creepingnet's Music Gear Setup

The inspiration for this guitar was Kurt Cobain's Univox Hi Fliers and Mosrite Gospel, and the Mosrite Ventures and Mosrite Mark V that Ricky Wilson was using in the B-52's early days (R.I.P. dude). I had a Kay KE-17 neck laying around, and no body for it, and I felt it would make a great neck for a Mosrite inspired guitar.

SPECS NECK: 2004 Kay KE-17 neck, Kluson Revolution Tuners, 25.5" Scale, 22 Vintage frets, skinny profile BODY: Pine multi-piece table bank sandwhich body inspired by the Mosrite Mark V and Ventures PICKUPS: First Act Humbuckers, an 8.4K in the neck, and a 16.8K Jammed right up against the bridge CONTROLS: 1 Volume, 1 Tone, 3-way pickup selector, and a tone switch for each pickup allowing for split/humbucker/parallel operation, giving a wide array of tones from thin and twangy to thick and grungy BRIDGE: Washburn Wonderbar/Shift 2001 vibrato unit compensated to act as a poor-man's trans-trem PICKGUARD: TAP Plastics ABS Haircell Plastic pickguard based on a Mosrite Mark V style guard FINISH: Bare Pine .), I've been making quite a few small tweaks/refinements as needed that would damage putting a permanent finish on it HARDWARE: Black CASE: None, yet, plan to build one STRINGS: currently using Dunlop .009-.042's as those were what I used to set it up, might move to Ernie Ball Paradigms to test next

I built this guitar on a whim. I wanted a body for that neck, so I went to Lowes for some unrelated things, and looked around the lumber section, and found a large chunk of pine sticks glued together that could be cut in half and made into a guitar body by sandwhiching the layers. I bought a pull-saw, and a coping saw - the whole mess cost me $15.00 total. Not bad. I've made other bodies out of pine before - but those were with power tools - this was in an apartment with HAND TOOLS - well, until the final shaping part and the final routing that was thicker than half the body thickness.

I came up with the shape by going through my giutar collection and matching lines of my other guitars up with photos of Ricky Wilson and Kurt Cobain's guitars I pulled up via google image search. I started off like Semie Moseley did for the original Ventures shape - tracing a Stratocaster backwards. Then refinements came by some free-hand alterations, adding in some Jaguar and Harmony H-802. The resulting shape was very much Mosrite-ish, but with some small differences.

The body contained some various experiments in construction. After the top half was cut out with the pull saw, it was glued and screwed to the back half using some coarse wood screws. Before doing that, I cut the neck slot using the coping saw.

When I was done, I did some of the initial pickup routing using a Chisel, but later went to using a router to refine everything. There were some mistakes on this body though, pickup routes were too wide because I had not decided weather I was going to use Univox style, Mosrite style, or some other pickups I had, I even toyed with using EMGs at one point ( an H and a 60 - both vintage 80's models). I finally decided to go with a pair of orphan First Act pickups I had laying around that never sounded that great in other guitars, but somehow wound up sounding PERFECT in this one. Possibly the biggest jack-up though was the neck slot, which has been under various tweaking from the start - but desipte, sustain and resonance on this guitar is crazy good. I've been filling it in, and reshaping with Basswood, and had to move the front shelf forward and cut the end of the rosewood board on the Kay neck flat to make sure it intonates properly - now this sucker is dead on and by god does it resonante now.

There are some key things in this guitar that makes it sound the way it does. The Pine body absorbs some of the lows and some of the highs, giving a balanced midrange effect - pair that with a big, monster pole equipped 16.8K Ceramic humbucker at the bridge, and it's like a super-high-gain mosrite kind of tone I'm getting out of it, even when full humbucker, it's still got that twang to it, just noiseless, and with a rididulously good amount of distortion - with a large amount of bite and a low end that never gets flappy or muddy, but is very thick.

The neck position is perfectly balanced, it compensates for it's very close position to the neck heel with less winds, smaller poles, and a lower ohms reading (8.4K, more in the traditional PAF vein). Split it does the whole Ricky Wilson/Ventures/Surf thing really well - in full humbucker it's like Insta-Bleach.

Overall though, it has kind of it's own unique voice, sort of like a shredder's surf dream, or a surfer's metal weapon. Which was the whole goal. so mission accomplished.

The last, and another interesting part of this things construction, was the use of a Washburn Wonderbar vibrato - a really weird old also-ran that competed with the Floyd Rose and Kahler vibratos in the 80's (originally called the Shift 2001 vibrato), and best noted for no need of routing to be useful.

But one neglected thing about this vibrato unit is it's ability to transpose chords around on at as many as 4 strings at a time, as a result of a set of "jaws" behind the tension rollers that change the rate of pitch drop each string recieves. So far I've gotten it close enough it's usable almost like a trans trem - which saves time for tuning down at concerts/gigs/etc. I'm working out a way to make all SIX work that well that way as the primary problem is the amount of pitch drop on the high E just can't get close enough - need something that matches up with a .009 gauge high E better in tension. Once I have that figured out - I might break my GAS for a Steinberger Trans Trem equipped axe of my own design.