Category: Guitars

A few weeks before Crimson Creatures started gigging, my precious Stratocaster (“Mr Pink”) started to malfunction — I was tightening up the truss rod every couple of weeks (ooh, Matron!) — and I started to worry that it might need to go to Fender Custom Shop hospital. So, I came up with the excuse to buy another Stratocaster, as a spare.

I headed to Guitar Mania in Poole, to see if they had anything suitable, and took a shine to two Strats: a brand new budget vintage-style Vintera II Strat with a 7.25in fretboard (like Mr Pink), and a well-worn late 90s California Series Strat with a 9.5in maple fretboard. In the end, I plumped for the California, as it felt solid and better made.

It’s not particularly pretty, with its brown sunburst poly gloss finish (“Mr Brown”?), flakey lacquered maple fretboard and dot fret markers, but it plays well and feels good in the hands. It turns out that 1998 was a good vintage at Fender. They decided to revisit the late 50s / early 60s period hardware (pressed steel) and tonewood (alder), and they gave every guitar a holiday: shipping them off to Mexico for spraying, before assembly back in California. (Apparently, they’d had a fire in their California spraying plant.) California Series guitars seem to be highly regarded.

Fast forward a year, and I’m not gigging again. The California Strat isn’t getting much love, and I’m starting to question why I still have it. So I put it up for sale. The thing is, Strats are everywhere, and I wasn’t willing to drop the price for a quick sale.

Fast forward another year, and I learn about baritone guitars. I’m intrigued. And the new band I’m in might occasionally benefit from a lower-range guitar to compliment the sound. Around the same time, I learn that baritone guitars are just like normal guitars, but they have longer necks, so the fatter strings maintain playing tension. And Fender makes baritone 9.5in pau ferro necks which slot straight into Telecasters or Stratocasters. I put my order in.

My DIY skills were put to use. The neck came without machine heads or string trees, and the nut had shallow slot guides. I ordered a set of ClassicGear tuners, which were easy to fit, and a couple of vintage wing-style string trees, which came with awful screw heads which I managed to round out but eventually fit. Nut filing is hard, but I’ve been doing it for so long now, I think I actually might be getting quite good at it. The bridge intonation needed a complete overhaul, as you might expect.

Baritone guitars take a bit of getting used to. They feel more like a conventional six string than a bass guitar. But they feel distinctly bigger and deeper. This is beautifully offset by the bright and fighty Tex-Mex pickups. In short, it’s a beast of a guitar. Mr Brown is a Twang Machine.

In the early 80s, I was a guitarist who was very much a product of the 70s Rock decade. I’d learned songs by guitar greats such as Steve Howe, David Gilmour, Steve Hillage, Tony Iommi, Steve Hackett, Robert Fripp, Mike Oldfield, Dave Brock and the rest. But, this was all becoming a bit comfortable and safe.

I became aware of a new breed of guitarists who were less like stars, and were bringing a whole new range of sounds to the party. These new guys included Robert Smith, The Edge, Will Sergeant, Bernard Albrecht, Hugh Cornwell and John McGeoch.

I found myself writing heavily effected angular warbly guitar parts. This was probably due in no small part to my obsession with a string of albums by Siouxsie and The Banshees. So, I guess it was inevitable that I would one day acquire a Yamaha SG1000, McGeoch’s weapon of choice in Magazine and The Banshees.

It’s not really a guitar hero’s guitar. It’s nicknamed the Les Paul Killer after all. It’s not very sexy, it’s not a classic guitar, and it’s not that common. In fact, in all my years, I’d not actually seen one in a shop until recently. But, there it was, in Johnny Roadhouse in Manchester, this summer.

I had to give it a spin. The first thing I noticed was its weight. It was heavier than all my guitars. But it is crafted beautifully. Solid resonant mahogany, faultless build, with an exquisite glued in slim C neck and 10″ radiused ebony fretboard, gold hardware, a belly cut, front neck and body binding, and fancy inlay. It oozed quality, with a matching price tag. But, when I realised that its pickups worked as humbuckers and single coils, I bought it.

Since leaving Crimson Creatures, I decided to make it my current workhorse. It’s a real Swiss Army Knife of a guitar. Expect to hear it on my next project.

I didn’t have much disposable income as a teen. So, when a friend bought an electric guitar, I made lots of measurements, got a luthiery book from the local library, and made my first electric guitar from plywood and cheap hardware. It worked, but it wasn’t great, and it wasn’t pretty.

A year or so later, I went halves with my parents, and got a used electric guitar for my 16th birthday, from Reidy’s in Blackburn. When I saw that tiger maple hanging on the wall, it was love at first sight. It was heavy, well built, with cream binding, a gorgeous rosewood fretboard and medium frets, smooth Grover style machine heads, and it played very nicely. But, all that was written on the guitar were the words “Kasuga Deluxe”. It was a mysterious mahogany beast from the Far East.

