Sparkle Motion Guitars Custom Builds and Projects

[Lost In Autumn]

What started off as a curious "I wonder If I could make that work," turned into a pandemic skill and an obsession with glitter, which turned into a side hustle painting guitars for a reputed indie brand based in Philadelphia and building custom guitars for a modest profit. I present to youse, Sparkle Motion Guitars:

[Lost In Autumn]

My beginnings were humble, as beginnings often are, starting with a 2000 Silver Sparkle Squier Jagmaster, that I picked up for $200. The 2000-2004 Jagmasters were overlooked and underrated guitars, perhaps underwhelming stock...


but were fantastic mod platforms. I began with swapping the pickguard:

but really, this guitar deserved more, so much more. I ordered a baritone neck from BYO Guitar, with abalone block inlays to match the pickguard.

Still, it wanted more, so I thought, why don't I try to color match the headstock? A bit of silver glitter and 40 coats of nitrocellulose and it was pretty close, with a proper waterslide decal to show the world that it wasn't ashamed of where it came from:

From there, the stock ceramic pickups were wanting an upgrade and I happened to have a Gretsch Blacktop Filtertron laying around:

I put a Lindy Fralin P92 in the neck and gave it a Wilkinson WVS II K tremolo:

and finished it off with some Wilkinson Tuners and a Graphtech Nut:


The headstock wasn't a perfect match, new Nitro is no match 20 year-old yellowed poly, but it was close enough for me to want to do it better the next time.

[Lost In Autumn]

Next up, I picked up a Warmoth Jazzmaster on Facebook Marketplace that was a prime candidate for a paint job. It had a Strat rout and a Mighty Mite neck, whose truss rod snapped as soon as I attempted to adjust the relief, which made it a great candidate for another baritone conversion, as I happened to have a spare neck. I thought about the color for a minute and settled on a shade that was pretty close to a Burgundy Mist Sparkle:


The first rendition kept with the Jazz Strat theme, but switched the American Pro Stratocaster pickups that came with it, for a pair of GFS RedActives, keeping the Hosco tremolo and Mustang bridge and adding an Allparts 28-5/8" scale baritone conversion neck, Wilkinson Tuners and a Graphtech Tusq XL nut.

The GFS Pickups sounded great, until they didn't & got replaced with a pair of Fralin Hum Cancelling AlNiCo & Steel Pole Soapbars:

before finally settling on a hybrid EMG David Gilmour & Vince Gill pickup set:

[Lost In Autumn]

I picked up a Fender Standard Series HH jazzmaster body and pickguard from craigslist for a low low, and began to assemble, first using a pair of import Seymour Duncan Jazz and JB pickups, with a coil tap

I mated a CV Jazzmaster neck and color matched the headstock in Olympic white. So far, total outlay is about $350.

I wasn't entirely in love with the Jazz and JB pickups in this guitar, though; the Fralin P92 and Filtertron combo had worked surprisingly well in the Jagmaster, so I decided to replicate it, this time, opting for a PAF-Sized Filtertron from ZR Guitar Pickups, and a Fender Am Pro bridge

Eventually, I added an Fender AVRI tremolo tailpiece and a Staytrem collet. It's a keeper

[Lost In Autumn]

I saw an ad on Facebook, selling a Warmoth Jazzmaster for $200. I couldn't pass that up, so I went to check it out. It turns out that it was a kit guitar from either the Fretwire or Pitbull. I offered the guy $125 and brought it home.


the photos in the ad showed a handsome, Elvis Costello inspired offset; In reality, it was janky a.f., with a half-assed stain job, poor sanding a pos tremolo tailpiece and bridge posts that weren't correctly located on the poplar body. I immediately stripped it and got to work, doweling the post holes.



with the bridge posts relocated, I got to work prepping & sanding, then sprayed a base coat of Pelham Blue lacquer.

