Buying - Or Building - An Electric Guitar: How Experience Matters

If you are a beginning guitarist, then picking an electric guitar (or bass) to get started should be a pretty easy prospect. All you really have to do is pick something that comes close to fitting the type of style you will start off trying to play. Hopefully that's something of decent quality from an established brand so you don't end up spending playing time trying to get the instrument to work the way that it should. But even assuming it is not, and you spend a lot of time frustrated by quirks, flaws, and limitations, the most important thing about that first instrument is going to be playing it enough to get to where you know what you are doing and understand how you interact with the instrument.

My Hagstrom Swede is a quality instrument, limited a bit by the quality of the original wiring and cheap pots that caused some hum issues and a nut that was cut in a way that made the G string bind a bit. Oh, and the bridge pickup had a coil demagnetize not too long after I got it. No big deal. All of those things were easily fixed. And in the mean time it made me use the neck pickup or just play it unplugged. I played it, and my acoustics, and my mini classical, and my Yamaha bass and eventually got to where I kinda knew what I was doing. I didn't need a different (or another) guitar because I was more limited by my lack of ability than I was by my instrument. Sure, I could have had fun learning to play with a vibrato bar of some sort, but what I really needed to work on was learning the fretboard and picking and getting comfortable with the basics of navigating what I had.

Now that I'm getting there, though, I'm starting to realize some things about myself as a player (I mean, beyond the fact that I'm not all that good). First off, I like the neck profile on my Hagstrom the least of all my guitars. I'm more comfortable and play more cleanly and no less quickly on the wider, thicker necks of my acoustics, and even appreciate the wider string spacing of the chunkier neck on my bass more than I do the "thin, fast" neck on the Hagstrom.

Secondly, I find myself most engaged in playing when I'm messing around with slower, more expressive stuff and I find warm, jazzy, open tones inspiring, especially with a little tape echo and tremolo dialed in. I really love the sound of semi-hollow guitars with filtertrons. Those Thinline Cabronitas sound just perfect to me.



Too bad they have an even narrower nut than does my Hagstrom.

Thirdly, I'm getting better at playing with a pick - especially now that I've discovered nylon - but I am always going to gravitate towards playing with thumb and fingers. And for that, I really appreciate having as wide a string spacing as the pickups will allow.

That all adds up to a lot of useful information that can help me decide what sort of guitar I want to get if and when I decide that it would be worth it. Now I can start looking at what is available to find my closest matches and start to prioritize my preferences assuming there are no perfect fits within my price range.

In the process of doing this, I've discovered some things about those priorities.

String spacing at the bridge is going to be limited by the type of bridge used and somewhat by the sorts of pickups that are available (the spacing of the pole pieces or the total width on a blade-style pickup) and by the width of the fingerboard.


Don't want to get to close to the outer edge with either E string. So even if you decided to build your own electric guitar and use individual bridge saddles to give yourself maximum customizability with the spacing, you would need to make compromises along the way depending on your neck and pickup choices. And the moment you start to look at buying a stock guitar you are really starting to have to compromise because the maker's choice of components are not going to give you much to play with.

So, assuming you are not going the all-custom route and are having to pick and choose based on what's available, and assuming that you are unable to find an exact match for your preferences, the next step is to either make peace with your compromises or find out what sort of platform will allow you the most range for customizing what is available.

Set-neck and neck-through construction will both mean living with what you buy, so find something you like from the start because that's not going anywhere.

Bolt-on gives you options because it makes the neck modular. If you don't favor the neck width or profile, you can replace the neck with something more to your liking -- provided, that is, that someone makes a replacement neck that will fit the neck pocket on the guitar body, or that the combination of neck and body is something that can be (and that you are equipped to) either shim or rout to fit the new neck. Shimming or routing is going to be a pain. If you love that sort of thing, then go for it. If you don't, or aren't equipped for it, then your best bet will be to opt on a guitar body that uses a neck pocket the size and shape of a Fender pocket, because that will give you the best range of availability and of options.



All of this combined is why right now I am leaning towards using a Warmoth body and neck as the platform for assembling my own guitar if and when I have the time and space to do so. I can get a wide, chunky neck from them to fit a thinline body. I can choose my pickups from amongst their available pickup routs and not have to worry as much about fitting or retrofitting the pickups. I may even be able to find a bridge rout that fits my bridge choice so that I don't have to worry about screwing up the placement.

All of which gives me a good set of workable parameters to play with while I decide what I really want. And in the mean time, I can still work on becoming a more accomplished mediocre guitar player.