331 Potrero Ave. San Francisco, CA 94103 |
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This weekend we hosted yet another in our ongoing series of Setup Workshops. This a great way to learn the ins and outs of your guitar, gain some critical knowledge on how to assess your next guitar before you buy, and have tons of fun doing it. This week we had Kieth, Evan, and Alex on the bench. Who’s next?
In January I had the opportunity to head out to Nashville for a few days to visit Joe Glaser at his shop, Glaser Instruments. If you’ve heard of him, it’s because he’s been around the industry for a long while, does work for some of the top guys and gals in Nashville and he invented and produces the Glaser B Bender. Other projects – the Lap Strat, solid body banjos with double locking tremolos(!) – are too numerous to mention. The visit was multifaceted and I was able to see how another top shop solves complex problems.
One interesting job on the bench was a Martin acoustic from the 70′s that was possibly re-topped at the factory. Re-topped or not, the bridge was in the wrong place and it was playing very sharp necessitating a saddle relocation. If the slot is filled and then re-cut, the saddle will be too close to the pins, causing a severe string angle and a strange appearance. The proper solution is to make a new bridge, move the pins back and cut the slot in the correct location, and that’s what happened. Making the bridge was straightforward, but cutting the saddle slot was pretty interesting. After the bridge was installed, the guitar was put in the Plek machine, the slot location was programmed and the slot was cut to the depth and width that was specified. It was a very slick operation.
The scope of repair work was familiar to me, and covered neck resets, full restorations, re-frets, fret levels and all manner of small custom jobs. They sent out a few guitars with small extensions glued to the front of the nut at the G string to help with the common sharpness present in the low frets. We’ve done it a few times over the years, but it looks like a go-to move at Glaser. His clientele is largely comprised of professional musicians, and the mods and repairs were tailored to that type of player. The action was set generally higher than our customers like and the final crazy polishing of everything was not as much of a focus, but that is not to say that the work was anything but impeccable. The focus was on day in/day out reliability and functionality, not on pleasing someone pouring over the instrument with a magnifying glass.
Since Joe uses the Plek machine, the work flow is different than at SFGW. They are able to turn instruments around more quickly, and are able to do complex fretwork that would be challenging, if not impossible, for the manual tech. The Plek is most definitely only as good as its tech, and if the tech operating it can’t do great fretwork manually, it’s going to be tough to get a great result on the Plek. But isn’t that the way with any tool?
My visit was incredibly interesting, and Joe and his crew were gracious hosts. I met some country greats, saw some great country music and had better Indian food than I would have ever guessed existed in Nashville. We ended with a trip to Gibson, but I can’t tell you about that. It’s a secret.
A mark of a true guitar tech geek is that when you’re not working on everybody else’s guitars during the week, you come in on the weekends and work on your own. Our very own Benjamin Strange is this type of geek. Check out his latest project, a complete overhaul of his beloved vintage Ovation Magnum bass.
Years ago, he defretted this instrument, and filled the fret slots and fretboard dots with ebony. Tons of playing had worn the board down, and it was time to re-plane the board. Once the board was leveled, he coated the entire fretboard in black cyanoacryle (which he left as a satin finish), made a nut out of water buffalo horn, and set it up for a fanned scale length (35″-33″). He also decided to add a few pickups, squeezed in the space between the stock neck and bridge pickups. After weeks of research, he settled on two Rio Grande Pitbulls and a single Rio Grande P-Zazz – partly because they sound really good, and partly because they would actually fit between the aluminum rails! He wired them all to on/off switches, with a single master volume. It looks and sounds badass! Check it out:
Nigel Tufnel: The sustain, listen to it.
Marty DiBergi: I don’t hear anything.
Nigel Tufnel: Well you would though, if it were playing.
If you aspire to rawk as hard as Nigel Tufnel, you should check this out:
This is the Sustainiac system, which allows you to have infinite, controlled sustain, ala Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, David Torn, Steve Vai, and countless others. It’s ridiculously fun. We’ve got ‘em, we install ‘em. Come and get ‘em.
Curious? Check out Robert Fripp playing lots of very long notes using his Sustainiac system:
We sometimes joke that our job is simply making things straight, and making things shiny – a gross understatement, but it does encapsulate what we do pretty well. Sometimes it’s easy, most times it’s hard, and sometimes… well, simply cleaning a guitar can be fraught with much peril….
