Custom guitars

     One of my favorite hobbies is constructing guitars, both for myself and for others. From 2012-2013, I worked on putting together my first guitar. I bought a guitar kit, and started painting and putting all of the pieces together. Since it wasn't as great as I wanted it to be when finished, I revamped the guitar and made it nicer. This guitar is now my favorite guitar both in sound and looks, and I use it the most out of all my guitars, both during live performances and in my home studio.
    In 2016, a good friend of mine was interested in a custom made guitar for himself. I spent much time during the spring and summer working on this guitar, and he now uses it for his own performances as well.

"AJ Strat"
      I first purchased this as a full guitar kit. It came with a body, neck, pickups, prewired electronics, and all other hardware to make a complete Stratocaster-Style guitar. When I first went about building the guitar, it was a fairly straightforward process: Put the guitar together. Paint the body, screw these pieces together, plug this wire in here, shape the headstock, attach the neck, and I am all set. When I put the guitar through the amp, I found out that the pickups, particularly the bridge pickup, where of very poor quality and had a very unnatural buzzing sound whenever I was playing. Additionally, the neck did not feel good to play, and when I tried to adjust the truss-rod to fix this problem, I saw that there was not any sort of adjustment socket for it. All that to say, I was very disappointed in how it turned out. 
      It was through this experience that I learned how important each and every component of the guitar was. This guitar ended up being shelved for sometime, but a year later I decided to fix it up and turn it into a guitar that I could be proud of. The first thing I did was replaced the neck with a brand new maple neck with a maple fretboard. After playing on different guitars with maple fretboards, I felt that a maple fretboard would feel just right on this guitar, and I also felt that it would help brighten the tone of the overall guitar.           I also wanted to make sure this guitar sounded as good as it played. With that in mind, I purchased new bridge and neck pickups. I decided to make these new pickups humbuckers to give them a more beefy, full, Les Paul Type sound, so I considered hot rail style pickups to allow for this. However, when I was looking for pickups, I came across the Dimarzio 30th Anniversary PAF Humbucker, a full size humbucker meant for the bridge position. Of course, the body was originally routed to only take single coils, so in order to accommodate a humbucker I used the back of my hammer (due to limited supplies) and took out a chunk of wood around the bridge pickup to fit the pickup. I stuck with the idea to use a single-coil sized humbucker for the neck pickup, which ended up being a Wilkinson Hot Rail. I kept the stock middle single coil it came with because it was the best sounding pickup from the original set. 
      As I was rewiring the guitar (replacing all of the improper alligator clips with actual solder joints), I then got the idea to expand on the tonal possibilities of the guitar by implementing coil-splitting for both the bridge and neck humbuckers. This allowed me to still keep some Strat type tones in the guitar while still being able to have Les Paul type tones. I also rewired the guitar so that I could have the bridge and neck pickups on together, as it would have been in a Les Paul, and I also enabled a middle-on switch that allowed for all three pickups to be on at the same time.
      Nowadays, the "AJ Strat" really is a guitar that I'm super proud of. I can use it easily for both home recording as well as live performances, and I'm glad I was able to make it a versatile guitar. Of course, this was the first guitar I built, so it has its weaknesses, most notably the rough paint job and the very messy inner wiring. One day I hope to fix those two things, and as a learning experience I know that I will be able to make some even better guitars in the future. 
      Knowing that I had built one of my own guitars, one of my good friends and high school bandmates approached me and asked if I would build him his own guitar. He wanted it to be a telecaster style guitar as a contrast to the Fender Stratocaster he already owned. I agreed to build him this guitar, but after we kept talking about how he wants his guitar, we both figured that using a standard telecaster design with single coil pickups would not be suitable for most of the rock songs we were playing. I thought it would be a better idea to try for a Telecaster Deluxe design with two full sized humbuckers and Les Paul style controls. 
      I purchased an alder Telecaster Deluxe body, the tuning machine heads, the pickguard, and the bride from Warmoth Guitars, a company which specializes in replacement and custom guitar parts, and an all maple stratocaster neck from Ebay. The pickups are two Humbuckers from the Fender Chris Shiflett Signature Telecaster Deluxe, also purchased from Ebay. To paint the guitar, I used a blue water-based stain and applied it over the body, and used polyurethane to lacquer the body. 
      The wiring and assembly of this guitar was much simpler than my first guitar, in that this guitar did not involve much soldering. This project mostly helped me with painting techniques for the wood. It was my first time using a stain instead of spray paint, and in order to be able to properly see the wood grain I had to constantly sand and reapply the stain. It required a lot patience and care, as over-sanding or under-sanding could result in an uneven finish. I also had some trouble in applying the lacquer as a spray form, so I attempted later to use a paint-on polyurethane, which yielded better, smoother. If I were to do this project again, I would have went with the paint-on lacquer first in order to achieve a better finish the first time. Additionally, if I had a larger budget, I would have used a nicer neck and added a flame maple top to the body for a brighter sound and a cooler look.

tele deluxe-Style

other projects

Epiphone SG Special Modifications

Just for fun, I purchased an cherry red Epiphone SG Special off of Ebay. I repainted the whole guitar white, and purchased a new bolt-on neck with a Gibson style headstock. I then replaced the stock ceramic pickups with Gibson Burstbucker Pro Pickups to improve the sound quality.
Epiphone Les Paul 100 Modifications

The Epiphone Les Paul 100 was the first guitar I ever owned. However, as I finished building the "AJ Strat" shown above, I felt that I should modify the guitar to bring it up to a similar playing level. With that in mind, I replaced the tuning machine heads with Grover tuners to improve the tuning stability, and upgraded the pickups to Gibson Burstbucker Pros. I also sanded around the edge of the body to create a fake binding look.
Ibanez GIO 5 String Bass Repaint

Originally, this bass had a black body with a plain neck. To add a different aesthetic, I wanted to paint the whole bass black. I used a black stain to blacken the back of the neck as well as the fretboard, and then coated both sides with polyurethane lacquer. The lacquered fretboard also helps gives the strings a smoother feel when doing any vibrato in the left hand.