Tell me about your maple neck-through guitars...

[moon]

Anyone ever had a maple neck-through (particularly with humbuckers)? What did it sound like? How did you like it?

I've almost made up my mind to get a neck-through blank. This will be 5-ply maple with a couple of walnut stripes and it comes already fretted with a rosewood fingerboard so I just need to carve the headstock, attach some body wings and do a little bit of routing.

To make a good guitar you need to have a sane plan which brings the best out of the materials by working with their natural tone and other characteristics. If I only knew what they were... I don't have any experience of maple neck-throughs. Most people seem to say neck-through sustains a little better than bolt-on or set necks but that's all I know.

I'd like to make a dual-humbucker guitar but that's not set in stone. I could use my Epi dot as a wing donor for a neck-through 335 or add some mahogany wings to make a Yamaha SG or a Firebird shape.

None of these guitar designs have maple necks though. I'm not sure how that's going to work with humbuckers. Maybe I should be thinking more about single-coil designs like a Tele or a Jaguar?

[Dru Edwards]

Hi Moon, my Schecter C1-Classic has a "multi-ply maple/walnut" neck thru. I got it 10 years ago and gigged it for about a year in a metal band. It has a mahogany body with a maple cap.

I do find the guitar just a tad bright but that could also be the Seymour Duncan JB in the bridge. I didn't buy the guitar for the neck though, I bought it because I didn't want to take my Les Paul to some of the 'holes' we played in when we started. I never noticed any big sustain difference between my C1-Classic and my 10 lbs Les Paul.

Sounds like you have a fun project on the go.

[clintj]

Look up an Eastman thinline on YouTube. The T386 is solid maple, from headstock all the way through to the endpin. It ends up a little brighter than an ES-335 due to the neck difference, and has more natural jangle both unplugged and plugged in. They can sound really great with good pickups.

[David Eastwood]

This might not be exactly what you have in mind, but here's my maple neck-thru, walnut wing Rickenbacker. It has dual humbuckers, but they are Rickenbacker humbuckers. So, automatically, it's a bit out of the mainstream.

All I can say is that I've owned this guitar since 2001, and I will never part with it. There's something about the overall package that just floats my boat, more than any other electric guitar I've ever owned. I have no idea how much the wood combination contributes to this - except that I firmly believe it matters, and nothing will ever convince me otherwise

[alnico5]

I have a solid maple Carvin guitar. It is a set neck. Body and neck are both Eastern hard rock maple. It has Carvin humbuckers, a master vol and ToneStyler tone pot. I have owned this guitar since 1986 and will not sell it. I use it for 98% of all my electric gigs and noodling around. Weight is 8.5 lbs. The maple is stable, sands smooth and has taken the paint well, in addition to holding the screws nicely, ie; they don't strip out very easily. Sustain is excellent due to a solid anchor at brass nut and Schaller bridge. Maple makes a fine guitar wood! (Carvin makes very nice guitars.)

[moon]

Lots of good info. It sounds like maple is adding a bit of "bright and clear" to the base tone (which I guess makes sense for a hard, dense wood) but nothing extreme. That's really useful to know.

@eatswodo That's a beautiful Rickenbacker. If I make a solid body I'll probably use walnut for the wings. Either that or mahogany.

[perttime]

What scale length is the neck?
It sounds much like what I have in my old Ibanez MC 150: thin Gibson-length neck-through neck out of 3 pieces of maple and 2 thin strips of walnut, mahogany wings, PAF style humbuckers with switches to split them.

In my ears, it is a sort of a half way thing between fendery sounds and a Les Paul. Much will of course depend on the pickups.

[Bob Womack]

I've got a Carvin TL-60T (maple through-neck with alder wings) that does really well. It isn't much to look at...



I found it used in a store and was amazed at how solid and clean it was. It has splittable humbuckers that split out to sound very Tele-ish. The neck is 25" scale with a very flat, consistent ebony fretboard, medium-jumbo frets, and a wide radius. The upper fret access is excellent because the through-neck allows a slim, smooth contour between neck and body. It feels and plays fantastic. I call it my "Swiss Army Guitar" because it is so flexible. Now, when compared to a mahogany/maple LP is is brighter and has more individual-string definition within a chord. It also isn't quite as "sweet."

Does that help?

Bob

[moon]

Originally Posted by perttime

What scale length is the neck?

Gibson 24-3/4 scale.

