Gasalcoholics anonymous? whoever said this was a help group?

[Blackened Soul]

Gives me a thought, wondering whether an updated version of the construction could be done with carbon fiber or some other sort of composite. Compare the existence of the Enya Novo, an all carbon fiber instrument with built-in practice amp that goes for $500-ish. Seems like a CF body shouldn’t be prohibitive to do at some reasonable scale. I guess it’s the initial engineering and passing the vintage snob ears test that’s the barrier.

Sadly carbon fiber has really fallen out of popularity.. Moses is gone, status is limping but still not making necks.. cost is always high on that stuff… there are a few new companies but they seem to be into making things that are uncool… I get the whys as a lot of the high performance resins have to be baked to set correctly.. but for something like a Supra/airline.. you could totally make a body with carbon fiber from tap plastics and west systems epoxy.. even fiberglass.. if you use epoxy instead of polystyrene resin you won’t have as nasty a outcome and it won’t outgas.. you just have to make a plug to make a mold to make your parts..

[dubkitty]

it seems like CF was the go-to option for exotic replacement necks in the 80s/90s, but aluminum took over after the millennium. i can’t even recall seeing an aftermarket CF replacement neck in my endless crawls on the usual sites in the last few years.

[Zork]

And I couldn't wait and ordered the Fender Villager 12

The guitar came in yesterday. It looks and sounds very nice and is very nicely built. However, they managed to fuck up the measurements. While the string spacing on the saddle and on the bridge is very convenient and easy to play, the neck gets muuuuch too wide very quickly and on the 12th fret, the outer strings are almost 5mm away from the fretboard edge. It feels super weird because all the strings are in the wrong place relative to the fretboard. I don't mind adapting to wider or narrower necks but on this one it is just wrong internally, so to say. It makes no sense and in my opinion, it's a major design error that's unacceptable for today's standards. The guitar goes back. I'm very, very disappointed.


Now I need to find a different 12 string I want to try. Most of the new offers are too big and too ugly for my taste and on the used market, it's 90% Japanese laminate Dreadnaughts from the late 70s. I've seen a beautiful 2017 model from Vintage™, a parlor sized guitar with even a slotted headstock, the VE8000PB-12 (what a sexy name for a guitar). But they seem to be quite rare and I don't fully trust the Vintage brand. Looks like this:

[dubkitty]

that sounds more like a bajo sexto that’s been retconned into a standard 12-string. it might be interesting to redo the saddle so the string spacing is more reasonable, but i can certainly see not wanting to fuck with it.

small 12ers are rare, i think because the string tension is too much to distribute around the top of a smaller body.

[Deltaphoenix]

I had a Modulus Fretless bass with a CF neck and I hated it. Something sounded off in the overtones.
My Tele has an aluminum neck and CF fretboard and it sounds amazing.

[Phosphene Audio]

Gives me a thought, wondering whether an updated version of the construction could be done with carbon fiber or some other sort of composite. Compare the existence of the Enya Novo, an all carbon fiber instrument with built-in practice amp that goes for $500-ish. Seems like a CF body shouldn’t be prohibitive to do at some reasonable scale. I guess it’s the initial engineering and passing the vintage snob ears test that’s the barrier.

Sadly carbon fiber has really fallen out of popularity.. Moses is gone, status is limping but still not making necks.. cost is always high on that stuff… there are a few new companies but they seem to be into making things that are uncool… I get the whys as a lot of the high performance resins have to be baked to set correctly.. but for something like a Supra/airline.. you could totally make a body with carbon fiber from tap plastics and west systems epoxy.. even fiberglass.. if you use epoxy instead of polystyrene resin you won’t have as nasty a outcome and it won’t outgas.. you just have to make a plug to make a mold to make your parts..

Another problem is that, whatever the potential for carbon fiber, a lot of companies just make weird decisions when they do give it a go.

I don't know if they are still active, but Composite Acoustics, a somewhat reputable composite builder (at one point bought out by Peavey) made an electric model at one point, called the Blade.

I bought one during the initial preorder and it was.....ok. It was affordable, $599, I think (probably in the late 00s/early teens), but it was not what anyone I have ever met was looking for in a solid body electric, which was how it was marketed.

I think it had Duncan pickups, maybe a JB in the bridge, which is a pretty hot pickup, but pretty normal within the realm of standard issue solid body guitar OEM pickups. The problem is, the guitar was almost entirely hollow, except for some build up around the bridge/tailpiece. It was touchy to use at gig volumes with moderate or high gain. It was honestly closer to a hollow body than a solid body or semi hollow. This is not necessarily bad, but it was marketed as a solid body composite electric.

Also, the only way to access the pickups or controls was to remove the entire back of the guitar. There were phillips screws every couple of inches around the back of the guitar. The problem is, they put them (or at least mine) together before the resin in the carbon mixture had cured and the thing had to be pried apart with a paint scraper and there was some tearing. I had to get into the guts because the Strat style output jack was installed poorly and was shorting out.

