Partscaster project

[balazs.bencs]

Hey folks,

I started a new project, so I thought I'd show you the result. After building two tube amps, I needed a new challenge, so I thought: wouldn't it be cool to have a guitar that I put together so that I can kind of say that I have a signature guitar?!

So I started planning and planning, looking around for parts - I have a thing for Telecasters, so I wanted to build a Tele. First I got the neck from eBay, which is an Allparts neck. I heard good things about Allparts, so I thought what the hell, I'd go for it. I got an unfinished quartersawn roasted maple neck because I really think that's the heart and soul of a guitar and I really liked some guitars that had roasted necks.




Then I bought the Crimson guitars guitar finishing oil to seal the wood. They are selling the stuff on eBay, so it's really easy to buy and also they have like 4-5 videos on youtube on how to apply it (it's really easy). I applied 10-12 layers, and then it looked like this:



In the meantime, I had the guitar body ordered from Italy, from a guy called Mattia Franchin: http://www.mattiafranchinguitars.com/
I really like solid colors, so I ordered a sonic blue body with a really light relic on it. Some people get offended by this, but what I like about this is that if I have a pretty guitar, I always care too much about the look of the guitar - I play with lots of energy on stage, I don't want to care about dings and dents on it.

It took 4-5 weeks till the body arrived, in the meantime, I kept applying layers of oil finish on the neck, and ordered the parts for it. It was not easy to get everything, cause I was really picky about parts - I wanted good quality hardware.



I was really worried about the neck joint, that is kind of important in a Fender style guitar. I was lucky, the neck was a very tight fit, I had to do just a little bit of sanding on the sides of the neck pocket. I put the bridge on and two strings to see if everything is straight, but everything was perfect.

Then I marked the holes and drilled by hand since I don't have a drill press, but since I was careful enough it worked great. Then I put copper shielding into the cavities, and started putting together the control plate, installed the tuners, it was basically some soldering from here on. It has a 4-way switch with a "humbucker"-ish setting and I also put a treble bleed mod on the volume pot, I do that on every guitar I have.

The result is:


The whole build was really easy, it took only a couple of hours to put together when I had all the parts on my desk.
Let me know what you think about it. Also, if you have a partscaster, show me yours.

Btw here comes the parts list, if you're interested:
Gotoh SD91-05M tuners
Graphtech nut
Wilkinson telecaster bridge
Seymour Duncan Vintage Broadcaster pickup set
CTS pots
Oak 4 way switch
Orange drop cap + treble bleed with a silver mica (john suhr type of treble bleed)
Switchcraft jack

[Muadzin]

Welcome to the hobby! Beware though, building guitars is addictive. I'm currently working on number 8, very close to finishing it. The next step of course is to build your own parts. I quite like building my own guitar bodies, if uninterrupted by work I could probably make one in a couple of days. Necks take longer, although I prefer to still buy those. I have built my own necks but I still find them a pain in the ass to build. Hardest of all is the paint job. Mistakes can set you back so much time. You can fix them with proper sanding and repainting, but paint takes time to dry, even mistakes. Still, if you manage to make it look good you feel like a million bucks

[Travis]

Ooh man that looks SWEET. I love a sonic blue Tele! That looks like a very tasteful build. How do you like those SD pickups?

Here is my partcaster build. It currently has the neck from my american Deluxe Strat because I am refinishing the Warmoth neck. The body is ash from Warmoth that my friend painted. I might just keep the neck on this one and put the Warmoth on the Am Deluxe body because I think they look cooler that way

[Silver Blues]

Sweet guitar dude (both of you)! Broadcaster pickups are pretty awesome, I have some Broadcaster-wound pickups in my guitar and they sound sick for as little playing skill as I have LOL. What kind of stuff do you normally play?

[balazs.bencs]

I usually play mostly garage-rock, maybe some stoner things (think of the recent QOTSA albums).
I really love the SD Broadcaster set. The bridge pickup is slightly hotter than a regular Tele pickup, but not hot at all. It has a remarkable midrange that I really like, great for the trio that I play in, it cuts through in a band context really well. The neck pickup definitely has a vintage vibe, not that hot - I think most people would think that it is not the best pair in terms of sound/tone/vibe comparing to the bridge pickup, but I tend to like it.