I then laid the glitter coat:

Followed by 40 coats of nitrocellulose lacquer:

I sanded and leveled the finish, replaced the electronics with 1meg CTS Emmerson Pro pots, with .022mf Orange Drop caps and a treble bleed circuit. I tossed the stock pickups and installed a pair of Lindy Fralin Soap Bars with a -10% wind, properly cut the nut and assemble it. it was greatly improved, but it still wasn't sitting well with me; I wasn't bonding with the Richlite fretboard, the tuners that came with it were junk and that tremolo tailpiece belonged in the trash. So, I dug into my parts bin, pulled out a 12-string neck, 2 sets of Wilkinson tuners, a Faction Guitars 12-string tail plate and a Rondo Music 12-string Tune-O-Matic bridge. Here's the almost finished product:


this weekend, I plan to swap the pickups out for a set of Fralin Hum-Cancelling AlNiCo Pole Soapbars and I think I'll rest on it.

[Lost In Autumn]

Squier's Jagmasters, not just the highly lauded Vista series, but the 25.5" scale Jagmaster reissues and 24" scale Jagmaster II's are some of the most underrated guitars that Fender has made. While it's true that the stock ceramic pickups and other components may be a bit underwhelming and certainly spec'd fo match a price point, they are nonetheless, fantastic mod platforms. Having had a couple long scale silver sparkle Jagmasters, the baritone shown above, as well as a similarly modded, stock neck version, I thought I'd give a short scale model a try. I found a body and neck on Reverb and picked them up for somewhere in the ballpark of my magic, $200 figure and began pondering the build.

the neck was minty, but the body was in pretty rough shape; the seller had tried to hide the dings with a black sharpie- they didn't show up in the reverb ad...

but they were all too obvious in person



I broke out the heat gun and started stripping the old poly away

I then shot ruby glitter over a candy apple red base

[Lost In Autumn]

I'd coating the previous builds with nitrocellulose lacquer from spray cans, which was not entirely ideal. It was convenient in that lacquer spray cans are affordable and easy to acquire, but even with a respirator, the fumes were giving me migraines, it was prone to blushing, limiting me to a narrow window between late April and mid June and late September and early August to shoot in my unconditioned carriage house. It also required a lot of coats to level, (40!) and took months to cure. While many will laud the tonal characteristics of nitro and they may or may not be right, when you're shooting that thick of a finish to level glitter, it probably isn't going to make much of a difference what you're spraying, so I decided to give SprayMax 2k Poly a try. After 12 coats over the course of 3-4 days, it was ready to level:

sanding and polishing was a breeze, ready 24 hours after spraying my last coat.

Whereas in previous builds, I'd been installing boutique pickups, I went a different route with this Jagmaster, opting for a pair of Korean import Seymour Duncan Jazz and JB pickups in the neck and bridge, with the nickel pickup covers removed and a push pull coil tap in the tone pot. I also went with a Wilkinson WVP6SB Strat 6 screw tremolo, because they're such a terrific value and offer a lot of bang for the buck.

I kept the stock tortoise pickguard, installing a gold-tipped Switchcraft toggle, gold screws and gold, Gibson-style top hat knobs to finish it off.



This guitar absolutely shreds and punches well above its weight. It was a tough decision to sell it, but since I'm an unusually large man at 6'8", I let it go; it sold for $650, at DiPinto Guitars, my neighborhood guitar shop in the Fishtown section of Philadelphia, PA.

[sal paradise]

Some really cool stuff here! Did you do all these in 2021? So many projects

[Lost In Autumn]

Some really cool stuff here! Did you do all these in 2021? So many projects

the first three were in 2020; the Jagmaster was done in the spring of 2021.

[Lost In Autumn]

I apologize to the admins for non-offset content, but this one was really challenging and a lot of fun. As I mentioned in a previous post, DiPinto guitars is my neighborhood guitar shop and I've lusted after their guitars for as long as I've lived in the neighborhood and became aware of them. I'll concede that I might be a bit of a bottom feeding cheapskate and the prices for them new, are a bit more than I could afford, at least psychologically. I had a reverb search on them for several years and when this DiPinto Belvedere Standard popped up from a seller who lived the next neighborhood over from me, I couldn't resist; I had to have it.

It was at a price that I could afford, but it had been through the wringer. In addition to numerous small dings to the body and neck, it had a rather large dent in the mahogany top near the tone control

and a radial crack in the finish, a couple inches outward.

