Customising an acoustic guitar

We've all done it, or know someone who has done it.
At the very least we've all played a guitar that's been customized.
Most common customization on an electric guitar is the pick ups or the bridge.
Then there's the finish, the scratchplate, the nut, machine heads, you can go on and on with an electric, to the point where you have the old " this is my great granfathers original axe, my granfather replaced the handle and my father replaced the head" style of thing.
But what about acoustic guitars?
There's not really a lot you can do with an acoustic. There's no pick ups to replace, the bridge is bolted and glued onto the body, if you mess with the finish you can mess with the tone.

I've been sort of customizing my acoustic over the years without realising, and indeed without intending to.

I have a Crafter FSG 250E.

Nice little guitar and suitable for the purpose. I've had it 11 years now and have been happy with it all this time.
Not long after I got it I made the first change. Purely for aesthetic reasons I replaced the machine heads. The stock Crafter machine heads were fine, kept tune and were relativley stable, but they were chrome, I wanted gold. So I bought a set of gold grovers and fitted them, like I say it was purely aesthetic reasons.

 

I never intended to make any other changes, but circumstances sometimes take over. I mainly used the guitar for home use and home recording. Then I started going to various open mic nights with the guys I was in a band with.

This particular model came fitted with a passive pick up. This was fine in itself, but meant if I wanted to amplify the guitar it would have to through an amp. At most of the open mics I went to, although amps were provided and I could take my own if neccesary, I thought it would be better if I could just plug into the PA directly, meaning all I had to take with me would be the guitar. So a few years ago I looked for an active pick up. I trawled guitar forums to find the best one......turns out it was about £300!!, so I read up as much as I could to find a more reasonable priced one, I'm not tight, just skint, but I wasn't going to buy the cheapest one I could find, just the most expensive I could afford.

As most people are aware it's not the price that matters at the end of the day, it's all about the actual quality. Now I'm not saying a £300 Fishman won't be good, but by the same token a £10 chinese piezo might not be crap.

The eventual pick up I bought cost about £30, I got it on eBay. It's RRP was £60, but I was patient enough to trawl ebay until I found what I wanted at the price I wanted. That's the beauty of eBay, if there's something you want, as long as you're patient, you don't have to pay full price for it.

So after a while I managed to get it. Cos it was active, and had a battery compartment as well as more than just volume and tone, it was a bit bigger than the original. So I had to enlarge the hole where the control unit fitted. Not a major job and didn't cause and damage to the guitar or affect the overall tone.

The operation was a roaring success.

( there should be a photo here, but I've tried and tried but can't get any of the photos to load, sorry )

So anyway that was that.

 

Then one day I was bored and trawling through eBay...............

I was actually looking for a soundhole cover when I came across an "O" port.

What was this strange device? I googled it, read the company blurb ( obviously they said is was the greatest thing since sliced bread, so I read through a few guitar forums. To be honest they didn't help one little bit. There was a definate 50/ 50 split between it being amzing to being a waste of money. So all that was left for me to do was buy one and decide for myself. After all it wasn't expensive.

A couple of days later it was delivered. I wanted to know what sort of real difference it made, so I recorded a short piece on the guitar, then fitted the "O" port and recorded the same piece.

When I played the two pieces back.....I couldn't tell a blind bit of difference!

I've sort of convinced myself that the mid range tones are a bit better, but to be honest I'm not entirely convinced. In fairness it doesn't detract anything either, so it's a lesson learned.

 

 

The story doesn't end there either.

 

Away back in the 80's there was a device made by a company called Asprii, it was a mechanical device for producing acoustic reverb. I was intrigued, but at £80 a go it was beyond my reach ( my weekly wage at the time was £90, the Asprii's were so hard to find as well).

I always had Asprii on my saved search list on good old eBay and sure enough it popped up one day. Brand new, loads of them, around £50 each ( compared with £80 25 years ago!!)

But I still didn't pay full price, got a used one for £16!

Sure enough it's as easy to fit as the manufacturers say, only takes seconds.

