Les Paul is known to newbie guitarists as merely the name of the now classic model of electric guitar built by Gibson. For everyone else, he is regarded as one of the most important figures in not only the history of the electric guitar, but in the evolution of recorded music and music technology. He is single-handedly responsible for the modern solid body electric guitar design, multi-track recording & overdubbing, and many staple recording effects like tape-delay and phasing.

Evidently, Les had his own very specific ideas of what he wanted to accomplish musically, and wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty and invent whatever equipment he felt he needed.

It was this realization, combined with some old-fashioned American balls, that led me to decide that I could build the best Stratocaster-style electric guitar possible my own damn self. I mean, really, it’s the 2000s… if I can’t wrap my head around a technology developed almost 100 years ago, then I don’t deserve to use a cell phone.it’s the 2000s… if I can’t wrap my head around a technology developed almost 100 years ago, then I don’t deserve to use a cell phone.

So, a little over 2 years ago, I began to envision exactly what my dream Strat would be, and began collecting the knowledge, money, and parts I would need to succeed. And, about 6 months later, I had built the best Strat I ever played, all for a little under $800. It went so well, in fact, that I thought I might share with HSU community the process I went through.

How Big Are Your Balls

Before I even thought of the color this guitar would be (purple), the first item on the agenda was one question: How crazy do I want to get? I knew up front that there would be some very challenging limitations. Do I want to go so far as to slice up the wood myself, from scratch? How about finishes? What about painting? Winding my own pickups?

I quickly knew that the best route would be to not reinvent the wheel. Why take on the monumental task of carving and shaping wood when all I want is a Strat body, which is easy to find? Why wind my own pickups when there are models on the market that I already love? Bottom line is, decide exactly what it is you want, and if it’s available already, let that be the end of it. If you have a desire for your dream Strat that no one has tackled yet, well, then it’s up to you (ie, I want a guitar body made of guano)… but wherever possible, piggy back on the brilliant work of others.

So the scope of this endeavor would simply be to acquire parts and assemble them. Cool.

So Whaddya Want?

Given that I wasn’t gonna do anything too technically demanding, the next question was “What the hell do I want?”. For me, the answer was a guitar that embodied the qualities of my 3 favorite guitar players, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and Joe Satriani, as well as the preferences and habits of my own that I’ve developed over the years.

Ultimately, that meant a Fender Strat with a handful of visual and functional modifications, including a few features just to get things pimpin’ (after all, if you’re gonna bother building a guitar, why not do some crazy shit to freak people out?). Let’s run through everything starting with my own personal preferences in a guitar…

The Kristian H Stuff

First and foremost, I love guitars that have big ass baseball-bat-sized necks. I learned to play on guitars with thinner necks, namely Ibanez guitars, and while that lends ease to more technically demanding stuff, the fact is that I typically don’t play things that are “technically demanding” in the obvious sense, ie, really fast, a whole lot. When it comes to digging in and playing more blues-driven stuff, heavy on the bends and rhythmic improv, something about the thick necks seems more comfortable for me, especially for thumb-over-the-6th-string Hendrix-y chords (of which I am quite the fan).

I also never, ever, ever, use tone knobs. I just don’t. No reason. Just never felt a need to. I dial in the tone I dig on the amp and pedals I have, end of story. So no need for tone knobs here.

Another important issue for me was intonation. I have had a couple guitars with Floyd Rose-style locking bridges, which, although effective, are a HUGE pain in the ass. And, if you ever break a string playing live, well, you’re screwed. I had been playing a Jeff Beck strat for a while, which included locking tuners as a feature. They worked great, could withstand some whammy bar abuse, and weren’t adversely effected by strings breaking. So my little project axe would definitely have some locking tuners.

Speaking of whammy bar abuse, the bridge I knew I needed was the Fender American Tremolo. Fender strats typically have either that bridge, or more often, the Vintage bridge. Both are cool, but the Vintage Bridge is a little stiffer, which I don’t like. The American Trem rests on two large screws, as oppose to the vinatge bridge’s 6 screws, and is much smoother to use. So, American Trem was the move for me.

