Melobaritone project 3

Melobaritone project: gear

I had the opportunity to acquire this  B-stock Steinberger-like tremolo that will fit perfectely to the Melobaritone project - yes it is now a concrete project, I decided to go for it (have to find a better name though, this is not a Melobar copy anymore)! 

I've been thinking about the aluminium neck (with some help from the  Aluminium T-beam Guitar blog) and consider a.o. a tubular neck - since a fretboard is unnecessary -, a little bit like on a Gittler guitar.

Melobaritone project 2

I started to work on the Doppelcaster but my brain is still busy with the Melobaritone idea... I did put some more thinking on it, and updated the project (I want a new instrument, not just a Melobar copy).

First I would do it with an aluminium neck - there's no need to build something as complicated as a regular wooden neck with a truss rod, and I've always been interested in alu neck, so building an alternative guitar is a good opportunity to try it. Also I would put a Floyd Rose trem (with an headless system) - I used one for the first time last month and really enjoyed it.

One would object that a trem on a slide guitar is superfluous, this is true if you play old school blues, but for me it's more like a two-in-one instrument - for a noise maker such as I am, the sound of extremely distended strings is very interesting, and since I wouldn't purchase a guitar just for its Floyd Rose, I'll take this occasion.

I could easily put in this project all the gear I bought for the neckless guitar - it's been on stand-by for months now - and make it my next project after the doubleneck one...

Melobaritone project

My latest infatuation is the Melobar, a portable lap steel guitar conceived in the 60s by Melobar and released a.o. by Mosrite - and revived lately by Manson for John Paul Jones. 

I think that this instrument is probably less difficult to build than a regular guitar, because it evacuates the whole neck/ fret/ scale/ fretboard/ radius issue - more or less you nail the gear on a planck and you have a lap steel! Actually I never played a lap steel guitar, but I like bottleneck a lot, and I think that learning how to play a new instrument is easier than to go over my limitations as a guitarist (it worked with bass).

So a home-made Melobar could be a cool project - it would be a baritone to create an instrument that doesn't exist, I see it with six-string so I can use regular gear - a wraparound bridge, a mini-humbucker and a lipstick pickup both in bridge position, a telecaster control plate... 

That's an exciting idea, will see if it can make an exciting project - I have other ones cooking...