I thought about stripping the finish entirely, but after consulting with Chris Dipinto, who pointed out that the mahogany body would need grain filling after stripping, I decided to just scuff it and paint over the original finish. First, however, I would need to stabilize the crack by filling it with thin CA glue

Next, I filled the dings and dents

and masked it off for paint

[Lost In Autumn]

The top received a coat of gold glitter, over a Shoreline Gold acrylic base, rather than the Gibson-esque bronze gold that it had, stock

I considered restoring the black finish on the back, but after finding a photo to the Eko 640 that inspired the Belvedere...

I went in a different direction, and sprayed the back in a Silver Sparkle, under an Inca Silver base, my thought being to go more trashy pawn shop glam than the designer himself, Mr, Creem Circus, Chris Dipinto:

here it is after leveling:

upon assembly, I gave the guitar a few upgrades, using Switchcraft switches, Emerson Pro CTS Pots and a Göldo Les Trem. This guitar was built in the early '00's by Unsung, the same factory that was manufacturing guitars for both Epiphone and Eastwood at the time; it came with Bill Lawrence designed, Epiphone-badged sidewinder Firebird pickups that were likely made by Artec. They didn't sound half bad, but I didn't paint it up to put Epiphone pickups back in it. After doing a bit of digging, I found D'Urbano Magnetics in Sydney, Aus and ordered a pair of Nickel Mr Fabulous Phoenix pickups and installed them with stainless steel trim rings. They're a vast improvement!



to finish it off, I bicycled over to Dipinto Guitars and picked up an enamel head badge, which is really just a lapel pin that Chris uses in lieu of waterslide decals on all of his current Safari models.

After stringing it and giving it a light set up, I brought it into the shop to show Chris. He liked it so much that he's asked me to paint guitars for DiPinto Guitars. Stay tuned for more!

[Lost In Autumn]

Buoyed by my success with the DiPinto, I decided to at least partly set aside my cheapskate ways, take even more risks and try to develop a signature style and experiment with color a little more. I managed to pick up the last swamp ash Starcaster-style body that Rosser Guitars made and ordered it with un-rounded edges, as well as Jazzmaster pickup, bridge and tremolo routing.

To that, I added a left-handed Allparts Stratocaster neck, Fender American Pro bridge, AVRI Tremolo, witch hat knobs over CTS Emerson Pro 1meg pots, Switchcaft toggle and jack and a pair of Lindy Fralin hum-cancelling Jazzmaster Pickups that I had in my parts bin.

I added tortoloid cellulose binding to the top:


next up, dying the body. My original intention was to do a semi-transparent shell pink wash, however, I wasn't particularly inspired by how it turned out, so I sanded it back and tried a different hue:

FolkArt Hot Pink Ultra Dye may have lacked the subtlety I'd originally intended, but it certainly wasn't short on impact and I'm, if nothing else, all about leaning into happy accidents!

[Lost In Autumn]

With the body dyed, it was time to lay down the glitter. My initial concept was to do a take on the classic gold top Les Paul, but with a twist: the body, now hot pink, was going to be translucent shell pink, with a rose gold glitter top.

After spraying a few coats of clear, the hot pink dye definitely makes its own statement

Meanwhile, I wanted to do something a little different with the headstock, rather than maintaining a standard stratocaster profile, so I played around with some carving, doing a mockup on an old Mighty Mite neck with a broken truss rod that I hadn't bothered to throw away:

reversed image; it needs some work, but I like where this is heading:

skipping the sanding & polishing & jumping right into assembly, Mike Adams, AKA Puisheen, did a demo featuring Curtis Novak's Thunderbird pickups in one of his Jazzmasters and I became borderline obsessed. I decided that I had to have that tone in the neck, and Novak's WRHB in the bridge.

[Lost In Autumn]

For final assembly, I decided that since I was trying to do my own take on a classic shape, that I didn't want any obviously branded parts. I'd had a great experience with the Göldo Les Trem and after reading a thread on it here and talking to OSG member whatisdust, I ordered a Göldo DG Tremolo tailpiece from him and installed it in lieu of the AVRI unit. I also painted the WRHB cover silver to match the Thunderbird, and installed a pair of Jim Dunlop locking strap buttons.

