On An Island

I have been going into this project totally blind. I have never built a guitar before, and I keep hitting brick walls. I seem to be stuck on an island, all alone.

But, one person has helped me quite alot, someone by the name of pinkfloydfan1 on the Pink Floyd Online forum, who's helped me in choosing my pickups and body.

I have decided that the pickups will all be Seymore Duncans - more specifically - David Gilmour Custom Shop models, which pinkfloydfan1 tells me, costs $300 - and at the time of writing this, is about £145.

Money, It's A Gas

Well, it's entry number 2 to my blog, documenting my struggle to build my own Stratocaster guitar.

It's pay-day for me tomorrow, but seeing as I'm only contracted to 15 hours a week, my pay is rather low :-( So I've been doing all the over-time I can, so I'm expecting around £600.

So, tomorrow (pay day) I'll be off to buy my soldering iron and equipment, and start looking for the electronics for the guitar, a scratchplate to fix them to, and a body.
As I stated before, the body will definately be black, as will the scratchplate. The pickups will be (at least one, anyway) Seymore Duncan - similar to David Gilmour's. If I decide to only buy one SD pickup, the other two will probably be Fender USA's.
Once all that's wired up and working, I can buy the neck, probably Warmoth.

The next entry? Who knows? When I get some soldering equipé and electronics...

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Stratocaster

Oh dear, oh deary, deary me. I have for some time now, wanted a Fender Stratocaster, but as cost is an issue, I bought a cheaper, Mexican Telecaster instead.... that was back in February/March. I came up with the idea, a few days ago, that I could afford a Stratocaster - if I were to buy it 'bit-by-bit'.

So, I am undergoing the task of building my own 'customised Stratocaster', as I am building it, I can omit fatures I don't want, or include new features that aren't included on Fender Stratocasters.

The guitar will be kinda based around David Gilmour's famous 'Black Strat' seen last during his 2006 On An Island world tour. The guitar has been modified a great deal since Gilmour purchased the instrument back in 1970, in New York. It now features 3 customised Seymore Duncan pickups, and thinner, black scratch-plate, a maple fingerboard and a nice little button allowing both neck and bridge pickups to be used simaltaniously.

For my project, I will need to aquire a soldering iron as cheap as possible, to allow more money to go into guitar parts, the body is, as yet, unidentified, but it will most certainly be black. The neck will probably come from Warmoth, and will be maple with a maple fretboard, and probably have mother-of-pearl inlays, shaped as either diamonds or ovals, I havn't decided yet, but the neck stage is a long way off yet.

Right, that's enough for now... there's no way of telling when my next entry will come. But I will post updates on my MySpace and various other guitar-based websites that I frequent.

All in all, you're all just bricks in the wall, GoodPIE!