Greetings from Scarberia

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RocknRoll Baker
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Joined: Mon Sep 18, 2017 4:14 pm

Greetings from Scarberia

Post by RocknRoll Baker » Sun May 27, 2018 9:20 am

Hi Guys,
I'm new to this website.
I've been lurking for awhile and admiring all the great looking Offset guitars and trying to formulate a design with features that will make for a nice functional axe. I have a collection of guitars, mostly electric but also a few acoustic. Never owned an Offset guitar although a good friend of mine from Ottawa started off with an old late '50's JM when we were kids. I used to play his guitar a lot and dug it's long scale neck feel. He later had a custom made guitar put together from a repair guy who worked at a place called Metro Music. It's on Bank St. right near Glebe Ave. The store has been there since the early 1960's & I believe that it's still a going concern. Anyways, my buddy had the repair guy who worked there at the time make him a JM shaped guitar but with humbuckers and a Strat bridge, finished simply to show off the woodgrain (cannot recall what wood the body was fabricated from). This guitar was a fire breathing monster, very useful for the type of music he was playing, progressive hard rock. I thought I would try to replicate this type of guitar but with my own touches. While I love the shape of a Jazzmaster/Jaguar, the contouring makes it look like an amorphous blob. A bit like a soap bar... or a late1980's Ford Taurus. So to make it look a little crisper I thought that foregoing the body contouring and adding binding both on the front and back I could achieve a look that would be pleasing to my eye yet still look like a Jazzmaster. I have always been a humbucker guy even with the numerous Telecaster projects I have completed, they all have humbuckers, especially in the bridge position. It's not that I'm against single coil pickups, I play through a couple of Marshall heads and my sound is pretty high gain so humbuckers work best. Plus, I can always split them using coil taps, in fact I love the sound of split humbuckers ;-)
So, I'm putting together a Jazzmaster project that hopefully will pull all these factors together. To be clear, what I'm looking for is Jazzmaster aesthetics but with perhaps more modern functionality, eg: humbucker pickups and switching & Stratocaster trem bridge. One of the aspects of the Jazzmaster that I find to be problematic is the relatively shallow string break from the trem to the bridge to the nut & headstock. A perfect solution, to me at least, would be to use a Telecaster type bridge with its string thru body feature. That, combined with its long scale AND humbuckers would be, for me, the holy grail in terms of tone and playability. Other than ordering a custom made body from a place like Warmoth I do not see a lot of options out there. GFS offers two types of Offset body, either with an original type of bridge, or a Strat type bridge but nothing with a fixed bridge. Enuff of my yapping. I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions. Thanks.

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