Full Build | Timeless Semi-Hollow Guitar with P90s & Intricate Natural Wood Details

I'm often asked what's the best kind of guitar and my answer is always the same. It's the one that makes you want to pick it up and play. That's the thought that shapes my decisions while I'm designing and building my guitars. So while I start making the neck let's have a talk through the plan. This guitar build is all about making a timeless semi-hollow electric guitar using some of my most beautiful and warmest woods and I'll be taking a few techniques from acoustic construction to add some really special details. This will be a lightweight set neck semi-hollow electric guitar. I want the overall look of the guitar to be rich and warm with some really nice light accents so I've chose canary wood as the warm wood for the neck and I've chosen elm for the top back and sides for the body. All of the contrasting light wood accents on the guitar will be done in flamed maple so I have a strip of flamed maple going up the centre of the neck. The fretboard will be flamed maple and all of the binding and accent pieces across the whole guitar will also be flamed maple and that two-tone look should give the guitar a really nice simple and clean appearance. For me guitar building is all about neck building. It's the thing that determines how good a guitar feels and something that you make an immediate judgment on the moment you pick up a guitar for the first time. This will be a slim taper neck with a perfect c-shape profile, a 12 inch radius fretboard with narrow medium height frets. The fretboard edges will also be rolled quite heavily for comfort and for maximum comfort I'm going to taper the neck heel and do a seamless carve between the neck heel and the body. Because I'm using flamed maple for both the fretboard and for all the accent pieces on the guitar I thought a nice detail to add would be to still bind the fretboard using the flamed maple but to add a pinstripe of walnut all around the inside of the binding and give a contrasting sharp line all around the edge of the fretboard and that's what I'm working on here. These are the kind of details that I love putting into my guitars. They don't have any impact on the way that the guitar feels or plays but they add a level of care and attention to detail that really appeals to me and I love doing it. When I'm asked what I love about guitar building I think for me I love that balance of creativity and precision that's needed in luthiery. I love that there are endless possibilities for creativity and yet you're still constrained by having to make something to a certain set of rules and that requirement to be so precise in some of the things that you do forces you to be totally absorbed in the thing that you're working on at that moment in time and I think that's a great thing for the head and the heart to be completely absorbed in something that brings you joy whatever that might be. I've chosen small simple three millimeter copper pearl fret dot markers for this guitar to keep the overall look and colour feeling clean and simple. They provide a nice contrast against the maple so you can see them easily when it's dark but still feel warmer than using something like black dots and with those done all that remains is for me to pop a seal coat onto the fretboard and install the frets and that's the point that I will leave the neck at until the body is complete. The body is where I get to use some acoustic building techniques and there's a few advantages to building this way. The first being that I just love making something with bent wooden sides and a matching top and back but more importantly it also allows me to make really light guitars and I can balance the overall weight of the guitar by just ensuring that I leave enough wood in the center block in the body to counterbalance the weight of the neck that I've made. They also sound nice and loud and resonant when they're played unplugged so for late night practice where you don't necessarily want to be plugged into an amplifier they're great. Something I've really found to be true building guitars and I've said this on quite a few of my videos is that patience is so much more important than skill when it comes to getting a really good end result and this type of guitar is a good example for that because the construction method might be complex but by taking my time and just making sure every step is done perfectly before moving on to the next it helps you so much as you go through the build process so I'd highly recommend if anyone is thinking of making their own guitar that they give it a go. If you take it slowly and carefully you'd be amazed at what you can produce first time round. Let's have a quick chat about the wood for the body before we come on to talk through the specs of this guitar. Elm wood isn't one of those woods that's traditionally used a lot in guitar building. It's also not particularly widely available these days but if you can find it it's a fantastic wood to use for guitar building because not only does it have the right tonal characteristics for guitar building but it comes in a wonderful variety of grain patterns and colours and I think produces some of the most unique looking guitars you can make and this piece in particular has this wonderful grain pattern that works perfectly with the design of my guitar. So while I get the top and the back of the guitar glued on and flushed up let's have a chat through the spec for this guitar. This will be a 24.6 inch scale 22 fret guitar and that scale you typically think of as a Gretsch scale length. It will feature two of my favourite vintage voiced bare knuckle P90 pickups. I'll be using a super comfy Schaller 3d6 bridge with Cluson top locking tuners and all of the hardware will be chromed throughout with the exception of cream pickup covers which I'm going to use because they perfectly match with all of the flamed maple binding and accents on this guitar. I need to take the time here to just make sure that that neck to body alignment is perfect before I move on because this really is the last critical part of the build. Once this part is right everything else is downhill from here and with that completed I can move on to some of the aesthetic details of the build. This is where I get to bring in some of those acoustic build techniques and embellishments that really appeal to me and add that extra level of care and beauty to the overall look of the guitar. It's an important thing for me that my finished guitars look like they're one single design thought and this guitar is probably the best example of that that I've made so far. One of the things that's a constant battle in guitar building is that you have access to so many beautiful woods to use and there's always a temptation to choose the most highly figured and the most stunning pieces of wood for every build but something I found to be true is that two really highly figured pieces of wood for the guitar top and for the fretboard never look as good together as they do individually. So I have a rule now that I always abide by and it's served me really well that if I use a highly figured piece of wood for the top then I'll use something more subtle for the fretboard and vice versa. What I've found is that that tends to give you one key focal point for the guitar and a cleaner and simpler overall look which is a style that really appeals to me. We've now reached that wonderful point in the build where everything starts to come together and the last remaining part to do before gluing in the neck and putting a finish on this guitar is to thickness my neck and to carve that perfect c-shape profile. While I finish carving the heel and the headstock transition I'll just take a moment to mention my friend Todd at Sweet Tea Guitars. He's one of my YouTube partner channels which you can find on my homepage and he has just finished a beautiful guitar for a customer which I'll leave a link to at the end of this video because if you like the style of guitar build videos you'll probably love the guitar he's just made. So now all that remains is to pop a finish on the guitar then I can do the assembly and the setup and then we'll take a look and listen to the guitar just on some clean settings running through each of the different pickup positions. At this point I'd also just like to say thank you to all of my recent subscribers. It's a constantly surprising and humbling thing that so many of you are interested in the things that I make and I just would like you to know how much I appreciate that.