The Body Design
We have been torn for a long time about a design. We actually bought a brand new standard Telecaster around 1970 (We wish we had held on to that now). It was a nice guitar, but not really right for what we were doing at the time (classic rock). We traded that for a Gretch hollow body that was in great shape, except that the nut was broken off of the truss rod right at the headstock (and the neck was, therefore, somewhat bowed). We were able to repair it and straighten the neck. We liked the humbuckers, but had feedback issues with it (again, not the right guitar at the time). We wish we still had that one as well, but it was borrowed, and it never came back... We currently have a Godin SD solid body, which has a humbucker at the bridge, and two single coils. It is actually a very nice guitar with a nice neck, and works well with our 70's Fender Twin Reverb (actually, a Super 6 in a Twin Reverb cabinet with 2 EV-12Ls), but we still had a hankering to build something (not from scratch, but from parts). We started to lean towards either a Tele or Strat body with humbuckers, and coil splitting to get the single coil sound when we wanted it. At first, we were thinking more of the Tele (we really like the simple shape of the body, and of the headstock). But then we came across a nice MightyMite Strat body on eBay...
Picture of actual item from eBay auction site
It was already finished, and routed for two humbuckers (and a possible center pickup), and it had a nice quilted maple top. Ok, so now we needed a neck. We found that on eBay as well. A nice MightyMite maple neck with a birdseye maple fretboard, ready to go with a nut already installed.
Picture of actual item from eBay auction site
The next step, visually, was to decide on a pickguard. We were having a hard time visualizing different pickguard colors (it was getting awkward holding the body up next to the computer monitor), and came up with the idea to use Photoshop to "build" the guitar, using pictures of the body, neck, various pickguards, pickups, etc. It worked out quite nicely, as you can see below, and gave us a good idea how the various parts would look together (If you don't have Photoshop, a nice graphics tool that will do layers like Photoshop is GIMP, which can be downloaded free here). The body and neck pictures above were taken directly from the eBay auction pages, and are pictures of the actual items. The rest of the pictures we got from the various sites where we were looking for the various parts we needed. Here are some samples of what Photoshop was able to show us:
First, we matched up the body and the neck (not perfect, but close enough):
Body and Neck mated using Photoshop
Then, we found pictures of various pickguards, resized them, and was able to look at the following possibilities:
Various pickguards added using Photoshop
Pretty cool, huh? We even printed up something like the above on one sheet of photo paper so I could stare at it for a while. We also sent a copy to my daughter at college, who plays a number of instruments, including guitar, to see what she thought. We both settled on the Vintage Pearl (second one down).
We already had two nice Seymour Duncan humbuckers (SH-1 '59 models, with chrome covers) that we got on eBay a while ago and had installed on an old Hohner LP copy, to play around with the split coil setup. We stoled these back for this project (don't worry, the Hohner will get its original pickups back, and will live to play again). We had setup the Hohner with push-pull volume controls which activated the split-coils, and push-pull tone controls which selected two different capacitor values for the two tone controls. It seemed like a pretty nice setup. We also liked the concept of the middle pickup on a standard Strat being wired out of phase, so We found a nice Seymour Duncan rw/rp (reverse wound / reverse polarity) lipstick pickup (also on eBay). We chose the lipstick style to match the chrome HBs. Back to Photoshop:
Add pickups...
The rest is pretty standard. A two post tremolo, output jack, and knobs:
Just needs tuning machines and strings!
This really gave us a good idea as to how the guitar would look finsihed! It was interesting to later see how closely this compares with the final project.
Ok, now that the general look of the guitar had been settled, on to the electronics!