Have you boiled your pickups?

Effectively, that’s what I’m doing here. These Jag pickups are taking a bath in a pot of hot wax.

When we talked about pickups a little while back, we discussed the fact that they were, for all intents and purposes, a big coil of wire and some magnets. Sometimes, the windings of that coil can move around a tiny bit (sometimes vibrating in sympathy with the note being played or just as you jump around the stage). This movement can be ‘picked up’ and added to the amplified sound which can result in nasty feedback. Pickups with this issue are often referred to as being microphonic.

Soaking in hot wax—called potting the pickup—allows the liquid wax to seep through the gaps between the windings and the other hardware (base-plates and so on). Once the wax cools, it solidifies in these gaps and helps prevent that movement. It’s important that the pickups are soaked for a while. When they warm to the same temperature as the wax, that ensures good penetration deep within the coils. You’ll notice a bubble in the photo—these continue to pop out slowly as the wax penetrates.

Wax tends to be the most common potting material as it’s easy to apply and makes it possible to disassemble the pickup in the future if the need arises. Lacquer and even epoxy have been used from time to time but neither penetrates as well as wax (they’re too thick) and they cure into impenetrable, hard, pickup-shaped lumps. Forget about disassembling one of these.

There are a couple of things worth mentioning on this subject:

Firstly, many of the most sought-after tones come from un-potted pickups. Some tones/styles can benefit from a very slight microphonic edge.

Secondly, it’s not necessarily a panacea. Potting can help reduce microphonic feedback but there can be many other contributors to feedback. If you’ve a problem, it’s worth considering everything in your signal chain.

It’s here again: the Massive and Brilliant, Haze Guitars Super Setup Sale.

That means Haze-quality setups for stupid prices.

We’re talking any guitar for €25 (which includes fresh strings*) and any bass for €20 (strings extra if needed as some bassists only change strings twice in a lifetime).

This craziness applies to any instrument dropped off at my workshop between 2nd and 31st of January

Pretty great, eh?

So, I’ll be spending the month under a deluge of guitars. Every year I run this sale and spend all of January wondering if I’m a strange sort of masochist. Seriously, the effect is much like having someone spend the month beating me with a pillowcase full of stomp-boxes.

But I’m the selfless type with only your welfare in mind so I’ll make myself blind and mostly insane getting your guitars playing their best.

Guitar setup €25. Bass setup €20.

Frickin’ bargain or what?

*A Note on strings: D’addario on the electrics, Martin on the acoutics—if you need something else, I can use yours or source them and sort out any difference in cost.

It seems like my internal organs have barely recovered from last year and Christmas is here again. Ho ho ho.

While it would probably be cheaper just to pay someone to kick me repeatedly in the liver for a week, it is traditional to take a little time off to ruin my health the old-fashoined, Irish, way.

With that in mind, Haze Guitars will be closed for the Christmas period. Other than a couple of collections I’ve already arranged, Haze will be closed from 23rd of December until the 2nd of January.

I will be answering the occasional email as family/turkey sandwiches/hangovers allow so feel free to drop me a line. 

Come January, I’ll continue to follow tradition by holding the Great And Marvellous, Definitely Going To Kill Me This Year, January Setup Sale. More info on this—and some other exciting news for January—over the next week.

As I always do at this time of year, I want to say an incredibly massive thank you to everybody who’s trusted me with their instruments over the last year. I know what it means to hand over your precious and I genuinely appreciate your trust. I hope I was able to help.

Thanks for everything this year, and have a great Christmas.

Haze Guitars offers a professional guitar and bass repair, upgrade and restoration service for Dublin and the east coast of Ireland.

I have been designing, building, hot-rodding, modifying and repairing guitars for years. I’ve made many instruments in many styles and have been lucky enough to work on countless new and vintage instruments in order to repair, set-up or restore them.

I can offer a full instrument repair, setup and upgrade service for any manufacturer’s guitars or basses. If you’ve problem with your guitar, bass, or even other stringed instruments, just drop me a line – I’ll take a look and do my best to help you out.

I also write repair and tutorial articles for the online guitar news website, Guitarless. Be sure to check them out.

From time to time, I get asked to make a custom pickguard for someone (and it’s fair to say that making my own guitars also means making my own pickguards).

If you’ve got a relatively standard guitar, there’s usually a good chance you can buy a replacement pickguard ‘off-the-rail’ (which is handy as it’ll certainly be cheaper to buy something that’s been cut in three seconds by a machine than something that has to be made to order). However, some people want something a little different or just can’t source a particular pickguard for an older or an unusual instrument. That’s where I come in.

Doing this isn’t rocket science but there’s a little bit of work involved as it’s generally necessary to sort out a template first. Having a template lets me rout and bevel the edges cleanly. If I were to cut this plastic by hand, it would be very, very difficult to get a good finish along the edges. Spending the time making a template is pretty boring but it pays off in the end-product. 

