Breaking news! IC on Spotify—for some reason!
This is the second installment in a series of as many parts as it takes. I’m writing about building a guitar—a guitar that a purchaser of my album on vinyl will win. Here’s the first installment. Here’s where you can preorder the album for a chance to win!
When I started playing around with ways to put the lion-lady-colllage-image on the guitar, a plan took shape. I initially imagined I would have a single image of the lion-lady under the strings between the neck and the bridge, but when I started to print scans of the collage, things changed. I had a high-res scan, and I thought I would print it on some heavy paper—maybe even over at the copy shop—and that would be the version on the guitar. I started messing around with my home printer just to experiment. As soon as I matched up a standard scan with a mirror image, I was sold.
Seeing the way the mirror images worked together, I decided to skip the Bibsby-style trem, which would have covered the leftmost lion-lady. A fixed bridge leaves room for two lion-ladies.
With this layout, the bridge will sit in the mountains between the lionesses. I liked this arrangement so much, that my home-printed images, which were supposed to be just experiments, became the thing. These home-printed pages, are now affixed to the body of the guitar.
Speaking of the body of the guitar (← expert segue), I went with a telecaster shape primarily because they are readily available pre-routed. Plus, they’re flat (in contrast to the countered body of other common Fender shapes), making it easier to attach the image, and tele bodies have fair bit of unobstructed surface area out past the bridge (if you don’t add a Bigsby).
I finished the neck with some raw linseed oil, pictured above, but that was just the beginning of neck finishing saga; more on that later! (You can’t wait!) I used copper tape (also pictured above) to create a faraday box around the single bridge pickup, which is supposed to reduce hum.
I confessed previously to being in love with Fender aesthetics. One of the exceptions to that infatuation is the traditional telecaster headstock shape. It just doesn’t do it for me, so I went with a strat-style shape, pictured below.
I bought the neck and body pre-done. The body was routed and sanded. The neck came with frets, nut, and tuning peg holes drilled. This makes the whole thing much easier, and lets me focus on the aspects of this process I enjoy as opposed to the math-stuff of getting the scale length exactly right and all the frets level.
That’s it for now. I’ll share more about the process of building the guitar in some future posts. If you can’t get enough, subscribe to get access to the Collage of the Day Program, which delivers an animal-headed pin-up model to your email inbox at 5:30 AM EST every week day!