Lastly, I love experimental guitar players. Anyone who does weird ass shit, no matter if it turns out great or ends up sounding horrible, gets an A in my book. Anyone who does weird ass shit, no matter if it turns out great or ends up sounding horrible, gets an A in my book. One dude I toss in this category of players is Tom Morello, and one of my favorite moves he’s got is the kill switch. Simply put, it’s a switch that, in position 1, lets the signal of the guitar travel to the amp, and in position 2, mutes everything by cutting the signal off. He uses it for turntable style rhythmic stuff (it works just like the fader on a set of two turntables). Gotta fit one of these switches in the guitar…

The Hendrix Stuff

Okay, so, admittedly, most of this creation takes some cues from what Jimi dug in his strats. The first thing was the neck pickup sound. Jimi’s rhythm playing was never really “clean”, but it wasn’t exactly “dirty” either. The sound wasn’t brittle and harsh, it was always very rich and interesting, and had lots of personality. Of course, this is most attributable to Jimi’s touch (can’t buy that), the pickup itself, as well as the amps he played through. Since Jimi was really kicking it in 1969/1970, I grabbed a Fender Custom ‘69 pickup for the neck position. These are wound by Abigail Ybarra, who evidently had made pickups for Jimi herself. Sold.

Also, Jimi regularly used the “out-of-phase” position on his strats. In his day, the pickup selectors on strats had three positions, one for each pickup. Jimi found that if you wedged the selector in between the neck and middle positions, he’d get sound going through both pickups, and those two pickups were wired out of phase with one another, which created a tinny, thin, narrow sound. I dug that a bunch, so I made sure to get a single coil pickup for the middle position that I could get that sound with (incidentally, I rarely use the middle pickup, so I didn’t care what model it was, I just bought one on eBay).

On top of that, Jimi was seen playing the CBS headstock-style strats quite a bit (these were the guitars with the kind of over sized, exaggerated head shape). Those looked really friggin cool, so I had to get a neck with that shape to it.

The Satriani Stuff

As it turns out, I always felt Joe’s sound to be very, very strat-ish, even though he plays his own model of Ibanez, the Ibanez JS. It’s no surprise that Joe’s biggest influence was also Jimi, so naturally he’s gonna end up sounding that way no matter what he plays. The one big thing, though, was that Joe uses much more higher gain sounds than Jimi ever did. Jimi never got in to an area you might call metal, but Joe definitely has his heavy super high gain lead and rhtyhm sounds. That being the case, I decided the thing to take from Joe’s guitars was a bridge position humbucker. Although the newest models use a newer redesigned pickup, the sound I was used to hearing out of Joe’s Ibanez was the DiMarzio Fred pickup.

One interesting thing I found in researching for this project was that, typically, different volume pots (potentiometers, or, the knobs) are used for humbucker pickups than for single-coil pickups. Basically, pots with a 500k resistance make humbuckers sound much louder (as they should), without sounding too shrill. These are what are typically used in Gibson guitars. However, 250k resistance pots are what help make single-coil pickups sound warm and vintage-y, which is why they are found most often in strats.

Since I’ve already decided there wouldn’t be any tone knobs, I figured, why not have one volume knob (pot) for each pickup? That way, I can use 250k pots on the single coil pickups, and a 500k pot on the humbucker. Awesome.

And one more thing, on the Ibanez JS, the humbucker can be coil-tapped, meaning that at a pull of the (500k) volume knob, the coils were split and you were in single-coil mode. Definitely had to rock that.

The Prince Stuff

Again, it shouldn’t be a news flash that Prince’s biggest influence as a guitarist was Jimi Hendrix (notice a pattern here?). What separated Prince as a guitarist was mostly in approach. Direct-in dry clean funk sounds, brilliant arrangement and taste, and over-the-top octave fuzz distortion sounds was where it was at. So how do I incorporate that in the instrument itself?

By building an octave fuzz pedal in to the guitar.

This was certainly the most ambitious feature of the guitar, as it would require some intense fucking with (technical term). But I had a Danelectro French Toast, which was a very very small pedal, that had a pretty cool fuzz sound, so I thought to myself, “There’s gotta be a way to get that in there”.

And finally, if Prince is gonna have any bearing on the guitar, it better look fuckin cool. So, it will be purple and all of the hardware/metal will be gold. So it shall be written, so it shall be done.

Hunting For The Goods

With a solid vision in place, and a pretty specific list of goods, the next phase was to simply acquire the parts themselves. I did this entirely through the internet, although, certainly, you could venture outside (gasp) and hit some music shops and Radio Shacks for the goods (most of the goods, anyway). I had the patience (and lack of cash flow) to grab things bit by bit as I found them on eBay, craigslist, etc. Some items I simply waited to find, others I had to order specifically… let’s run through all the parts and where I got them.

