So, I told you it was gonna be good.

I’m assuming that a lot of the (Irish) people that read this probably listen to Radio Nova for their fix of great, guitary music. Well, now you’ve got another reason to tune in.

The teasers have started to air and I can now announce that I’ve been working with Nova to help spread guitary-goodness.

Next week (first week in October) Nova will be running a fantastic competition for their Rocktober 500 Countdown. It’ll have a rather special prize:

A custom Haze guitar or bass.

Yep, the lucky winner will get to design their perfect instrument with me and I’ll build it for him or her.

This will be a completely custom instrument. I’ll meet with the winner to discuss and decide on specifications and then I’ll hack at bits of wood and metal and strings and stuff to make their dream guitar or bass.

Pretty cool, eh?

More details to follow. For now though, if I were you, I’d turn on the radio.

So what do you think? I’ve whittled and carved and hammered and sawn my way through a complete web site update. I reckon it looks quite snazzy.

I think things should be pretty stable and solid around here but if you notice anything odd over the next few days, I’d appreciate it if you could drop me a line.

Other than the new coat of paint, I’ve managed to get a few more images of some of the custom instruments I’ve made. I’ve been a bit remiss, in the past, about keeping photographs of my guitars and basses but have managed to pull a few together for your viewing pleasure. I’ll be more careful about this in the future and will try to get some more images of older instruments too.

I’ve also enabled comments on these blog posts—the future is interactive, I understand. Do feel free to pipe up with questions, thoughts and whatnot. At the moment, as this site is for my business, I’m moderating comments. We’ll see how we get on.

You’ll also notice some sharing links down the bottom. If you used them to tell your friends all about the shininess here at Haze, that’d be great.

I hope you like the new look.

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.

Want a more powerful bass? Easy, just square it. The Haze P² really punches out the low end.

Twice as much stomach-thumping power. The P² brings the bass. It’s a classic vibe with added attitude.

A beautiful hunk of amber-stained ash and a monstrous Bad-Ass bridge couple the strings on this beast. Before they head up that maple and rosewood neck, those strings pass over not one, but two pickups. A Seymour Duncan Hot gives vintage tones with an extra dollop of output but the Seymour Quarter-Pound really heaps on the bottom. The P² is a force to be reckoned with.

Each pickup routes through its own volume and tone so there’s plenty of opportunity for shaping that sound and even for getting more traditional tones if all that bass becomes too much.

The Haze P² is a weapon of bass destruction. Is it more bass than you can handle?

Bass times six. The Haze Bassmaster 6 takes six-strings down an octave with thirty, delicious, inches of bass goodness.

It’s not that easy to find a short-scale, six string bass. One with a vibrato narrows the search even more and good examples of such a rare beast are few and far between. Feast your eyes on this though. This is the Bassmaster 6.

An alder body and a graphite-reinforced maple neck. We’re talking solid here. The gloss black of the body is echoed in the headstock and the plain ebony fingerboard but all that chrome ensures this won’t disappear on stage. That ebony board imparts a little warmth to the tone but the bolt-on construction and maple/alder combination keep a focus that you don’t often find in a 30″ scale bass.

With an extra couple of strings and three, individually switched, single-coil pickups to play with, the Bassmaster 6 is chock-full of great tones. Everything from Jack Bruce to Glen Campbell—passing Robert Smith along the way—is catered for.

The Bassmaster 6 plays and feels very like a guitar. It can open up new worlds of experimentation for the seasoned bassist or can help introduce guitarists to the pleasures of the low-end—surely not bad things.

Half-price or 2 for 1 on guitar setups.

We know that January can sometimes be a slow month for gigging musicians.  Why not make the most of that downtime to have your instruments professionally set-up?

And, we also know that for some, January can be the first month with a spanking new Christmas guitar or bass (you lucky people, you).  Well, a good setup can help get the most from your new pride and joy.

So then, for the month of January, Haze Guitars is offering:

The Amazing Super January SETUP SALE.

Any guitar or bass setups booked and dropped in January will be charged at half-price.  If you’ve more than one guitar, this means it’s two for one.