I also have another Tele with a Dimarzio Twang King and a Seymour Duncan Little 59. The two guitars are completely different, they don't have too much in common.

I just built a reactive load too, so I'll post some sound samples soon - I currently record my band's first EP, so maybe I'll put here some guitar tracks later when I have the time.

[balazs.bencs]

Oh and I already started to think about a Strat type of a guitar with humbuckers.
I really hate tremolos, so in an ideal world, a hardtail one.

[Travis]

I’m wearing a QOTSA shirt right now haha. I would love to hear the EP and chat about recording though. I just got a lockout studio a few months ago that I’ve been using to experiment with recording

What are you guys recording with? What kinda room are you working in?

[balazs.bencs]

Actually, it's kind of a homemade situation. We mostly record in our rehearsal space - we made a bunch of diffusor panels with Rockwool, so reflections are not a problem, the room is really quiet on its own. Nothing scientifically measured or anything, we just threw up a lot of panels onto the walls and hang some from the ceiling.

I have an 8 channel Presonus interface (firewire), so everything goes into that, recording with Reaper.
I have a bunch of microphones that I picked up through the years doing live sound, so... I have a lot of SM57s, SM58s, SM58Betas, a couple of ribbon mics, AKG drum mic set, and one or two nice condensers as well, like the AKG C414. We are monitoring through a pair of Adam A3X, which are pretty good sounding but not very loud speakers.

Currently, I'm doing the guitar parts and.. to be honest, I started micing my cabs and recording it live, and that was good, sounded great. Then the reactive load entered in my life and since then we always record with that. Not that I suck at micing cabs, it's just easier: Sometimes with a good IR you get a better sound than your own micing (that I have to admit), you always get the same sound if you go back 3 days later when the mics are packed away (: , you can always go back and change something, and also you can add more and more cabs with the same head/sound, and you can record without a tube amp cranked and screaming at your face (not tiring your ears that much if you record whole day long).

Mixing will be a different situation I think, a friend of mine has a UAD processor, so I want to borrow that and mix with UAD plugins, they sound freaking awesome.

[Travis]

Sounds like you’ve already worked through some of the things that are messing with me

I feel like my room actually sounds really good, it has carpeted walls and a high, iirregular and soft ceiling. It doesn’t sound like an auditorium or something but it avoids that really boxy sound we got in the garage studio before

I definitely need some diffuser panels.. my amp is a cranked up Twin Reverb and obviously it’s pretty much impossible to have that not come through the drum overhead lol

I have aimed the null of the drum overhead at the amp but the sound of the amp fills the room of course. When adding any compression to the overheads that tends to make the guitar in that track even louder and makes it harder to mix

[balazs.bencs]

Actually, I have two tips I can give you, which I did many times while touring.

One band that I used to tour with had two Deluxe Reverbs (40W), and those amps are loud clean amps and only sound good when you push it to like 5-6ish - which is pretty fuckin' loud, so I did the following:

Buy a plexi sound diffuser wall, which you can put in front of the cab, it helps on the bleeding situation, but you'll be still able to hear everything. Just look at Joe Bonamassa rig rundowns on youtube, those are great :)))

Cheaper option: place the combo facing the wall and cover it with a blanket (on tour I used to use guitar cases and foam from the top of racks or the tops themselves). That way it will be still good sounding and you'll hear it well, but won't bleed that much, won't be that freaking loud.

Still the best option out there is the reactive load with an IR plugin. Sometimes with my band, we practice with the bass and my rig ( amp -> reactive load -> pc) plus a couple of drum mics into a mixer and have everything monitored through our headphones. This makes things a lot easier in terms of handling the sound pressure problem and train your ears a lot - it's hard to learn how to play with in-ears at gigs if you decide to use something like that.