Also, the neck had no truss rod. In and of itself, this is not a problem. There are Steinbergers without them and, indeed, wood necks without them. The trouble is, the CA carbon formula did not result in a very stiff neck. If you wanted to use a set of 11s, you had relief that resembled a ski jump. I have owned MANY wood necks stiffer than the CA.

Lastly, the frets were tiny, like vintage mandolin tiny, very difficult to play, IMO.

I had mine for a month or two, used it at one gig, and sold it while people still wanted them.



Similarly, I had a Parker Nitefly. There were a lot of good ideas swirling around the genesis of that guitar that were undermined by poor execution. The carbon fiber skin was supposed to make the BASSWOOD (yes, my early one had a basswood neck) stiff, but even with a 10-46 string set, there was way too much relief. There were other problems that had nothing to do with carbon fiber, but I've probably derailed the thread enough.


Ultimately, as much as I am in favor of experimentation and have bought in on it in the past, the product needs to work, sound good and be reliable. It's a tougher bar to clear than one might think, considering how many affordable and usable traditional guitars are on the market at present.


Honestly, Steinberger and Modulus got it pretty right back in the day, but the public didn't want it.

If the various attempts to re-energize the Steinberger name (Gibson MusicYo era and Ned's NS company) had gone with stainless frets, I bet they would have been more successful. NS does fine with the violin family, though. I had a Music Yo GM4S (necks were by Moses at that point) and wore the frets to nubs in 18 months. It's a shame because the guitar sounded great. Replacing the neck or getting a refret would have been half the cost of the guitar, and a hassle. I sold it and moved on.

It doesn't help when some of the principals are utter cranks. I used to be FB friends with the Moses guy. That ended when he started blaming the COVID vaccine for tinnitus. Bye, loser.

[Blackened Soul]

Thanks for sharing, that is interesting stuff!
I think lot of your points is why I never really went cf.. although I do own a Moses pbass neck.. I think I had it on a bass for a week.. it was too heavy for that body… shame about dude got nuts.. too many boomers lost their sense of reason due to believing fake news calling real news fake….

The refret issue is on the pathetic side… let’s use spaceage tech but install frets like they have since the 1930s… although Parker’s idea is interesting.. you ever watched his vids?

I never got the cf hollow-body-for-weight design concept.. hollow is hollow, doesn’t mater what you make it out of..

I’m kinda thankful that I so disliked my time in the glass shop when I was in collage (I have a degree in traditional marine carpentry and repair - boat building) that I never got into experimenting on my own…

[dubkitty]

i don’t love dealing with fiberglass, but i’ve seen what goes into making boats and surfboards and i’m sure manufacturing with it is ten times worse.

the only guitarist i know of who seemed really committed to carbon fiber necks was Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead with his Modulus Strats, and he’s been back to normal guitars for years now.

[dubkitty]

i checked out some videos of the single-pickup Supros i’m thinking about for the Bigsby project and they seem promising…they sound cool stock but not in a way that’s terribly different to a lot of bridge pickups so i feel OK about messing with it, and the resonance feels right to me. i’m still not certain, but everything seems plausible so far. now, if one would go up for $300 i’d really be happy because that’s probably less than a good Tele neck and body would cost.

[Gone Fission]

Flashing back to someone marketing Tele shaped bodies made like Danelectros out of dry-erase board material with some Masonite-like backing. This was mail-order from a tiny ad in the back of Guitar Played or Guitar World late 80s or early 90s. Different thing, but rhymes.

[Phosphene Audio]

The refret issue is on the pathetic side… let’s use spaceage tech but install frets like they have since the 1930s… although Parker’s idea is interesting.. you ever watched his vids?

Despite its flaws, I loved the Nitefly and played it for years. The frets were great.

[Phosphene Audio]

If the various attempts to re-energize the Steinberger name (Gibson MusicYo era and Ned's NS company) had gone with stainless frets, I bet they would have been more successful. NS does fine with the violin family, though.

I've been thinking about this, and the 2 things Steinberger put on the map in a big way, headless guitars and alternate (non wood) materials, are still going strong in the industry, just applied a bit differently.

Headless guitars are probably more popular now, at least in some genres, than they were in Steinberger's heyday. Strandberg, Kiesel, Ormsby, Ibanez and others all have successful headless lines, mostly bought by metal players. A lot of those are multi scale, which is something a lot of folks may have first seen on the Klein guitars using Steinberger hardware and Novax licensed fan frets.

Aristides, who make fully synthetic guitars with headstocks as well as headless , also seem to be doing well.

I had a Flaxwood for a while, and wish I'd kept it. I think Marnie Stern plays these. They are kind of what CA seemed to be going for in the guitar I described in my earlier post. They are also not entirely solid, but they basically feel like a solid body or chambered solid body, more so than a fully or semi hollow guitar.

