noise about the Brad Paisley Secret Agent pickup but I couldn’t find a guitar with no visible pickups (other than ones with wood pickup covers of course). I did a lot of thinking about how to get the pickups as close to the strings as possible. To this end I decided to recess the bridge, lower the neck, and recess the underside of the top where the pickups would reside. I used Fishman Fluence Open Core active humbuckers (just like in the blue guitar above) thinking that these would be powerful enough to work at a distance of between eight and nine millimeters from the strings. The body is roasted basswood and spalted hard maple. One of the reasons for trying this little experiment is that it seems a shame to pay a hundred bucks or more for a beautiful wood drop top and then cover it up with a pickguard or mounting rings. BTW, all of these guitars have pickguards - 5mm laminating sheets from Amazon. If you look real close you might be able to see them. These let the beauty of the wood show but protect it from pick damage. One other advantage of this type of pickguard is that it is very inexpensive. If you need to change pickup configuration you can just peel it off. If you’d like to try it, search on YouTube for a video of Frank Ford installing a clear pickguard on an acoustic guitar.

Shorthorn Tele shaped "stealth" (no
visible pickups) guitar

It worked...sort of. If I were playing jazz this would be pretty good. The sound was incredibly clear but, if you wanted to give it some power, it was a bit anemic. The other problem is that if you have any kind of string imbalance the only way to adjust the pickup is to move it further away from the strings. Luckily I had my contingency plan (Plan B From Outer Space) - cut through the top and mount the pickups with the mounting screws on the top. Since the pickups are mounted through the back this gives you a very clean top. Here’s the back.

The pickup covers are secured with screws but the control cavity covers are held on with 5x2mm neodymium magnets. Here’s the top.

Front of "stealth"
guitar after exposing the pickups

Note that the fingerboard sits flat on the top like an acoustic guitar. I started playing this at gigs and something weird happened. I really liked the lowered bridge and neck. It’s incredibly comfortable to play and palm muting is much easier. I actually retrofitted the blue guitar in this manner. The acoustic is already like that because of the lower acoustic bridge. Oh, BTW, if that neck looks familiar it's because I stole it from the first Telecaster style guitar. I gave the Telecaster body to a friend.

All of these guitars were finished with GluBoost CA glue. You can finish a neck from sanded to buffed out in about three hours with this stuff. The body takes about a day. Wait time to completely cure is about ten minutes. If you’re really impatient you can get some GluDry. Funny thing about the CA finish for the neck - it isn’t sticky on very humid days even with the high gloss finish. I’m assuming that this is due to CA glue curing in the presence of water. I’ve never liked gloss lacquer necks because, here in the deep south, they get really sticky if it’s humid.

For the curious, here’s a picture of the inside of the guitar with the back of the drop top prior to gluing together. Note that I put the copper foil shielding on the drop top before gluing it to the body. I use copper foil tape for shielding because I have yet to find any of the “shielding paint” that passes the connectivity test with a DVOM. Another thing to note is that the sides and back are about 1/4” thick. That reduced the final weight (with pickups, bridge, strings and everything else) to 5 pounds and 2.3 ounces.

Inside of "stealth" guitar prior to
gluing on the drop top

As for the control and pickup cavity covers; yes, I cheated. I used a Sculpfun S10, 10 watt diode laser (with blower - about $700) to cut out the control cavity covers from the body. That’s why the grain matches on the back. You can do almost the same thing by hand using a template and whatever wood you want although the grain won't match.