Smokehouse Guitars

Features

• Four String
• Red Oak Neck
• Poplar Fingerboard
• Solid Body
• Custom Bob Harrison single coil pickups (reverse wound for noise cancellation)
• Cocobolo bridge, control, and jack plates
• Gold Tuners
• Zebra wood volume knob
• Three way selector switch
• Buffalo bone nut and saddle

Features

• Lacewood Neck
• East Indian Rosewood Head Plate
• Gabon Ebony Fingerboard
• MOP Inlay
• 24 Fret neck
• Gold Evo Alloy Fretwire
• Solid Body (Poplar)
• All gold hardware
• MOP Top Dome Knobs
• Coil Tapped Neck and Bridge Mini-Humbuckers (Volume, Push/Pull Tone)
• Hard Tail String-through-body Bridge
• High Gloss Lacquer finish (box)

Making very good progress on the neck.  I expect the frets to be fully dressed out tonight and the finishing process can begin.

This is going to be one solid, stable neck.

Features:

• 25.5 Scale
• African Mahogany Neck
• Padauk fingerboard
• Padauk control cover plates
• Two Way Truss Rod
• Buffalo Bone Nut
• Medium Nickel/Silver Fret Wire
• Red Abalone Inlay
• 16″ Neck Radius
• French Polish Finish, Blond Shellac (neck)
• All Chrome Hardware
• GFS Dream 180 Neck & Bridge Humbuckers
• Neck Pickup: Master Volume/Tone – Push/Pull Coil Tap (tone knob)
• Bridge Pickup: Master Volume/Tone – Push/Pull Coil Tap (tone knob)
• 3-way Selector Switch
• String-thru-body loader bridge
• Solid poplar body

Background

A year or so ago when I was out in Atlanta, Georgia, I met a fellow engineer who shared my deep and abiding love for music (guitars in particular).  We hit it off pretty well and had some fun talking about guitars and some of the features that we both thought made the perfect guitar.  Some time after I left Atlanta, he decided that he wanted one of mine and hired me to build him a update of one of my earlier guitars: The Hot Rod.

He told me that he was less interested in looks (although they were still obviously important) and more interested in having a versatile instrument.  While he didn’t want to load the thing up with a bunch of MOD boards and built in effects (purist) he did want to have quick access to a wide range of different tones.

I built the voice of this guitar around a set of GFS Dream 180 humbuckers.  The Dream 90 series is already some of my favorite pickups, having perfected the scream of a classic P90 with none of the noise issues, so I wanted to give the 180 series a shot and see what it had to offer.  These certainly do not disappoint.   I simply can not believe the dynamic range these things carry.  They have tons of old school PAF flavor (and all the mellow, dreamy quality that implies) but if you push them a little further you get plenty of jangle and chime.  They are loaded down with wax and are completely and totally silent, even when the coils are split.  Again and again, GFS continues to amaze with the quality of pickups they turn out at a mere fraction of the price of the big name players.

The guy who commissioned this one was very clear: he wanted as much individual control over each pickup as he could get.  So each pickup got its own dedicated volume and tone knobs, and each tone knob is a coil splitter to convert the pups into single coil screamers.  It’s pretty tough to load four pots into a cigar box body due to the limited real estate, so I had to get a little creative with their placement so as to keep them out of the way.  After play testing a bit I think I did okay.  The whole arrangement is polished off by the typical 3 way selector.

The neck itself is comprised of a nice, old, hunk of African Mahogany.  This stuff was cranky as hell to work with (I had to modify a lot of my standard practices to work the wood as it did not like bladed tools at all) but ended up being well worth it.  The neck is strong, stable, and responsive and its darker color works well with the rest of the instrument.

Finally, the body itself is loaded with a solid block of Poplar.  Say what you will about Poplar (common Aspen).  It’s maybe not so much to look at but I swear it is some of the brightest sounding tone wood I’ve ever messed with.

How nice this is!  I was mentioned over at rocklifeboat.com on their list: The Ultimate Guitar Makers List.  I guess the list was published back in May but I just stumbled upon it now.  Pretty nice, I thought.  Go have a look at the site when you get a minute.  There is some pretty cool stuff over there.

I put some strings on today and played it in my garage for a spell.  All I can say is that your neighbors are going to hate your ass!