I decided that the wood finish was too gorgeous to spoil with plastic. So I removed the cream pickup selector ring and pickguard, and replaced the cream pickup rings with ‘cool’ black ones. Phwoar!

The Kasuga served me well. For 10 years, I recorded numerous songs and played a dozen gigs in several bands in the North West. And then, the thing which happens to many people in their 20s, happened to me. I got a job, got married, and had kids. The guitar hung on a hook on the wall for almost 3 decades. Occasionally, it would come down for a dusting, and I would struggle to remember how to play anything. A couple of times, I tried to restart the playing, but it never lasted long.

In 2018, I joined a group of mature amateur musicians. This was the catalyst I needed to resume my passion for playing guitar. The Kasuga got a good clean and a set of new strings. I also decided that I was long overdue that fancy guitar I’d always dreamed of, and the Kasuga ended up back on the wall.

Meanwhile, as the internet had become a thing since I acquired the Kasuga, I decided to do some research. I discovered that the Deluxe was actually called an LG-480BS, and it originated in a Japanese factory sometime around 1976. Kasuga was a respected if little-known company, which had made good midrange electrics and acoustics for a range of well-known Japanese and western guitar manufacturers for many years.

As my renewed guitar obsession progressed, I started to feel sad about the Kasuga, which was being betrayed on a daily basis. I’d even tried out a few real Les Pauls. But none of them played as well as mine. So, one day, I decided to make it up to her. I was going to give her a deluxe make-over.

I also replaced the knobbly old bridge saddles with smart shiny new ones. The Kasuga was hot to trot.

So now, it looks a little more and sounds a little more like a £250k 1959/1960 Les Paul Standard. The bolt-on neck (neatly hidden from view) still sustains almost as well as a glued-in neck. The comfy 10-inch radius fretboard and satin slim C profile neck is a delight to play. The pickups sound old, expensive, and like they’ve seen a few things in their time. And she still looks gorgeous. Not bad for approaching 50!

There are a lot of guitars out there. Millions of them. Trying to find a good one can be a difficult and a never-ending task. Obviously, guitarists have their own preferences too. So, it helps to know what to look for. I decided to investigate this more closely.

Being a bit of a nerd, I made a spreadsheet of measurements of each guitar I own, from weight to fret size. The logic was that I would probably find clues buried in the data, and a pattern would emerge.

Half of my guitars have a Fender scale, the other half a Gibson scale. I seem not to care. Using 10-gauge strings, Gibson scale guitars tend to be slightly slinkier, but that’s a double-edged sword where you trade lightness for grip sensitivity. However, all of my guitars have Rosewood fretboards. So I can definitely tick that box.

The number of frets seems not to matter. I have a mixture of 21, 22 and 24 fret guitars. I generally don’t get up that high. But what about the frets themselves? After straining to check, it seems that I have acquired a mixture of Jumbo, Medium Jumbo, Medium, Modern (tall thin), and Small.

Nut width seems to be pretty consistent around 42.2mm to 43.2mm. I doubt that 1mm makes a lot of difference. If anything, the neck profile is more important, and I think that I’m very much in the slim ‘Oval C’ camp. My guess is that the neck has to be comfortable in your hand, and I have a nasty habit of wrapping my thumb around. A satin finish helps with mobility too. Gloss necks can be a bit sticky.

I had thought that fretboard radius would be important, because I love the 7.25″ radius of the 1960-style Strat. But it turns out that 9″, 10″, and 12″ fretboards can be just as nice to play.

What about string spacing? The narrowest is 49mm and the widest is 55mm. That’s a 1.2mm difference in string gaps at the bridge. That’s quite a lot, though I’m not so sure it matters. I’m starting to think that I’m missing something.

What about tonewood? Besides the rosewood fingerboards, it appears that maple necks and mahogany bodies are a common factor — apart from the alder Strat and the ash 12-String. Maybe we’re getting somewhere. Or maybe they’re just the most common tonewoods.

I know, weight. The Les Paul and 335 style guitars are both almost 9 pounds and have great sustain, but so does the SG, which comes in at a rather skinny 6.6 pounds. Hmm.

Looking at three single coil guitars and three humbucker guitars, I decide to quit while I’m ahead. Finding the magic formula is harder than it seems. The only commonality betweeen my guitars is the neck profile (slim/oval C) and fretboard material (rosewood). I am disappointed that the results of my experiment are so uninteresting.

On the other hand, I’d look pretty silly if all my guitars were the same. Vive la difference!