You can go to my What’s New section to read about how this particular design came into being and see many of the construction details. Here I will discuss more details of the finished product.
wanted the primary wood to be mahogany. We selected plain mahogany for the back and sides, and a figured top (note that Mark did not want sound holes). Bloodwood is used for binding, fingerboard, peghead top and back plates, and pickup rings, bridge surround, and control knobs. Black veneer strips are used to separate mahogany and bloodwood. The knobs are capped with ebony and a bloodwood position indicator. The wood is finished with hand rubbed Tung Oil.
The mahogany neck has a bloodwood/black stripe that is matched to the body back stripe. This was a challenging bit of construction; you can see more of the details in What’s New. Mark wanted a wide and chunky neck. This one has that comforatble baseball bat feel featured in early Gibson’s. The nut is a wide 1.8”. We used a vintage strat hardtail bridge with a 2.25” string spread for comfortable fingerpicking. Grover open back tuning machines are used.
The electronics consist of a Seymour Duncan 59 Trembucker in the neck and a Seymour
The basic design elements of this guitar are: large semi-
Duncan Custom 5 in the bridge. The bridge saddles are replaced with Ghost piezo units. Both magnetic and piezo pickups are routed through a Ghost active preamp which allows either stereo or mono mixing. Controls consist of magnetic volume and tone, piezo volume with a push/pull switch for dark or bright tone options, a three way switch to select between magnetic only/mixed/piezo only. The six way rotary magnetic selection switch is
configured for the following options: 1) neck standard humbucker; 2) neck and bridge standard humbuckers in parallel; 3) bridge standard humbucker; 4) neck split; 5) bridge split; and 6) neck and bridge in series out of phase. The combination provides a great deal of variety.
The guitar sounds great in all combinations. The two most stiking aspects of the sound are, first, it is quite loud compared to the single coil guitars I normally build and play (I have set the piezo gain to match humbucker output level). It can sure drive an amp, but turn down the gain or back of on the volume pot and it cleans up nicely. Secondly, this guitar sustains like crazy; hit a note and it is there until you are tired of holding the string to the fret.
All in all I am very pleased with how this guitar turned out. I plan to use the basic design for future models.