Hi, I'm Frank Pope with FBI Guitars, and I'm
here on behalf of Expert Village to talk to
you guys about how to build your own guitar.
One thing that you need to decide early on,
is whether you want to build a guitar that
has a tremolo system in it for the bridge,
or whether you want to go with one that has
a fixed bridge. I'll explain the differences
to you, as far as what the guitar is going
to be able to do, and then tell you some of
the construction techniques that are going
to differ between these two guitars. The guitar
that I'm holding right now is what is commonly
referred to as a tremolo guitar. That means
that the bridge, the whole assembly, through
the use of a little metal arm, can tilt to
lower, not only the tension of the strings,
but the tuning as well. This is commonly the
sort of thing you would hear in the early
playings of Eddie Van Halen, and other players,
when you hear big dive-bombs on the guitar,
that's what you'll hear. If you look a the
back of this guitar, you'll see that when
you build a tremolo guitar, not only do you
have to route through the body to put the
block in, but that you'll have to route some
of the back as well to be able to put the
springs and the control claw that holds the
springs, into the back of the guitar. So there's
going to be a limit at some point as to how
thin you can build a guitar, before the pickup
spaces actually emerge through the back of
the guitar into the tremolo space. So that's
something that you'll have to keep in mind.
If you'd like to have a guitar that's as thin
as possible, you can actually build one with
a set bridge, a hard tail as it's called,
and I'm going to show you that one in just
a minute. This is the other type of guitar,
commonly referred to as a hard tail. If you
look at this bridge, it is secured to the
guitar with two posts, which adjust the height
of this particular bridge. When you look at
the back of this guitar, you can see that
there is no routing coming through. There
is no routing in the back. Now the beauty
of a hard tail bridge, although it will not
let you do the divebombs, is that because
these posts are set directly into the wood,
the sustain on this guitar will usually be
better than the sustain on a tremolo guitar.
If you are simply after tone, and you don't
need a divebomb effect, it's a lot simpler
to build one like this, and you may want to
consider this one of the first ones that you
build.