And with this you can hear the difference immediatley. Has an excellent full reverb tone. Wish I had got one away back in the eighties. I would recommend them, the only downside is the reverb isn't noticable in a gigging situation, so it's really for using at home, or if you have a microphone in front of your guitar, but still a nice item to have.

 

 

 

So you can customise an acoustic guitar, even if you don't mean to.

 

 

The Guitar That Hated Me!

So it doesn't look that bad.
This guitar hated me.
I mentioned it in an earlier post, it's an Epiphone Les Paul. The photo's really don't do it justice, it was a beautiful looking guitar, the grain was a beautiful tiger stripe and I loved the look.
But playing it was like wrestling an alligator.

One of the very few guitars I never got on with, and I do mean few. This honestly was hard work. I bought it in 2000, it was made in 1998. I bought it purely on looks, I was in a shop my mate worked in and as I was leaving I saw it on a stand and bought it there and then, it was only £90!
Didn't try it out or anything, total impulse buy.
From day one it just never felt right. Even the way it hung on the strap didn't feel right. When I played it, it felt like it was constantly wriggling out of my grip.
I'm not superstitious or any of that crap, but looking back, this guitar didn't want me to play it. I couldn't get a decent tone out of it, everything sounded clunky. But because of the look, I persevered with it.
Now I'm not putting down Epiphones, this was an excellent guitar. Well made, excellent set up, I just couldn't get to grips with this one, I've played various other Epiphones since, and even own another Epiphone Les Paul, the only problem was this particular guitar.
I looked after it, I polished it regularly, put lemon oil on the fretboard everytime I changed strings. But it was destined not to be.
Eventually, in 2009 I sold it. For 9 years I persevered with it, but realised I wasn't gonna get anything out of it. So it went on Ebay. I'm just glad there were no kids to worry about :-)
I made a decent profit out of it, and used the money to buy my Gretsch.
Not long after I sold it I got an email from the buyer, he loved it, it was his perfect guitar. Which just shows the vagaries of guitar buying.

For the eagle eyed among you, it IS left handed. I'm naturally left handed, but can play guitar either right handed or left handed, I've played both ways at gigs, just to show off. Cos I'm like that.

Electraglide In Black........

I remember seeing this in a guitar magazine review in the mid eighties. I was intrigued by the design of the neck. It was quite unique. The fretboard was made of alluminum, and instead of frets, the fretboard was made in a stepped design, some describe it as a sawtooth effect. The guitar also boasted state of the art materials and electronics.
.....................so what went wrong....................
Well despite all the technology and innovation, the reviews reckoned it was just a rubbish guitar. Bland and unexciting, the controls were fiddly to opperate and the need for an external power source limited it's use..................all fur coat and no knickers.
The company folded a couple of years later, popular opinion has it they only made 1000 guitars.
Personally I've never seen one up close. The only guitarist I've ever seen playing it was Mick Jones of Big Audio Dynamite.
I'd still like to try one.

Here's the wikipedia entry for it

The Bond Electraglide was a carbon fiber electric guitar manufactured by Bond Guitars between 1984 and 1985. It resembled a matte-black, 3-pickup Gibson Melody Maker (although with the 1962 onwards double cut-away), with a unique stepped aluminum fingerboard (anodized black) instead of traditional frets. Pickup switching, volume and tone controls were completely digital, powered by a large internal motherboard.
The player selected pickups via five pushbuttons; volume, treble and bass were incremented numerically via digital rocker switches, confirmed by a three-colour LED readout.
The guitar required an external power supply pack and given the state of engineering at the time, was relatively bulky; it never really caught on in the marketplace and only about 1400 units were ever manufactured. ^[1]
British guitarist Mick Jones is known to have used a Bond Electraglide with his band Big Audio Dynamite in the mid 1980s. The Edge used his extensively on The Joshua Tree, including the solo on "One Tree Hill", as well as on "Exit," and "Mothers of the Disappeared".^[2] Will Sergeant, John Turnbull, and Dave Stewart were also Electraglide users.
Bond Guitars was set up by Andrew Bond (d. 1999) in Muir of Ord, Scotland, in 1984. The company ceased trading in 1986.