The Black Strat

I may as well begin this blog by explaining the name: it comes from two of the first guitars I built. I will start with the Black Strat.

The Black Strat was the first guitar I ever built (up till then I'd just been modifying and tinkering). It started with this plywood strat body that was lying around from one of my brother's project guitars. It looked beautiful to me (it was probably, at best, a $100 guitar); and the more I looked at it, the more I thought "I should make a guitar out of that. I've already got a body, how hard can the rest be?" I was quite poor at the time (being a 2nd year uni student), so I jumped on Ebay and checked out the cost of various Chinese guitar parts, and the project sprang to life from there.

I built the Black Strat from the ground up with 2 goals in mind: 1) it should be the ideal 'worship' guitar (my main musical output), and 2) it should look like Steve Vai's Ibanez Jem (my favourite guitar player). I ended up cobbling together what I think was a pretty good tribute to the Ibanez Jem, considering the foundation was a black strat body:

This thing had all gold, all cheap, all Chinese hardware. The tuners were originally the cheapest I could find, but these were quite terrible. I soon swapped them for some mid-range Chinese locking tuners (around $50). These have worked fine for me ever since, although I have reason to believe I fluked a good set. Remarkably, I haven't had problems with the cheap bridge (although I have since blocked the trem). This is probably because there is not much that can go wrong on a fixed bridge.

The very first assembly had cheapo pots, but I immediately realised they sucked (budget guitar lesson 1: don't skimp on the pots). I swapped them for full size Dimarzio pots, which have been perfect ever since. The pickups were one area I didn't skimp on - I firmly believe that pickups account for 80-90% of a guitar's final tone. I bought a Dimarzio Air Classic bridge, Dimarzio True Velvet middle, and a Seymour Duncan Jazz neck. I'll elaborate on my pickup experience later. I fully shielded all cavities with copper tape, something I do on every electric guitar I own.

The original guitar had a neck that I got bare from China for $70, which looked beautiful. Unfortunately it had 2 problems: the first was that it was very flexible, and would go out of tune depending on where my left hand was resting on the neck; The second was that I used an oil finish on the wood, which looked great but collected grime from your hands like nothing else. I got the frets levelled and dressed at my local guitar shop.

The guitar actually sounded fantastic, thanks to the quality electronics. Unfortunately the playability was very poor at first, until I blocked the trem, got rid of the locking nut, swapped the tuners for locking type, and ditched the cheap pots. With each tweak, the guitar improved until it was quite a solid instrument. At this point in the project, I'd spent $600 on the guitar (including the round of relacements). I estimated that it had superior tone and equal playability to a $1000-12000 retail guitar, although tuning stability remained an issue.

Finally, after many on-stage tuning sessions, I gave up on the vine inlayed neck and paid way too much for a Canadian maple neck (pictured below). This was a rock solid piece of wood, and fixed the tuning issues. Unfortunately, I didn't realise it had very low frets, and although I kept this configuration for quite a while I never grew to love the playability.

Eventually, I decided to replace the Canadian maple neck, and found a Bullet Strat for sale nearby for $100. I loaded the kid in the pram early one morning and walked around to buy the guitar while my wife slept in. I ended up using the body, neck and nut out of the Bullet Strat, and rebuilt my guitar into what it is today. The Bullet Strat neck is fantastic - fast, good frets, nice wood. Reading up about Bullet Strats, I understand they are hit and miss, but I happened to find a good one. I also got to upgrade the body from plywood to basswood, which was a nice bonus.

Let's talk about the pickups. The Air Classic in the bridge has become my favourite bridge pickup, ever. It sounds incredible - whether clean, lightly saturated or full on overdriven. In fact, it is the only bridge pickup that I've ever enjoyed played clean. It will produce chugging riffs and wailing solos but is never overpowering, like some high output pickups can be.

The True Velvet single coil is a very solid performer, and the middle position often comes back to being my favourite pickup position. It has a similar bite as the bridge, without having all the power behind it (which is sometimes what you need). It is also good for solos that need to sing but you don't need/want full power.

The neck pickup has been an interesting ride. I was in love with the Jazz humbucker for a long time, and it is definitely an awesome pickup. However, I started to get sick of the overly-warm neck humbucker. Eventually I swapped the Jazz into the bridge of another guitar (with great results), and bought a Tonerider A2 Classic. Tonerider pickups are sweet & cheap pickups, and I will always recommend them. I appreciated the tone of the A2 Classic but I realised I really wanted to get away from a humucker in the neck. Trouble was, I really liked the look of the guitar with the 2 black humbuckers, and didn't want to upset the asthetics. I toyed with the idea of gluing 2 single coil covers together so I could make a single coil look like a humbucker, but I ended up with a different solution.

The Seymour Duncan JB is famous for its overwound coil architecture, which sports around 16k resistance. I had read about the great split tone of the JB (because each coil is about 8k, similar to many single coil pickups). Trouble is, JB pickups are quite expensive for someone in my position. Thankfully, the popularity of the JB has meant that it is probably the most widely copied humbucker out there. I found a JB knock-off for about $12 on Ebay, which had Alnico magnets, wax potting, and 16.1k resistance. All I had to do was wire up this JB clone as a permanent single coil, and I now have an HSS strat which looks like a HSH. The neck single coil sounds really good - I wouldn't say its as good as a genuine single coil but I prefer it to the previous humbuckers. I will eventually upgrade to a genuine single coil, but for now the $12 JB is doing very well.

The latest modification I have made to the guitar is to install a noise-cancelling coil. I can explain the design and theory in a follow-up post, but essentially I wound a thick (0.2mm) wire coil to have the same hum sensitivity as a single coil pickup, then installed it in the pickup cavity. The end result is a silent guitar, even on a noisy stage with the gain cranked. Yet thanks to the coil design there is 0% tone suck.

The Black Strat was my first build, and my first attempt at a low-budget guitar. I now realise that it cost me a fair bit more than I intended, but it was a great learning experience. So far the guitar has cost around $1000, which makes the 'budget' status debatable. However, the cost of the guitar as it is currently built comes to about $650 - I'm pretty happy with that, considering the guitar sounds exceptional, plays like a dream, and looks like a 3 piece suit (in my opinion).

And in the end, I would say the current version is pretty close to my ideal worship guitar...

...till the next mod.