You can get yourself two guitars setup for the, non-princely, sum of €45.  Halve that for one.

Make the most of a slow month.  Make the most of your guitar.  Drop us a line and get set up.

You’d be mad not to.

UPDATE #1: More information and costs.

UPDATE #2: Setups Are Making Me Blind.

Ho ho ho and all that.

The festive season is upon us and, as I’ve got to follow tradition by stuffing myself stupid with turkey and beer, Haze Guitars will be closed for a while over the Christmas period.

We’ll be closed from December 24th until January 4th, 2011.

Of course, you can email at any time – I’ll be checking in.

When we open again, we’ll have a super sale for you.  More on that in the next couple of days.  Stay tuned.

To all those who allowed me to help out with their guitars in 2010, a big thank-you.  I hope you all have a fantastic, and hangover-free, Christmas. Over the holidays, I plan to actually play some guitar instead of hammering crooked nails into them. I’m quite looking forward to it.

Thank you all, and Happy Christmas.

This is the second article in what will be a series (of an undetermined ‘few’) on guitar headstock and neck repair. The articles are written for Guitarless guitar blog and repeated, in extract form, here.

Last time around, we looked at a pretty basic repair of a cracked peghead. This time, we’ll take a look at one where the repair needs a little bit more thought.

A More Challenging Headstock Crack Repair

With string tension slackened, the crack is pretty hard to see. Even under string tension, it only opens a little. This makes things a little more difficult as it’s important to work the glue all the way into the crack to get the best repair. With a narrow crack like this, that can be a tall order.

Before I get that far though, I want to consider how I’m going to clamp this repair. Unlike the repair in the last article, the location and headstock shape means I’ll need to get inventive on this one.

Over in the full-text article, I describe the repair steps for this one in more detail. First off, I make a clamping caul that perfectly matches the curves and angles of the cracked headstock. Then, I use a weird-looking clamping setup to very carefully force open the crack to allow the glue to penetrate fully – this is important. I use hot hide glue for the repair and even warm the neck wood to prolong the gelling-time of the glue and to help it penetrate. Clamp-up, wait patiently and I’ve got a good, solid repair. A little clean-up of the glue squeeze-out and I’m done.

Do pop over to have a read of the full article on Guitarless.

The first in an, eventual, series on headstock repair that is being published on guitarless.com.

We’re going to start with some – relatively – straightforward stuff: cracked headstocks.

An Easy Headstock Crack Repair

A headstock crack is generally a little better than a complete break. There is usually still some wood holding somewhere and aligning the pieces of the crack tends to be straightforward.

One drawback of a crack, as opposed to a break, is that, in most cases, it’s difficult to work sufficient glue into the crack to get a sound repair. If the glue doesn’t penetrate well (i.e. all the way) into the darkest recesses of the crack, the repair is not as good as it could be. This means that you sometimes have to think of inventive ways to open the crack and to work the glue all the way in.

In some cases, as in this classical peghead crack, it’s not too difficult. This was a pretty easy repair. The crack is along the scarf line where the manufacturer glued an extension to the neck blank in order to form the peghead itself. The location allows for the crack to be opened quite easily by wedging (carefully) into the tuner hole. Once it’s open, hot hide glue is worked in without too much bother…

Pop over to Guitarless to read the rest of the article and to see larger images.

Next time, we’ll go with something a bit more challenging.

Some of you guys may already know that, from time to time, I write articles on guitar repair and on some of the various ins and outs of guitar hardware.

These articles are written as time allows and, sometimes, as interesting jobs come through my workshop.  Recent examples are published on the Guitarless blog. Guitarless is a guitar news site and, if you’re interested in guitars and basses, you could do worse than pop over and have a read.

As new articles get published over there, I’ll update here too so you can take a ganders.  Lots of these are ‘how-to’ features with instructions for working on your own guitar.  Some of them, however, are a bit more advanced than most people will be comfortable trying at home – these ones are mainly intended for your interest only.  If you’re reading this though, odds are you’re as much of a guitar geek as me and hopefully you’ll find something in them that will appeal.