Evolution of a guitar - from the drawing board to the prototype

Over the last few years I have been trying out a number of prototypes which can be put made into a production model with a number of options which would appeal to a large number of players. At this point, what you see in the photos above is the third iteration of this design.

The first iteration got as far as templating about three years ago, but I decided not to continue with it due to a number of practical issues regards to the building process, the hardware that it would require and some reservations that I hadn’t got the rear sweep correct.

the second iteration was made in to a prototype. This, rather unusually, was a bolt on design - the first totally original design that I had produced that used that construction. I identified a number of problems with it in use, especially that the sweep design was purely aesthetic once the guitar was plugged in due to the jack socket placement.

There were many other issues that I thought I’d got wrong. The control placement with the tremolo didn’t work - the arm was always in the way for me in that I like to be able to use my little finger on the volume control. Also, because I don’t do a lot of right hand tapping, I hadn’t realised that the three way switch would be in the way for that kind of playing.

So in revisiting parts of that design that I liked, I went back to a tried and trusted guitar for inspiration, the guitar I built to gig behind the Notebook album in 2009. That guitar has undergone quite a few changes since its original build, in part due to having been broken in half in a house move (literally).

What I was always very satisfied with on this design was the balance, and the access to the higher frets. It used a tun-o-matic, but without the angle created by the space under a Gibson style bridge and the accompanying neck break angle. That made it easier to transport and less fragile, and gave a feel that was more relatable to telecaster players.

From the Model 2 (2013) and the Firebird/JR-1, I used the straight pull headstock style that I had already developed. This reverted to the 3x3 tuners, and away from the 6 in line that I used on the 2017 sweep prototype. That project was clearly too space age to be a production model.

So the first process was to incorporate the sweep into that design, alongside a much more commercially acceptable neck profile (if you’ve played my original guitars, they really are built for my left hand and taste, which isn’t widely shared)!

So at this point I was left with a design that was mostly like the Junior Mk1, but with the sweep and rear loaded rather than with a pickguard.

The sweep made the waist look very fat, so I brought that in on the drawings. At that point I had a body shape.

The next issue became the pickup positions. With a 24 fret design, the classic neck sound of the Les Paul just isn’t really quite there, so it had to be a 22 fret design with the neck pickup right up to end of the fingerboard. To test it templates are made.

So that’s the process by which an idea, the 2017 prototype with the tremolo and a pickguard evolved into the model that you can now order. the stages beyond this are just a matter of normal production tweaks - but the real work is already done by that point., cutting a volute, setting the neck joint angle, these are things that I usually do on the fly when making a prototype, because the proof for such issues is in the manufacturing process and the playing.

That’s the process for a new model. It looks short, but it’s been three years. Will it be a success? It all depends on what I consider a success. If I sell ten of these over the next financial year (to April 21) , I’ll be fairly pleased. That will get me even on costs and allow development into the next project. But as things are today, as I write, there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what the market is going to do over the next year.

This is a subject I will return to very soon…..