I had an opportunity to make a solid body guitar for the Stocklist. So, time for a bit of fun. Make a SuperStrat.

I had some beautiful flamed maple for the overlay and fingerboard, some very light weight swamp ash for the body core and some quartersawn flamed hard maple for the neck. Add to this timber some quality hardware by Schaller, quality pickups from Seymour Duncan and wrap it in a sminky blue gloss lacquer and here is the result.

Construction has 4mm of the flamed maple overlaid onto the swamp ash and bent over the arm relief. The neck (a laminate of flamed maple, rock maple and sapele) is glued into the body with a smooth contoured heel that allows full access to all the 24 smooth, wide, hard, Dunlop 6110 frets. The lacquered fingerboard is made from the same board of flamed maple as the overlay but not coloured. The headstock is scarf jointed and angled back with Schaller bottom locking tuners. A Schaller LoPro Floyd Rose completes the hardware. Pickups are a Duncan Distortion at the bridge, a Custom Flat single coil in the middle and a smooth, wide range Jazz at the bridge. Pickup selection is by a 5 way slider with the addition of a pull switch on the tone control that adds the neck pickup to whatever else is selected. This means that, as well as the normal selection, you can have all three pickups on in parallel at the same time or the Les Paul style neck and bridge in combination making the sound palette wider than you might expect. Master volume, master tone and Dunlop Straplocks complete the set-up. The blue sunburst brings out the figure in the maple and ash.

You can see that it looks good enough to eat but how does it play and sound? The neck is very slim front to back and with 9 gauge strings takes a very low action - it feels like it plays itself - very fast. The bridge and middle pickups are high output so all the rock and metal sounds are possible and the response is immediate. The neck pickup is so versatile that you can do jazz with it (although you might look a bit odd on a jazz stage with this guitar) and roll back the tone control, push the amp a bit and you have a beautiful Clapton blues tone. So, despite the image, the guitar is very versatile. Did I mention that with the swamp ash core you can induce resonant feedback on any fret with a suitable amp setting?

Now gone to a good home! This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it me if you have any questions about it and I'll try to answer.