The guitar on one side of this was the Flaxwood, with a no longer made Bill Lawrence pickup that was kind of a hum cancelling P90 type thing. The other side was some kind of Strat copy. https://decoherence.bandcamp.com/track/ ... david-kuzy

It looks like they sell necks now, which are their proprietary composite reinforced with carbon fiber:

https://www.flaxwood.com/product/tele-s ... t-on-neck/


They aren't cheap, but not too out of hand, though with the tariff madness, all bets are off. I am surprised they don't do stainless frets, though.

[dubkitty]

the Supro situation is hella confusing…i gather that they made a number of Reso-Glass-topped guitars with different pickups/combinations of pickups with and without vibratos. the White Holiday is tempting because it has a piezo pickup in the bridge, but the pickup controls are probably too close to the cavity for the bridge pickup mount to fit and i’m not enthused with relocating the knobs if it’s going to leave holes in the (any color other than black) top. i kind of got away with it on the Hopf for the sole reason that the black aluminum pickguard helps de-emphasize the holes visually, but that’s not gonna go on anything lighter.

the closest candidates right now are the single-pickup Sahara and Belmont models, neither of which has the vibrato. i’d prefer a Bigsby anyway because it’s a known quantity i know works for me, but if i check demos and like the vibrato that’s a possibility, though perhaps not worth a $200-300 premium.

Music Go Round has a Sahara up for $349 which gets me right in the hypomania—they’re usually over $500—but i’m pretty tight at the moment due to payments on the Wandré so it’ll have to sit for a bit. meanwhile i’m patching damaged areas on the edges of the Kondor body, which is coming along nicely now that i figured out using the StewMac rosewood-flavored grain filler was the ticked for the areas where the mahogany had been splintered after being dropped. more on that in the Project Guitars thread later.

[Blackened Soul]

If the various attempts to re-energize the Steinberger name (Gibson MusicYo era and Ned's NS company) had gone with stainless frets, I bet they would have been more successful. NS does fine with the violin family, though.

I've been thinking about this, and the 2 things Steinberger put on the map in a big way, headless guitars and alternate (non wood) materials, are still going strong in the industry, just applied a bit differently.

Headless guitars are probably more popular now, at least in some genres, than they were in Steinberger's heyday. Strandberg, Kiesel, Ormsby, Ibanez and others all have successful headless lines, mostly bought by metal players. A lot of those are multi scale, which is something a lot of folks may have first seen on the Klein guitars using Steinberger hardware and Novax licensed fan frets.

Aristides, who make fully synthetic guitars with headstocks as well as headless , also seem to be doing well.

I had a Flaxwood for a while, and wish I'd kept it. I think Marnie Stern plays these. They are kind of what CA seemed to be going for in the guitar I described in my earlier post. They are also not entirely solid, but they basically feel like a solid body or chambered solid body, more so than a fully or semi hollow guitar.

The guitar on one side of this was the Flaxwood, with a no longer made Bill Lawrence pickup that was kind of a hum cancelling P90 type thing. The other side was some kind of Strat copy. https://decoherence.bandcamp.com/track/ ... david-kuzy

It looks like they sell necks now, which are their proprietary composite reinforced with carbon fiber:

https://www.flaxwood.com/product/tele-s ... t-on-neck/


They aren't cheap, but not too out of hand, though with the tariff madness, all bets are off. I am surprised they don't do stainless frets, though.

Shame they don’t seem to do basses.. that’s why I’m a little bummed about status and Moses.. kinda still have gas twinge for a fretless sr5 neck.. only thing available is in fender dimensions..

On the Steinberger subject.. I have a NS upright and a fretted cello, mostly wood though.. the upright is a older one with a ebony fingerboard.. the one on the cello’s is composite…

[le lambin]

And I couldn't wait and ordered the Fender Villager 12

The guitar came in yesterday. It looks and sounds very nice and is very nicely built. However, they managed to fuck up the measurements. While the string spacing on the saddle and on the bridge is very convenient and easy to play, the neck gets muuuuch too wide very quickly and on the 12th fret, the outer strings are almost 5mm away from the fretboard edge. It feels super weird because all the strings are in the wrong place relative to the fretboard. I don't mind adapting to wider or narrower necks but on this one it is just wrong internally, so to say. It makes no sense and in my opinion, it's a major design error that's unacceptable for today's standards. The guitar goes back. I'm very, very disappointed.


Now I need to find a different 12 string I want to try. Most of the new offers are too big and too ugly for my taste and on the used market, it's 90% Japanese laminate Dreadnaughts from the late 70s. I've seen a beautiful 2017 model from Vintage™, a parlor sized guitar with even a slotted headstock, the VE8000PB-12 (what a sexy name for a guitar). But they seem to be quite rare and I don't fully trust the Vintage brand. Looks like this:

I hate to say it but you are probably better off with an entry level Taylor- I am unaware of another smallish 12 string that will actually play well and stay in tune out of the box. I have experience with the entry Martin 12 and I liked it, but it’s a big ol dreadnaught.