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Article#2 – Parameters of a custom guitar

In our previous post we gave a general view on what a good custom guitar should look like for a player. So, the main criteria are:

  • it sounds good
  • it’s comfortable
  • it’s tailored for the client
  • it’s visually attractive
  • it’s unique

Jules – Melkor 5 string Bass

Ok, now we have our benchmarks, but how do we fulfill them? -To achieve these, we must go through the instrument’s parameters.

What are these and what do they influence?  – This is a very hard question, and we believe that not even the world’s best luthier could fully answer it without some gibberish. Even though the guitar is quite a simple instrument, it can be hard to fully describe it  analytically with facts or physics. What almost all luthiers agree on is that the guitar -as a whole- is an “oscillation unit”. From there on it all depends on the individuals or companies what they want to communicate towards you, or what the luthier believes…. You can hear things like:

  • The wood matters the most!
  • The pickups matter the most!
  • The body wood plays no role in the sound of the guitar!
  • Only the bell brass is the best for bass bridges!
    etc., etc., etc.…

We won’t try to prove or contradict any of those statements. In the following we are going to share our experiences GV guitars.

Stellar – Aquamarine 6 string guitar

So, you can take the following articles/blog posts with a grain of salt, as we share our experiences. Some of you will fully agree with most of the knowledge we’ll share, some of you probably won’t. What we know is that these things tend to work within our workshop.

So, after this “disclaimer”, let’s finally talk about the parameters that will bring the best out of your custom guitar:

Parameters / impact on:

wood

hardware

pickups

finish*

Look

****

**

*

*****

Sound

**

**

*****

*

Construction

***

***

*

**

Comfort

*

***

*

***

*proper luthier grade finish

In the first column you can see the parameters, and for each row we tried to weigh the amount of impact they have on the particular criteria. The weight of impact as stars from 1 to 5:
*- almost no impact 
*****- heavy impact

Scythe- 7 string guitar

In the following articles we will talk about these four parameters in more detail. Until then, stay tuned!

See you next time, in our next blog post!

If you want to ask, comment or notice something, regarding this blog post you can do it in our Official Facebook Group

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