I also leveled the frets, set the action and installed a GraphTech TUSQXL Black nut (and ultimately, a matching string tree), a set of Wilkinson vintage style tuners, worked up a logo and had custom waterslide decals made.



My stoke level was high, but I'll admit that I was rather disappointed with the tone of the Novak Firebird pickup in the neck. It was boomy and indistinct, completely out of balance with the WRHB in the bridge and sounded nothing like the pickups in Puisheen's demo video. I was crushed, I'd spent a pretty penny on the T-bird* and it sounded like hot garbage. I couldn't figure it out, I checked the wiring and nothing added up. Crestfallen, I ordered Curtis Novak's JM-HC Diamond Gold Foil pickup and a black cover for the wide range humbucker. The combo sounds incredible. As a prototype, I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out, the tone is warm and the body seems more resonant than any Jazzmaster I've played.I definitely will make another, with some minor changes to the headstock carve and components; while I'm pleased with the performance of the Göldo DG- it's super smooth, with excellent feel, but it's not quite as solid in the hand as other units. I'll likely try a Mastery or Descendant in an upcoming build for comparison. In the mean time, Rosser is only making bodies from pine these days, which I don't fine particularly appealing, so perhaps it's now time to make my own bodies? I've got a semi-local source for wood, so let's see what the future brings...


















*However, in my haste to put everything together, overlooked that Novak had sent me a bridge pickup instead of the neck I'd ordered. I checked my order receipt to make sure I hadn't ordered the wrong pickup, but sure enough, I didn't receive what I'd purchased. I reached out to Curtis the week before Thanksgiving to let him know and it's been radio silence from him. I'll use the pickup in another build, but I am a bit miffed that he didn't even respond to say, "oops, sorry."

[Lost In Autumn]

sorry for yet another non-offset, I'll get it back on track, I promise... I bought this Epiphone Wildkat new in 2003, at a guitar shop in Ann Arbor Michigan. I'd regretted selling a 60's Gibson ES12TDC with a Bigsby to pay my college tuition and prices on them had escalated out of reach in the decade or so that followed. The Wildkat had a similar rockabilly style at a price that was less than that I'd bought and sold that ES, for <$500. The neck is what lured me in, even though the pickups sounded like hot mud. I bought it thinking that I'd change out the pickups sooner than later, only to throw the towel in on playing music again. I eventually left it in my father's barn in Iowa for about 7 years and only got back after I'd started playing again, 3 years ago to this very date. After scrubbing the dust off of it, oiling the fretboard, giving it new strings and a quick setup, it still looked and played great!


but it sounded like my amp had been shoved into a closet and covers with a half dozen, heavy blankets. It sounded like hot mud. Many reported that changing out the stock wiring harness, which used nearly 3m of gavitt coaxial wire, reduced the capacitance and brightened the tone. It certainly did. A new wire harness was a dramatic improvement, but the stock pickups, with heavy, chrome covers gave a good deal of shielding to the P90's, at the expense of high end chime.


others said that changing the covers helped, so I tracked down a pair of plastic dog ear covers that fit the Wildkat's unconventionally spaced P90s. It helped quite a bit, but I remained unsatisfied.


Finally, growing increasingly weary of my dukkha with regard to this guitar, I exercised what I though was the nuclear option at the time, and threw in a pair of Lindy Fralin dog ear P90s. They sounded magical and for I while, i was quite pleased, until my tone chase led me in other directions and many, many other guitars.


This summer, I realized that I kept reaching for other guitars when I'd practice or record and began to think that maybe I should sell the Wildkat. Still, I'd had that guitar for a minute and while the neck felt like home to my hands, even more than most of my other guitars, the tone didn't have quite the chime, spank and sparkle that I wanted. Given that I'd been pleased with the very affordable Blacktop Filtertron that I'd put in the Baritone Jagmaster, I figured that for $75 for a pair, it wasn't much of a risk to see if that would help. Indeed it did! The Filtertrons took it to that magical glittery land somewhere between a Fender Stratocaster & Gibson Firebird for high end clarity and a P90 for low end response. That was it!