The neck was the most specific, and expensive, item I had to get. Rather than wait for the unlikely chance I’d find a large-sized Fender neck with an oversized headstock on a site like eBay, I decided to order one from Warmoth.com. Warmoth is a fantastic custom guitar and bass site where you can order, anything you could imagine to build an instrument. They offer tons of different choices for woods, shapes, finishes, and other customizations (they even helped a friend of mine, who is soon to be mentioned by name in this article, build an all ebony bass… heavy). For about $250, I ordered a birdseye maple fender neck from them (the C-shape, the largest neck they make), with an ebony fretboard, and an oversized headstock. It also had gold frets (that was an option!), a graphite nut (which is black, to fit my color motif and invisibly blend in to the ebony fretboard), and had holes pre-drilled for the Sperzel Tuners I knew I’d buy. I chose ebony because I love dark wood fretboards, and birdseye maple because it was pretty. Sorry, it really was that simple. I chose ebony because I love dark wood fretboards, and birdseye maple because it was pretty. Sorry, it really was that simple.

The body was the next big acquisition. The body had 4 requirements: It had to have the correct cut to match the width of the heel of the neck I already ordered, it had to have the two large screw holes drilled for the American Bridge (not the 6-screw Vintage Bridge), it had to have a cavity large enough for my octave pedal and kill switch, and it had to be purple. Although it sounds ridiculous, it turns that such a body was available on eBay. Yup, in purple (I guess it’s technically something called Midnight Wine… whatever, it’s fucking purple). That set me back about $200. It arrived in great condition, ready to go.

For all the pickups, eBay was the spot once again. The Custom ‘69 and the DiMarzio Fred were both easy to find for about $50 each. The middle single coil I got was listed as a ‘59 Reissue… honestly, I’m not sure if that was ever made, but, like I said, I did’t care what the middle pickup was, since it’s only real use would be to get that out-of-phase sound. That thing ended up being $15.

The pickguard (as well as the guard for the back of the guitar, where the trem springs are) was also ordered from Warmoth.com. They accepted custom tracings that they would then make to order, so I just hit Guitar Center, bought a standard strat pickguard, traced it, and then modified the tracing as necessary for the humbucker pickup and the additional switches for the octave fuzz pedal and the kill switch.

I ordered (gold) Sperzel Locking Tuners from Musician’s Friend for about $70, and grabbed the American Fender Bridge on eBay for about $40.

Everything else past this was tiny and cheap. Most of the remaining stuff came from a site called StewMac.com, although occasionally I’d hit eBay and craigslist if I found better prices. They sell just about everything you could need for guitars… parts, tools, supplies, you name it. So the only stuff left to buy was various screws (4 large screws for attaching the neck to the body, 6 screws to secure the pickups to the pickguard, 12 screws to attach the pickguard to the body, 2 screws for the strap buttons, etc), a 5-way pickup selector switch, 3 potentiometers (one that had push-pull functionality for the humbucker coil tap), the neck plate, gold pickup covers, a gold frame for the humbucker, gold knobs for the potentiometers, a gold gibson-style pickup selector (which would become the kill switch), the input for the cable, and the gold plate that held the input in place. Whew.

Becoming An Electrician (Or Finding Someone Who Owns A Soldering Iron)

It’s more like the latter: I went and grabbed someone I knew who could make it happen on the electronics tip. That someone was a man known only as “Billdo”. I’ll get him to write a little something to talk about the process he went through. It would have been simple if it weren’t for the fact that I wanted to put this octave fuzz pedal in the guitar. That made it unecessarily tough on poor Billdo. But he came through! I’ll update here with a link when he finds a minute to do some explainin’…

Put It Together And What Do You Get?

A friggin’ dope guitar is what you get. After acquiring the parts and having the electronics soldered together and connected to the pickguard, the assembly portion of the process was literally just a matter of turning screws. The neck fit snug on to the body without any trouble whatsoever. The tuners were a little bit of a tight fit, but with a little muscle and elbow grease they popped in just fine. And every other piece, the bridge, the springs, etc. was a no-brainer.

After the guitar was assembled, the set-up was surprisingly quick, so much so that I’m sure I just got lucky. The neck needed only a minor adjustment and setting the intonation on the bridge went quite quickly. A got that thing strung up with some 10s and plugged it in and BLAM: I built myself a guitar.

Got some ill ideas for a custom guitar of your own? Let us know in the comments section below…