EXTRA ONLINE RESOURCES


Fig. 4 - Bolting the neck back on before tuning up is definitely a good idea!


Fig. 5 - At last I was able to take of the masking that was stopping the strings becoming a tangled mess. I only broke one!


Even though we’re using pre- made parts on this phase of our guitar-modifying project, there are several extra details I’d like to share with you that there just isn’t room for in the magazine. So if you’d like to see a lot more tips and tricks that can make the difference between an OK guitar build and one that knocks yer socks off, please visit the web site for the videos and PDFs I’ve put together. www.playmusicpickup.co.uk


Fig. 6 - Nearly finished. Simon’s project guitar almost good to go! Q & A WITH SIMON


Q A


Like a lot of guitarists, I’m a total Hendrix freak and I’m trying to get my set-up close to his but I’m right handed. I’ve been talking to a guitar


maker about putting a left-handed Warmoth or Allparts neck on a right-handed US Fender Strat body, mostly to get a more authentic Hendrix look. He reckons it will change the string tension to be more like Jimi’s guitars too. Is he having a laugh? How can the length of the string behind the nut make any difference? Pete, Glasgow


For years, I thought that any part of the string outside of the ‘speaking length’ made no difference to the tension and I said as much to guitar guru Trev


Wilkinson. He told me that Leo Fender thought the same thing as me – but we were both wrong! Trev came up with various suggestions for demonstrating the point, including stringing a Fender-type guitar with 009s in all six positions. “Before I do that, what about a guitar with a locking nut? Once you’ve locked the string, you could cut straight through it behind the nut and it would make no difference,” I argued. “Yes,” replied Trev, “But the way a string feels after you’ve locked the nut is different to the way it felt before, which tells you the extra string length makes a difference.” Know what? He’s right. The effect is subtle. In


fact, if your guitar has a floating vibrato that slacks off all the strings a little when you make a finger bend, you’ll probably never notice any difference. But if the bridge is fixed, you get slightly more string tension as the distance between the nut and machine head increases (or the distance between a separate bridge and tailpiece, for that matter). It took me about a year to come up with a sensible answer to the last part of your question: how does it make any difference? To get my head round it, I imagined that I’d built a test guitar rig at the top of a major suspension bridge. The machine head for my string was at the top of the tower on one riverbank but the nut (and the rest of the guitar) was about a mile away, on the tower the other side of the river. (Figure 7)


Now ask yourself this, assuming the string was an 00.9 and you were able to tune it to a high E, would the string between the two towers be in a straight line? I think we all know the answer is: no it would sag in the middle. In fact it would probably sag by a few metres. Now imagine that as you start to bend the string on the guitar neck, you have to combat a couple of metres of sagging string elsewhere in the system. You ain’t got the blues, you’ve got blood blisters!


Then I asked myself, how does this imaginary experiment relate to a difference in string length of, say, 20mm versus less than 150mm, when it comes to a guitar with a single-sided headstock? For


Fig. 7 - When a string vibrates behind a nut or bridge saddle, it is no longer in a straight line, which must affect tension. Other factors include scale length, string gauge, whether there is a floating vibrato and the angle of the string the machine head and anchor point behind the bridge.


one thing, the string sag in my mile-long example would probably be caused by gravity, hardly a big deal on 150mm of 009. That’s when the light came on.


If you play any guitar with a separate bridge and tailpiece, as soon as you stop, you hear the short lengths of string between those two points ‘singing’, a bit like reverb springs in an amp. So, if those strings are vibrating, they can’t be in a straight line – and the longer the string is behind the bridge or nut, the greater the angle of deflection from the straight will be – which should mean more string tension. Let’s forget all this theory though! Your guitar maker is correct but it’s one small factor in so many that effect feel, I wouldn’t get too hung up about it. When you get your guitar together, don’t forget to post it on the www.playmusicmag.com web site so that we can all admire it. PM


www.playmusicpickup.co.uk 441


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