more sketches

more sketches (and a few comments and links)

I don't like so much forcefully fancy guitars, mostly not the "metal" ones ridiculously trying to look fierce (and worse when they are handled by graybeard musicians). On the other hand, when 90% of nowadays guitars are just boring Strat/Tele/Les Paul clones, metal guitars are the most creative ones once you got rid of the superfluous... Some are just classics of elegance (I don't have to mention Gibson's Flying V or Explorer claimed by metalheads though they were designed in the 50s) like the Ibanez Iceman, the Dean Cadillac, the BC Rich Bich 10... And I enjoy crazy guitars designed for Japanese Visual Kei musicians such as the ones you can see on ESP Japanese site, who are reaching a true poetic baroque and fit to the genre...

Anyway lately I let myself sketch some fancy guitars just for the fun of it and I don't regret it since it provided some nice ideas - also because I tried to keep them ergonomic. There is something to do with the double low horn that allow a good stability when playing sitting combined with a long horn. Also I was trying a kind of lyre guitar and found that in guitar history some have been more interesting than what I had in mind - as you can see here (amongst the fancy guitars I also like the lyre style Danelectro Longhorn) ; I won't go very far with lyre guitars but it inspired the back horns and better, the ram-horn (should be made out of aluminium)...

and now, something completely different...

can't tell if this project is a real guitar for a Norwegian black metal band, an art work for avant-garde galery or something I should instal in my basement for private use...

more sketches

I've noticed that jazz guitarists using solid bodies are quite into experimentation and high-tech for their instruments - they will go for radical ergonomic design, carbon necks and bodies, headless, fretless, metal fingerboard, piezo pickups, MIDI, etc... on the other hand those who use hollow bodies are stuck with instruments that are supposed to have reached perfection 60 years ago... thought I'd put a little bit of work at rejuvenating the ancestor... plus some more variations on headless and minimal ergonomics.

I thought that I 'invented' asymetric F-holes but you can see a nice vintage example here (but mine are even better).

tuners for headless guitar

in the comments of the previous post, I had interesting feedback from Alex of Aluminium T-beam Guitar blog, who is particularly interested in headless guitars and proposed in reaction to my 'open bodies' a ingenious way to put regular tuners behind the bridge :

to complete Alex's idea I would put the supporting tuners plate inside the body and not on it, and protect it with a bridge cover, like this:

and to develop the 'open body' idea, this is a more precise sketch of an open-semi-hollow body with neck-trough that should be big enough to allow big holes and easy access to the tuners, and have the proper structural strength.

more sketches

this blog was supposed to be about guitar making but it turns out lately to be about guitar drawings - that should be like this until I have a little bit more time... but it's not so bad, uh?

more sketches

I think that I reach something interesting again in these last drawings...

since this blog acquired more visibility, some friends asked me why I would give away my design research on the net, in this times of hysterical intellectual property...

well first of all I have much more ideas for guitars than I can ever build, and I doubt also that I can make really good guitars on my own before long, since I start from crap, with mainly good will and guitar playing experience... so visibility is good for me, and with the good feedback I start to have about my work, meeting partners to develop these projects feels not so unrealistic anymore... so if you are into guitar making but on the technical side, and need some design, feel free to contact me...

a last thing, I think that just someone serious about guitar making knows that these rough drawings are not so useful without the "vision" behind, and it would be much more productive to ask me to achieve the work than to steal the stuff...

more sketches