These are just ideas, and not everyone can use reactive loads, but since I got one I use it all the time, can't recommend it enough. Great for recording, doing live shows (yes, I've done it), and for band practices. Plus freaking easy to build. Need a schem?

[Travis]

Thanks man. I will try pointing my amp towards a wall and surrounding it with open cases first since that won’t cost me anything.

I suppose I could also try pulling 2 of the 6L6 and a speaker to cut the power in half, but I like the convenience of having 2 speakers to mic separately since I’m enjoying a 2 mic approach on the amp. One of my past customers who is a successful session musician swears by putting one mic in front of the speaker and one behind the speaker on a single-speaker amp. So I have a lot of things to try out.

The reactive load sounds like a cool thing to have around. Could it hang with the Twin though? That makes me nervous, the Twin is a beast

[balazs.bencs]

As far as I remember it is 4 x 6L6GC tubes, summing up to like 85W power, am I right?
A 100W rated reactive load would be easily capable of handling a dimed Twin :)

Remember the JTM45 that I did? That amp is a 2xKT66 beast, which has around 36W of horsepower. I built a 50W/8ohm reactive load and that can easily handle the dimed JTM45 with no issues or anything - actually it sounds fantastic like that.

I don't really recommend taking out the tubes, cause a lot of things would change: Fewer tubes means less power eaten away, so the plate voltage would go up. That means the bias would go way off. In theory, it would still work I think, but the effect on the amp requires to measure bias and re-set it.

Taking one speaker out might work as well, but I'm not sure if that output transformer has other secondaries, there's only a 4ohm output isn't it? That is risky that the transformer is not seeing the correct impedance that it expects.

Is that Fender a silverface one? I had serviced a 72 Twin for the other band in our practice room and that amp sounds magic. I changed the caps in it, cause the caps were old (I think original caps) and started eating tubes for breakfast :) With Mallory 150 caps and some F&T filtering caps, that thing came to life.

[Travis]

It is rated at 85W but probably exceeds 100W at max volume. (It’s a blackface reissue)

It uses x2 8 ohm speakers in parallel for a total of 4 ohms. Removing 2 of the 6L6 changes the output impedance to 8 ohms, which can be matched by disconnecting one of the speakers. It should require bias adjustment

I’m gonna have to try that myself, I imagine I will build some diffusers too

[balazs.bencs]

or... since I'm always thinking the DIY way -> build an attenuator. Ideally, a reactive one would be great, but I'm not sure how can you do something like that. A resistive attenuator would help a lot in volume, but you'll lose some high end.

[Travis]

Any way I go will be the DIY way

Are you using Aiken’s reactive load?

[balazs.bencs]

I used the following schematic:


The coils that I used were Mundorf HiFi Aircore coils, and the cap is also a Hifi Mundorf cap.

[Travis]

That looks cool, thanks dude! I saw the mundorf .27mH on eBay but not 27mH. Where’d you get those?

That seems like a useful thing to have around, but I also have a friend who I think would really benefit from this since he doesn’t have a rehearsal space at all (ac30 + apartment = crap). I think he would love this

Time to head over to the studio and start trying out some ideas

[balazs.bencs]

I found them on multiple sites, but I ordered from Don Audio, cause I ordered some other stuff as well, pretty great site, they have lots of cool stuff (like Lundahl transformers and whatnot)

https://www.don-audio.com/
http://www.lautsprechershop.de/

https://www.hificollective.co.uk/catalog/components/inductors-coils/mundorf-inductors/mundorf-air-core-wire-inductors-0.html

[balazs.bencs]

Here comes a little sound clip with the reactive load that I built:

https://soundcloud.com/bencs-balazs/reactive-load-sample/s-kV9lL

It's funny, that all the gear that I used during the recording was mine that I put together. DIY rules.

I used the new Tele, into the Trex gristle king that I just built (I think it's phenomenal), into the JTM45 that I built, then the reactive load.

VST Plugin was the Pulse plugin, with one of the free Kalthallen Cabs IRs (http://cabs.kalthallen.de/).
Then it was rendered using the raw tracks, no EQ, compression or any magic on them, just the Pulse plugin.