hello everyone,
my name is Adam and a couple of years back I built (or re-assembled) a frankenstein-esque guitar made up of a Washburn (forgot what model) electric guitar body and a Yamaha (forgetting again) fretless bass neck. Currently, I have two bass strings and 4 guitar strings on it. At the time I was really interested in heterodyning drones while bending the pitch simultaneously, so luckily the parts were given to me for free (or next to nothing) for the project. i assembled it and once i plugged it in and discovered that it sounded like shit, i brought it down to my local guitar wanking, Yngwie Malmstein-blaring guitar store (it's all i had at the time). They gave me a hairy eyeball glare and said, "what are you thinking?" and being especially naive at the time, this discouraged me.
so now that i've discovered the electrical forum, and see people discussing alternate tunings as well as equipment, i've decided to unearth this guitar and try to revitalize it. What I am looking for in terms of suggestions:

1) this thing needs new pickups. i am looking to drop a couple new pickups into it. i really like the bright, metallic sound of single-coil pickups but i don't want to lose the low end on the bass strings. It currently has 2 single-coil pickups and one humbucker with a 5-position toggle switch (not sure if that is proper terminology). I would like a tone that will have brassy Mid's, and High's that will shred ear drums but Low's on the bass strings that the listener will feel in their chest. suggestions for types of pickups or resources that will help me find the right pickups?

b) i am not sure if i will be able to get around the next problem, as it may be a matter of faulty design: the neck has quite a bit of give in the warping/bending department. right now it's held in place by 4 screws (your typical bolt-on neck) and i don't remember if i used a dollop of Elmer's wood glue, but i may have. are there any features i can install to improve this? can it be improved just by finding a good tuning, string tension, or balance?

3) I am totally open to suggestions on any ideas that people have in regards to: string gauge, potato chip flavors, tuning, action, anything else people have discovered from similar experiments. also, if anyone knows of people who have attempted this before, please tell me more about them or give me a link to information about their research/sound work.

4) would I be better off playing through a bass amp or guitar amp? I don't need to get too specific with amps because then this discussion would probably never end, but again i am open to suggestions.

5) were those ponytails at the guitar store right in disgracing me? should i go sit in the corner for what i've done to this guitar? i won't because i'm determined to make this thing work and sound great, but if you feel otherwise please present yourself.

If anyone would like to see pictures of this beast, I'd be happy to post them. It's got a crazy paint job (i think at the time i assembled it, i put more time into the paint than the design and functionality). if a picture of it will help people diagnose it, i can make it happen (i just need to know how i can get them online). thanks in advance for any assistance.

cheers,
adam

(1) Honestly, I'd cut custom pickups (one specifically for the bass strings and once for the guitar strings) but again this is a hard determination becasue i dont know what youre going for, really. you might like the sould of a bass through a guitar pickup and vice versa.

(2) put a different neck on it. thats about it. its most likely warping because it wasnt made to have 4 guitar strings and 2 bass strings. if you keep your tunning lower you'll ahve less tension on the neck (obviously) which will supposedly keep it in tune a little better. unless its completely goatfucked in the intonation department.

(3) I would suggest (if you havent already) read up on guitar design in general. the basics will help you to draw conclusions and to know the answers to your ideas before you go on huge money binges trying to fight physics.

(4) again depends on what youre going for. i would route it to both.

(5) lastly, ponytail guys are NEVER right. Do wahtever you want. unless, you know, people start dying. then I'd say back off a little.

I'd like to see some pictures, it sounds like a really cool idea.
PM me.

Chris

get a pickup from a bass guitar, a massive humbucker (like my old Kramer had), and wire it up to be switchable humbucking or single-coil. put it in the mid position. get the same style pickup (switchable humbucker/sing-coil), but from/for an electric guitar. put it in the neck position. don't put anything in the bridge position. wire it up with each pickup having its own volume control, and put two output jacks, a separate one for each pickup. run them into separate amps (a 1x15 combo for the bass humbucker in mid position and a half-stack or twin-style amp for the guitar pickup). or, with same instrument setup, but if you wanna go for a single-amp config, use an ABY pedal and plug the two pickup outputs into A and B, and run the "input" connection to a ballsy head, plugged into a cab like an 8x10 or 4x10+tweeter.

as far as the neck-bowing problem, i'd just try tuning it to a different tension than you have been. lower, higher, whatever it takes to get it in a range where you can adjust the truss rod to get the neck curvature and string tension to a point where it's a useful instrument. that won't cost you a penny. it would seem to make sense to try and do that first, before investing any money in pickups for an instrument that may never be particularly playable in the first place.

sounds like a fun project.

the humbucker can only fit in the bridge position, would i get decent results if i put the new single-coil in the mid position and dropped the new humbucker in the bridge? or should i avoid the bridge position altogether and cut the mid position bigger to accomadate a humbucker? how do these positions differ in sound? it seems as though when you pluck the string closer to the bridge you get a brighter sound, is this analogous with pickups? thanks!

