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Just finished 2nd build

Howdy all, just thought I'd put pics of my 2nd build up. Its a 25" scale fretted. Bolted on maple neck with maple fret board, body is recycled pine (shipping crate from work), with 1/4" birch plywood top and back. The bridge is a 1/4" x 20 bolt with the head cut off, surrounded by a laser cut Canary wood retainer (just to add some color to all that maple and birch). It has a piezo hot glued inside the box under the bridge. To hold the strings in the tail are small rivets on the top and bottom. The pot is 1M ohm.

For a quarter inch sound board it has surprisingly good acoustic sound. I have yet to plug it in, probably after I figure out which tuning to use.

(If you're wondering about my 1st build, well, it will probably never see the light of day.)

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Permalink Reply by Rand Moore on April 20, 2014 at 12:20am

Looks good. Here's a photo of the instrument TC is talking about...

Well, TC, how does she sound?

-Rand.

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Permalink Reply by TC DeVeau on April 20, 2014 at 6:04am

It sounds pretty good, not too loud though. Still need to adjust the nut and put a retainer near the bridge to get rid of some buzz.

(I realized that I forgot to post the pic here. oops)

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Permalink Reply by Rand Moore on April 20, 2014 at 7:56am

Hi TC,

The maple (hardwood) neck is a must for better volume, so you're good there. A thinner soundboard would help. I use 2mm plywood veneer for my sound boards and back boards with good results. Recently I have been experimenting with cookie tin lids for a resonator and these instruments have been quite loud, the loudest yet w/o going with a pickup and amp.

I see you have already made the "jump" to piezo pickups and amplifier. The piezo pickups tend to pick up a lot of "finger noise" when you fret the instrument, etc. So, it can be tricky to isolate the piezo with the right amount of hot glue/silicon seal/foam/wood/whatever to limit the sensitivity of the pickup to minimize the sensitivity without also muting the pickup, especially on the bass end. I continue to find piezo pups problematic at best. It may be that I need to better interface them to the guitar amp by first feeding the signal through a pre-amp to better match the impedance (Z) of the piezo (high Z) to the guitar amp (low Z). I don't have much budget to experiment with this the way I should. Likely, I just have a lousy guitar amp.

I can't tell too well from your photo how the strings "bend" over your nut. But I have had problems and just took a tie-wrap and put it around the strings to force them down against the headstock (just above the nut) and this has eliminated some buzzing problem. Also, I tend too use bolts for nuts as I find they are more "problem free" and I always use a fret 0 to make accurate fret positioning easier. With the "bolt-for-a-nut" approach, I sometimes have to use a round file to file a grove in the neck so the bolt will lie down lower, or shim the bolt to make it sit higher relative to fret 0, but I rarely have a buzzing problem with them. When I do, it's likely because the down angle on the neck is greater than 2 or 3 degrees and the result is that the strings, when vibrating, barely touch the neighboring frets near the nut, causing them to buzz. To fix this, I use a shim on the bridge to raise the play action a bit and that will eliminate the buzz. Hunting down and eliminating buzz can be frustrating, but usually it can be tracked down and solved, so just keep at it.

-Rand.