Builds - #3 Squier VM Jaguar

This is where it all got serious. I bought a Strat body, complete with P90 pickups, but the body was some weird scale thing, and disgusting green. After trying a standard 'Strat' neck it was found that intonation just wasn't happening at around 15mm short.

I bought a Jaguar neck thinking it was a short scale - no such luck! Ultimately after much spending and importing at crucifying import rates I completed a full Jaguar. 

So in all, approx £400 vs £320 at the time. What did I gain? Well... first off the Squier VM shielding/wiring is just pants. This is fully copper shielded in the style of the brass in the vintage Fenders and rewired with cloth wire which admittedly is more cosmetic. Its also got true Fender pickups.

The final result? Well its second only as a player to the Hondo!

Builds - #2 The Partscaster era

In my search for something more traditional sounding I decided a Strat style guitar would complement the rock animal the Hondo Les Paul had turned into. In retrospect this one would have been cheaper to buy off the shelf - *but* - its worth the effort for both the realisation that a USA Strat is different to a Mex Strat, which in turn is different to a Japanese Strat, or a Korean or Chinese Squier Strat.

One change I do make is to run the the bridge pickup through the lower tone control. The above uses 500K pots with this wiring variations and is very bright and Strat-y, the guitar below is voiced with 250K pots and the mid and neck shared the upper tone pot - its a richer sounding lump of ply for sure, also don't let the Jay Turser neck put you off- if you find one that is not warped they are superb!

The first problem once you get an Affinity Strat body and neck is the body width. At 40mm or less you are stuck with narrow width string spacing (not necessarily a bad thing, Mexican Strats can have the same spacing), but the problem is the block depth. The tremolo block is the metal lump that rocks inside the guitar where the springs attach and have the strings inserted.  On the cheaper trem units these are made from some kind of metal that doesn’t really have any major sonic qualities. While a certain amount of cork sniffing snobbery is involved, your block metal to a point will affect your sound slightly, just as your strings do, just as the wood density of the body will. You can get blocks made, and I’d recommend http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/kevinh3324 if you do but you have to decide if its worth it.

This is my last partscaster, a Squier SE, bit with alnico V pickups, the wiring as above (250K pots, bridge/mid shared tone pot). It has a Mexican trem with a custom short block. It sounds and plays surprising well.

Builds - #1 The Hondo Les Paul

I picked this up as from a friend of a friend for £40, it came in the usual condition, rusty strings (although obviously not all six!), a battered black Les Paul shaped guitar with a rusted Tune’O’Matic style bridge, chewed adjustment screws, and tuners that barely held onto the the headstock, let alone tune.

Of course at the time it worked fine for what I needed but as I progressed from simple power chords I started to find it a bit lacking. The tone was always a bit dark, so the pickups were first to go, there a lot of talk about Hondo’s having Dimarzio’s, no such luck here, these were a single coil in a humbucker shell (apparently some people find these valuable and collectable - I binned them as that was all they deserved)!!! I’d always liked the look of Zebra’s so in went a set of Wilkinsons which in retrospect are a touch too hot. The rusted Tune’O’Matic was ejected for a roller bridge which also brightened up the sound. 

It stayed like this for a few years before I desired something a little more flexible, so in went an Axetec ‘Mr Page’ kit (still available here http://www.axetec.co.uk/guitar_parts_uk_028.htm) to give coil taps, phase and parallel/series switching. Thats when it really started to notice the fret-wear and had to move on to the first Partscaster.

Making the switch from bass to 6 string guitar

So how did i start on six string guitars?

My father has amongst a few others, a Hofner Galaxie (like this one here), red, covered in switches, and despite one pickup thats had winding issues its still in fantastic shape aside from being played out on the neck, so much so he won't play it unless begged. Suffice to say with its rhythm and lead switch, individual pickup switches and tone control, and a single master volume its capable of moody dark Cure-like tones all the way to trebly Surf. It doesn't hurt that it plays like butter either. 

Playing bass is fun, its my key instrument and influences my tastes in music today, but as a solo affair, its a touch dull. So I decided i needed to at least be passable on electric guitar.

Even 25 years ago, they were out of my price range, so I went for a Hondo Les Paul copy that ironically now seems to collect many times the amount I paid for it - at least if i'd left it original but thats for another post. That guitar too played well, but was lacking sonically and also has started to show signs of fret-wear. 

I thought again of the Hofner Galaxie now I earnt a bit of money  - then I saw the price had gone up faster than my wages! Chris Rea, The Raveonettes etc seem to have catapulted it into the cool class (along with WEM it seems), and quite frankly the re-issued Galaxie HCT just misses the point that it would take a lot of work to reinstate the features that make the original Galaxie so special.

This left me looking for a ‘nearest alternative’. Whilst the Galaxie is in many ways a kind of ‘superstrat’ its actually really much closer in soul to the Fender Jazzmaster. Theres a huge amount of love for the offset Fenders and prices match. So I went on a partscaster binge which will be covered in other posts!

In the end, through much misadventure and learning from Dave's World of Fun Stuff - YouTube I ended up with a weird scale surf green Strat style body that wouldn’t take any neck i tried, which was a shame as it sounded interesting with Wilkinson P90’s. As a last stab, I tried a Squire Jaguar neck I scored cheaply which didn’t fit either!!

To my luck this neck was from one of the real star guitars of late, the Squire Vintage Modified Jaguar, noting its pedigree from the Jazzmaster and its scale length closer matching my familiarity with Gibson style guitars - so I gave it a shot and imported a body from California, paid the staggering pile of import fees (on a second hand body!!! HMRC do like to rob me…) and started on building the Jaguar, concluding my guitar assembling chapter