-adam

morutzk wrote:the humbucker can only fit in the bridge position, would i get decent results if i put the new single-coil in the mid position and dropped the new humbucker in the bridge? or should i avoid the bridge position altogether and cut the mid position bigger to accomadate a humbucker? how do these positions differ in sound? it seems as though when you pluck the string closer to the bridge you get a brighter sound, is this analogous with pickups? thanks!

-adam

i hafta start with a caveat, that being the following: don't consider anything i've said here or am about to say here to be "research". there's probably books written by luthiers, and websites with guys who make guitars for a living who know this shit a *zillion* times better than me.

i have a strat copy guitar (Cort) with a bass humbucker in the mid position. i like it there. i'd say to put it in the neck position, but i think the neck pickup is the best location, so i would reserve that for a nice pickup for the guitar aspect, and forsake the bass aspect slightly in its favor. from all i know, the closer you get to the bridge, be it picking or pickup-ing, you lose the low end. this makes sense, as the lowest frequencies you get out of a string are not really occurring at the very ends, their action is more in the middle or nearer there anyways. the only string movement that's gonna be appreciably picked up at the very ends of the string are the higher frequencies, which could have a wavelength so short that they go through multiple cycles between the bridge and the bridge-position pickup. for an open string, for example, the biggest excursion of the string is gonna happen right in the middle of it, right? double check that, cause i'm not really super-informed about the physics of strings. but one thing i know for sure is that the string isn't moving at the very ends of it, since they're locked into position.

long story long, you should get more low end information out of the mid-position pickup than the bridge, and more still out of the neck position. that's why in my frankenstein guitar, the bass humbucker went in the mid position rather than the bridge. and the neck, again i believe the neck pickup to be the most valuable location, i left as the normal, stock single-coil. the routing of the body to accommodate the giant bass humbucker was done with a dremel tool. the same goes for the pickguard.

please take everything i've said here with a grain of salt, and do some actual research re: the physics of strings, the location of pickups, whatnot. while i don't regret having made those changes to my $30 strat copy, i don't like the thought of you doing relatively irreversible body work on your instrument based on what i said, y'know? one thing i have no problem stating with certainty is that i am massively, massively in love with a guitar i acquired earlier this year, that has three pickups, all of which are switchable single-coil or humbucking, and the mid and bridge have polarity reverse switches. this guitar has the widest range of sounds i've ever heard from a guitar before. the ability to flip switches and completely change the tone of the instrument is mind-blowingly cool to me. for example, i usually play only the neck position pickup, in single-coil mode. i've found on every electric guitar i've owned, that has always ended up being the sound i liked best. but with the switchable s-c/humb pickups, and the phase reverse, i've found other very different, very cool sounds that are useful not as a main tone, but as great B or C sounds, to be used more sparingly and to a greater impact. one i really like is the neck pickup turned off, the mid position as a single coil, the bridge position as a humbucker, with the polarity reversed on one of the two. it sounds very distant and thin, it actually sounds "old" to me, if that makes any sense.

this is something i will recommend without hesitation: use pickups that are switchable with regard to single-coilness or humbucking, and put in polarity reverse switches too, where you can. you're making a frankenstein instrument, right? the more options, the better. i tend to dislike the sound of humbuckers as opposed to single coil pickups. in general. but if i'm somewhere that's a particularly noisy environment, it's nice to have the option of flicking a switch and slightly worsening my tone, but taking out the noise. i have no hesitation in recommending leaving your options open.

but yeah, don't dremel the body unless you're fully aware of how that's sorta irreversible, and you're all "ah, what the hell" about it. and then, y'know, go nuts.

speaking of nuts, what kind of nut and bridge do you have on it? it seems like it'd be a bit of a challenge to get a stock nut to want to take bass strings. did you have to file it or sand it or cut it or whatever, to make it big enough so the bass strings are well-seated in it? and how about the bridge? are you able to set the intonation properly?