Building Your Dream Custom Guitar

custom guitars

Many artists and music enthusiasts love their guitars. Their love for guitars drives them to make their own custom designed guitars. These guitars involve making use of graphics, bright colors, different designs and state-of-the-art technology, to produce the best quality of sound. Many guitarists have redefined the shape and look of a guitar to make it look unique and different. Custom-built electric guitars are usually made in accordance to the likes of an individual. Many production companies cater to their clientele with the assurance that their custom guitar will not be replicated. This gives the owner a personalized guitar. Custom- built guitars are expensive and valued possessions of artists, and to replicate them would diminish the value quite a bit.

Preparing For The Custom Electric Guitar Builder

Preparation before ordering a custom built electric guitar.

Before you start to make your custom guitar from a luthier (that’s guitar builder for you and me), there are some things for you to prepare first:

1. You will need to draw the guitar to scale. This doesn’t have to be an entire 3D drawing, but a large enough flat picture on paper drawn to scale of the head and body of the guitar. It can help to speed up the design process.The luthier will create templates of both the neck and body of the guitar made out of plywood or sometimes perspex, kind of like a flat version of the guitar that’s going to be created.
2. You need to know exactly what parts you want on the guitar. These are crucial to the design of the guitar. Electric guitar builders can’t even think about starting on a guitar before all the parts are right there. Acoustic guitar builders have less of a problem as there are less parts to worry about.
3. Find a guitar neck that you like the feel of and try find out the measurements, like fret board radius, neck thickness and scale length.

The best electric guitar construction method

There are three basic electric guitar building methods to consider that are most commonly referred: the bolt on neck, glued in or set neck, and neck through body construction.

The best choice would be neck through body construction, the second choice is a set neck,while the last is the bolt on neck

Some luthiers will do something called a deep set neck tenon, which is half way between a set neck and a neck through. Not a bad compromise at all.

Good wood equals good tone

There are many good woods to use on a guitar. A good idea is to do some proper research, like listening to some of your favorite guitars and see what wood they used on them.

Guitar tone is a very personal thing, so no-one can tell you what to do there. An experienced luthier will have a good grasp of the tonal character of various woods, so tell them what you want and they should know what to do.

The value of a personalized custom electric guitar is something that’s difficult to quantify. I personally think that any good guitar is worth more than the money you pay for it.

For those of you who like it better to purchase branded guitars, the Gibson, Fender, Martin, Ibanez, and others could be the perfect choice.