Friday, May 30, 2008

New Guitar with hand carved rosewood neck




I did a custom neck for a customer who wanted a VERY wide profile neck. He's got big hands and needed something in a category that's only offered by manufacturer custom shops at very high dollar amounts. The neck would fall into the category of an acoustic guitar neck profile, so you can imagine how hard it would be to special order. I sourced out the body from a great little company in New Jersey called Musikraft. They build their parts there on site. I chose a '65 Strat body design built from one piece of very light swamp ash and built the neck to fit the body. The body was finished in a very thin amber tinted finish. All of the hardware I hand picked and installed. The neck I carved from a chunk of East Indian Rosewood to the customer's specifications. The pickups are Seymour Duncan Alnico 2 Pro for the neck and middle position and the bridge pickup was a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates. It was wired up like a standard strat except the bridge pickup had a coil tap option at the middle position tone pot. With the all rosewood neck the pickups sounded warm and had just the right combination of brilliance to them for what the customer requested. It was a really fun project to do.