I took these photos a while back, while finishing up the last Bassmaster. The process is the same for pretty much any of these, though. Spend the time perfecting the template. Rout the edges and then bevel wherever necessary (that 45° angle usually doesn’t run the whole perimeter). Often, as here, there will be cut-outs for pickups and annoying little control plates—that’s when the swearing starts.

The other annoying thing: When you rout plastic, it shaves off in tiny slivers that fly about, all charged with static electricity. These cling to whatever they touch and you end up finding tiny squares of white/black/white plastic in strange places for days.

As I mentioned, then, if you’re looking for a standard pickguard for your Strat or Tele, have a look online and buy one for a few quid. If you need something a little weird, though, give me a shout. 

The time has come.

Tomorrow morning (Monday 16th July), I’ll be down with the lovely people in Radio Nova to present the Haze Bassmaster 6 to its new owner, Greg. Greg won Nova’s Rocktober competition and his prize was a custom, hand-built instrument from Haze Guitars. After some discussions, the Haze Bassmaster 6 (with a few tweaks) was decided upon.

Thirty inches and six strings. The Bassmaster is a wonderful, quirky, beast with a tone that’ll get you noticed. This one looks great with a lovely ash body peeking through that burst. Nice. You can check out the build process for the Nova Bassmaster if you like or you can read a little more about the Haze Bassmaster 6.

More images to come but do tune in to Pat Courtney on Nova tomorrow morning (100FM) and you might get to hear a bit more. Hurrah!

Let’s see what’s happening on the Radio Nova prize winner’s guitar.

Last time around, we saw the neck completed—it was cut, shaped, carved, fretted and so on. That and the body were sanded.

A lot. Finish-prep really builds those arm muscles. There are a number of sanding stages, each with a slightly finer grit and each involving a lot of inspection for little imperfections in the wood that will translate into bigger imperfections in the finish.

Finally, though, it’s ready for some finish.

Finishing schedules vary depending on what you’re working on, what you’re using, what effect you’re trying to achieve, and exactly seventy-three other factors. Well, more or less. What I’m getting at, though, is that there isn’t a definitive way of going about ‘finishing a guitar’. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how this Bassmaster has been finished.

As the body is a nice piece of ash, I’ve decided to accentuate the grain a little. Some creative grain-filling will do the job.

Grain-filling, by the way, is necessary on certain woods in order to achieve a smooth, flat finish. Many woods (ash, for instance) are considered ‘open pore’ woods. This means that the grain pattern tends to have a lot of tiny holes or pores. If these aren’t filled, the finish applied will simply sink into the pores and won’t allow that perfect gloss that many like to see on their guitar.  The grain doesn’t have to be filled and leaving it unfilled is perfectly acceptable if that’s the effect you’re going for. Here, it’s not.

I (usually—see above about schedules) shoot a sealer coat onto the wood before filling the grain as that tends to make it a little easier to manage filling. After grain-filling, I carefully remove the excess filler and let it dry. Then I seal that in too. That’s the stage you see in the first image above.

Now to take some of that pale look off the wood and warm things up a little. A coat of amber-tinted lacquer will take care of that quite nicely.

As this instrument will be a ‘black-burst’, I’ve hit the edges first with some black pigmented lacquer. I get these coloured first, before moving on to the top and back and the actual burst.

Incidentally, the reason you’re seeing the back of the guitar in all of these shots is that I’m spraying this in the old Fender style. On the front of the guitar are three nails that support it—raised—above a turntable. When spraying, I do the front first and then flip it to do the back. It’s at this point I can more easily take a photo.

Now the money-shot. The burst has been applied to the body. For any readers who don’t know what the hell I’m talking about with all this ‘burst’ talk, it’s a method of applying finish with a gradual fade from one colour to another. Burst is short for ‘sunburst’ a term coined (I think) early in the last century. There are many kinds of sunburst finish and different manufacturers have different styles and methods but the most common are one and two graduating colours from a lighter centre (which, make what are called two or three-colour bursts).

In this case, we have a two-colour burst: Light amber at the centre graduating to black. A black-burst.

Nice.

We’d better not finish up without a word about the neck. This neck has a dark, ebony fretboard. Couple that with this headstock and we’ve got a nice, Spinal Tap, none-more-black thing going on.

A silver Haze logo and a Bassmaster 6 logo applied and we’re good to coat over with clear lacquer.

And that’s where we’re up to. This was all completed a while ago and is sitting, waiting for the lacquer to properly cure. At that point, I can wet-sand back the finish on neck and body before buffing the hell out out it to get things nicely glossy.

In the meantime, there are a few smaller jobs like cutting the pickguard (a custom shape so no easy route of buying something off-the-peg).

What should be the final update in this series soon. Stay tuned.

Time for an update on the Nova Bassmaster.

I say ‘time’ but what I actually mean is ‘incredibly overdue’. Sorry about that but, when things get busy, sometimes blog posts and updates fall behind.

Rest assured though, that progress on the Bassmaster has been… well… progressing. The image on the left shows the body with the additional control cavities cut.

