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Ikea birch wood butcher block, an ur-telecaster...

Here it is! I hinted at it last week, and due to the generosity of a benefactor (a little bit surprise to be asked for her humble kitchen appliance), I managed to put my hands on a second hand (with vintage patina) Ikea butcher block (out of production) made of glued birch cubes (I still don't know why birch is not a common tonewood for electric guitars, when it is used for its resonance for drums and speaker cabinets...), with the perfect dimensions to cut a telecaster out of it, Zachary style! 

Now I used the sitar bridge on the Doppelcaster so it would be a more standard project (also I have a lot of tele gear leftovers from my previous projects) though with a slightly different design (time to try the double lower horn) and the new mini-humbucker I bought lately in neck position. Also I don't know if I will use my Micro-Frets neck with its shorter scale or get a tele neck, or even a baritone mod one... 

Sitar bridge and pickguard polishing

So I finally installed the sitar bridge on the doppelcaster, though until the last moment I thought that it would not work - the vintage bridge is really smaller, and I was about to give up when I decided to not use the string-through holes - it's not so important since the sitar saddles remove anyway most of the sustain (and I took the occasion to re-polish the pickguards). Anyway the sound is brilliant and I'm convinced now that this was the best move, a guitar + sitar makes more sense than a guitar + baritone, and I have already some songs ideas with this beastie.

I will try to make soon a video demo of it but I need to set precisely the sitar saddles, and it will take a while, then I'll have a pro setting to have the guitar at its best, also I'm curious (and a little bit anxious) to have a pro point of view on this instrument. Ah, and the P90 still doesn't work, if anybody knows where to find a wiring diagram for a P90 in neck position on a telly, it's welcome!

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a sitar bridge for the Doppelcaster

Ordered sitar-guitar saddles from Rockinger, and a vintage style telecaster bridge, but I overlooked the fact that the Squier teles I used to build the Doppelcaster had modern bridges... I will see if I can make things fit - and I still have the option of making another telecaster-inspired guitar, I'm on the tracks of an old-school Ikea Butcher Block.

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the slowest guitar project in the world

So here it comes again, I could put a couple of hours into the 7-string guitar project, I finally assembled everything and it works not so bad, but a buzzing problem that requires that I rework the neck pocket - I need to remove 2 mm of wood... The lower horn isn't a problem as I feared once, and I really like how the pickup rails follow the frets!

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of,

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pedals

How to transform the sound of a theremin into a quadrophonic storm of heavily effected white noisy thunder,  with the help of a few guitar pedals...

No guitars but plenty of pedals

Didn't post here for a while, but for honorable reasons, being busy with a project in real life. No guitars this time but plenty of pedals, as you can see on these pics, connecting a theremin to a quadrophonic sound system for an heavily effected drone music concert together with text projection - another episode of my on-going Angel Meat transmedia project. 

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CDs non reviews: the CDs I bought in the last months...

Last year I started to review some CDs, and I planed to go on, very subjectively and only about the stuff I'm interested in, but I failed at that - started some then postponed and now there are too many to do it seriously but without turning it into a serious job - this blog is but a hobby... 

So I just post the covers of the CDs I bought these last months, excluding the stuff I download or copy - I still favor CDs when it comes to owe music, and I do want to remunerate the artists whose music I enjoy so much (for the industry, it can collapse, I don't mind). I listen to a lot of music online, but it's interesting for me to see what I've bought over a certain lapse of time - I realize that I'm mostly into guitar based rock music nowadays, and that after 20 years I'm still not finished replacing my vinyls collection - I really had a lot! - and I need some more classics...

The Dead Weather is without any doubts the most exciting band I've heard for a long while - I had lost my enthusiasm for raw rock for years but I really enjoyed their concert in Berlin last summer... I also discovered Broadcast but sadly only the very day their singer died, and I listen to their last album a lot. I keep enjoying medieval music and Anne Azéma is a luminous singer. And after having listened to a lot of jazz-rock in the last years, I have a strong minimal phase, in very different styles but always quite pop, at the exception of This Heat that is an interesting crossing of experimental music, krautrock and post-punk from the early 1980s...

Two last things, the artist I pirated the most lately is Burzum - not only his CDs are not easy to find, but I mind financing a half-nazi, that is probably quite stupid since I do value his music... And again I will miss a great concert in a couple of weeks, but I really cannot put 200 € to see Roger Water's The Wall, even though that's the only chance I'll ever have to see it in my life... Again, when did rock become upper class entertainment?

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