Originally Posted by perttime

In my ears, it is a sort of a half way thing between fendery sounds and a Les Paul. Much will of course depend on the pickups.

That's interesting. Sounds like it could be quite a versatile platform.

This would also be a good opportunity to experiment with rear-mounted pickups ie a rout that goes clean through the body so you can swap pickups easily without changing strings. I've been wanting to try that for a while. I wind pickups (just for myself) so it would be really useful to test new winds plus it also means I could swap around between different kinds of sounds easily: something filtertron/rickenbacker-ish to bring on the jangle, some standard humbuckers designed for more body, and maybe even some single coils to solve the problem of nearly-but-not-quite humbucker coil taps.

[moon]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

Does that help?

Yes thanks Bob The big thing I was worried about was if a maple neck & body (which is essentially what this: the wings will affect the sound a little but I don't think they have a huge influence) had a really strong character. Strong character might make it really good at one thing but really bad at everything else so you'd really need to know what you're getting into to make a success of that.

However, it sounds like it would be a fairly versatile platform to build on, so long as you're not looking for something with a softer kind of attack.

[straightblues]

I have owned a few. I currently have MIJ Matsumoku from the 1970's. The can be good sounding guitars. Solid maple guitars tend to be bright with a strong fundamental tone. You can offset that by winding higher output warmer pickups. They lend themselves to playing with lots of gain, but they can sound nice clean as well. Go for it.

[moon]

Thanks again for all your comments. The neck-through piece should be with me in a couple of days although it'll be a while before I make a start on it. Anyone who saw my cheap 'n cheerful DIY cab thread will know what a danger I am to innocent pieces of wood. I'll need to plan this one out carefully and try to do a proper job.

I missed out on a B5 bigsby the other day which went for only £15 on ebay!

[moon]

Originally Posted by moon

I could use my Epi dot as a wing donor for a neck-through 335

It seems that Les Paul thought of that first.

If only I could play like him too...

[moon]

The neck piece finally arrived. If you hold it in the right spot you get a satisfying, deep "boinng" when you tap it. I don't suppose this will really tell you much about the final guitar but it's nice to know I'm not starting out with a dead piece of wood.

The frets will need more work than I expected. I'm going to have to learn how to level & crown - yikes - and if that goes bad I'll have to pull all the frets and start from scratch. I guess you don't start a job like this unless you're prepared to learn. That's part of what makes it fun too.

I'm thinking more about a solid body now and have been trying to design a body shape:




The lower curve will need to be positioned so the guitar balances nicely on the knee, and the guitar overall should balance nicely on a strap. I'll need to figure out some way to try to calculate that.

I think I'd like to keep the headstock small and try to keep the tuners roughly in line with nut slots to help avoid strings binding in the nut.

There is no neck angle so that suggests something low like a traditional Tele bridge style (but with compensated saddles!). I definitely want humbuckers so I'd need to cut back the standard bridge.

I also want to mount pickups from the rear ie the pickup rout will run right through the body. This lets me swap them in and out quickly. If the guitar is disappointing tonally that alone would make it really useful for pickup winding, and testing new pickups.

The other thing it lets me do is pop in some single coils etc if I want a different sound. For example, I could switch out the 'buckers for tele pickups (that would also mean mounting the pots & electronics on a removable front plate so they could be swapped out easily too). With a Tele bridge and the maple construction, I might get a nice snappy, twangy Tele tone.

Also, adding a Bigsby would give me a second way to string up the guitar with a lower break-angle for a slightly smoother kind of attack. Less "snap" might take me closer to traditional dual-humbucker kind of sound when I've got humbuckers mounted - not to mention all the fun and frolics of a wang bar.

It would be possible to fit a tunomatic but I'd have to shape the body piece in order to create a neck angle - 3 degrees or thereabouts. It is thick enough to alllow that but I think I might struggle to do it precisely. Plus, I'd lose the option to set the guitar up like a Tele.

Some people recess the tunomatic to get it to fit a flat neck but I'm not sure I'd like that.

This is going to be hard.. but interesting. I'll need to put it away for a bit until I can afford some tools. It won't hurt to have more time to read up on the skills I'll need to pick up anyway.

[clintj]

Just a thought, but how about a replaceable pickguard like the Strat uses? Bathtub rout the body, and pickup changes become fast. Just have a second pickguard loaded and ready to go, and use a quick disconnect to the jack.

I'm eager to see the finished product.