The Design

Design Thinking

Despite the fact that my first was one (so young and naive....), I am not in favour of building what are essentially copies. Building your own guitar is not, despite what common sense may dictate, necessarily a cheap alternative to buying a 'brand name' guitar, so if you want a 'name' guitar, then buy one rather than recreating one. Remember that there is a lot of snobbery in the guitar world, especially where names on headstocks are concerned. Building and playing your own guitar makes a statement about you, just as stringing a 'name' guitar around your neck does.

I like attention to detail in a design, and I like all aesthetic details (the way that the separate parts look) to reflect and interact with each other. Headstocks should look 'right' with the  body shape, and details such as scratchplates and control positioning are just as important as the overall body shape. 

When designing a body shape remember that a guitar usually needs to:

• Be balanced when played standing up;

• Sit on the knee when sitting down;

• Allow access to upper frets;

• Allow palm muting of strings;

• Allow hanging from a strap;

• Be tuned from a playing position;

• Have controls that do not interfere with playing.

What the shape actually looks like is secondary (witness Bo Diddley's square Gretsch, or 1980s bodiless Steinbergers) as long as it does most, if not all of the above.

Be prepared to experiment with ideas using sketches. If it helps, or if you are not confident with your skills, work over photocopied pictures of guitars so that you can modify designs to make them your own. Remember that little in guitar design is truly new. After producing initial conceptual and development sketches, detailed full size drawings should be produced, and photocopied full size for the manufacture of templates. These 'working" drawings are crucial to the success of any similar project as they allow you to think through and solve problems before they occur, as well as visualise the finished product. On the left are some of my development sketches for the sheoak guitar shown in the gallery pages. They show a sheet of concept sketches for the headstock, and another detailing two potential final solutions for discussion with the client.

The XII String

As the Explorer was largely a copy I decided that the twelve string would be an original idea, following the trend for ‘retro’ designs. Inspiration came initially from Schecter’s Hellcat, but the body shape was modified to include a shaped scratchplate with an integrated jack socket, and three single coil ‘lipstick tube’ pickups. The body was to be hollow so a suitable sound hole was devised to harmonise with the body and scratchplate shapes. The headstock was also designed to reflect the body shape without looking contemporary. Much design development work (fine tuning!) was undertaken at this stage in order to produce what I considered to be an optimum design, paying full attention to the smallest of design details.