Also new since the last update is the neck pocket. In common with the Haze BC-1, this instrument also has the neck pocket cut at a slight angle (about 2°). It’s not strictly necessary on this bass but doing so allows me to get a little more break angle from the strings over the bridge. This improves the tone and sustain and helps keep everything in place down there.

Most of the work since last time, however, has gone into the neck.

The first image above is mainly just the outline where the neck will be cut from this maple blank. You’ve probably spotted two channels already cut. These are actually going to hold carbon-fibre rods that will help to stiffen the neck and prevent the tension of those six, chunky strings from bowing it too much. The rods are epoxied in place and, as they’re carbon-fibre, they don’t add any weight to the neck. There will be an adjustable truss-rod too, of course but I thought you might find this interesting.

The image on the right shows the fingerboard being glued to a neck. Yep, those are rubber bands. Actually those are two very, very long rubber bands and they are great for jobs like this. They provide a firm, even pressure that’s perfect here. Seriously.

On the left is what we end up with. A flat hunk of maple in a vague neck shape and a flat lump of ebony stuck on top. Incidentally, I’ve already slotted the fingerboard as it’s easier to do that before it’s glued in place.

What we need to do is to start shaping things. The overhang of the ebony fingerboard is removed. Then the recessed headstock face is cut. The fingerboard is radiused and I wonder—as I always do at this point—why on earth I would bother to work with a wood as bloody hard as ebony. The reason, of course, is that it’s a beautiful looking and sounding wood but, damn, it’s hard work.

Fretting time. On the left, you’ll see some of the tools I’ll use. When I started doing this racket, I hammered all my frets in (old skool). I began to press frets in more and more (mainly as good tools became available to me). Oddly, in the last while, I’ve been making the move back to hammering more often. Whatever way they go in though, I almost always now use glue too. Glue-in fretting has become pretty popular with repair-guys and smaller builders over the last ten or fifteen years. For good reason, I think. It’s not always merited on repair work but I tend to glue frets on most of my own builds. It slows the job a little but I think it’s worth it.

There are a number of different methods of glue-in fret jobs for a number of different jobs and builders’ preferences. That’s possibly a topic for another day though.

Speedy catch-up: Frets glued and clamped until dry. The fret-ends on the edges are brought flush with the sides of the fingerboard so a player won’t have to rush to the Lacerated Hand Ward of the nearest hospital while the ends on top of the fingerboard are bevelled at an angle to feel more comfortable. Then, the curve at the back of the neck is roughed in before being more carefully carved. After that, a lot of sanding and it’s ready for finishing.

And that’s where it is right now. More soon.

I joked over on Google that the Fantastic Super Haze Setup Sale was speeding my inevitable nervous breakdown and descent into madness. It’s true. It can only be a matter of time until I climb a tall building with an air-rifle and begin to seriously smart the skin of innocent passers-by.

If you’re the sort who’s been desensitised to this kind of awful violence by TV and the internet and would like to speed my crazed, pellet-shooting, lunacy, then you should remember there’s still two weeks of January left.

That’s two weeks to pile guitar and bass setups on my sagging, tired shoulders.

And, as if ringside seats at my psychotic incident aren’t enough, remember that you can get these setups done for equally crazy prices. Seriously: €25 for any guitar setup (even those pointy ones with fiddly Floyds) and €35 for a bass including strings*.

It’s like I’m encouraging you to push me over the edge. It’s like I want to shoot plastic pellets at random people. “All the clues were there. He was a quiet type—kept to his workshop mostly.” That’s what they’ll say.

Those things can really sting, you know?

*See here for more

So, if you’ve been following along (of course you have), you’ll know that the winner of Radio Nova’s Rocktober Win-A-Haze-Custom-Guitar competition is keen to get hold of a Bassmaster—the six-string, short-scale bass.

Groovy, indeed.

So, I figure we’re overdue a bit of an update on the progress of this build as it makes the transition from hunk of wood, to a fantastic, rocktastic, basstastic, instrument.

As this bass is going to be finished in a snazzy, ‘black-burst’, I’ve selected a nice, one-piece ash body. That grain will peek through the finish and look very tasty indeed.

So let’s get it moving. The first image above shows the rough-cut body. I marked the shape on the ash blank using the well-worn template you can just see behind (making templates is pretty dull but it’s time well spent) and band-sawed close to the outline. This leaves me with a vaguely guitar-shaped bit of timber with reasonably rough edges.

Those rough edges are soon taken care of with a router, however. Then the control and tremolo tailpiece cavity are routed (the image on the left). It’s starting to look a bit more like a guitar, isn’t it?

To my mind, though, it’s the rounding over of those sharp corners that really starts to make this look like an actual guitar. I always feel this step (photo on right) is when the wood stops being a bit of a tree and starts being a guitar or bass.

There’s still some routing to be done on this. The neck pocket, obviously and the cavity for the rhythm circuit. More on these soon but, for now, I think we’ll do some work on the neck.

If you want to keep track of this particular instrument, you can use http://www.hazeguitars.com/tag/novabass/

Stay tuned…