One thing I have always wondered about guitars is, why are the pickguards plastic? You’ve got all kinds of exotic woods, precision craftsmanship, topped off with a cheap piece of plastic. Not to say they always look bad, just that a lot of times they could look so much better. The Japanese guitars of the 60’s often had metal pickguards. It contributes immensely to their design aesthetic and it’s not surprising these guitars are becoming more and more sought after.
From a practical point of view metal pickguards can help shield the guitars electronics from outside electrical interference. Most plastic pickguards are at least partially covered on the underside with metal foils for this reason.
So now I’m sure your thinking, maybe I should get me a metal pickguard. Well, your in luck, because I recently came across a maker of fine, custom, handmade metal pickguards. Her name is Christiane Eertmer and she is an artist from Germany. I asked Christiane if she could tell me about herself and her work and she had this to say:
I started making these pickguards about 2 years ago. I’m a trained engraver. I was trained to engrave hunting rifles with traditional engraver tools.
I love to engrave and working with metal in general and since I also love the beauty of guitars so I wanted to combine this.
About the process. I make the pickguards of metal plates (aluminium, brass, copper). At first I make the designs with pencil and paper. Then I saw the pickguards out and engrave them.
Lately I also started to plate the metal with other metals like gold, brass or copper. Or I work with paint.
I make everything myself and by hand. I don’t use CNC, laser or mechanical gravers.
Some of the pickguads (like Strat, Tele, SG …) consists of two parts the sawed out part and a backplate. This backplate is also made of metal to serve as a shield and to cover the electronics.
I make my own designs as well as custom work.
I accept orders for all shown pickguards and also for custom pickguards.
The price depends on the material, design and size.
Prices for the Les Paul size start at $ 45
for Tele, Firebird, Thunderbird, SG size at $ 70
for Strat, Flying V, Precsions bass size $ 85
(without shipping)
This is a beautiful version for solo guitar of this classic tune. Pat walks you through every note in this 3 part series. Man that tone is great! And check out this other amazing version by Brian Setzer
While playing in a band is certainly the ultimate goal of many guitarists, getting to the point to where your confident enough in your abilities to go to that first audition takes lots of practice. And though playing along with a metronome is great for technique, it not always very inspiring.
Backing tracks are songs with one or more instruments removed. The omitted instruments are meant to be filled by a live player. It’s like a backing band that will play the same song as many times as it takes for you to learn it, except without any snarky comments. And they’re never late for rehearsal.
Guitarbackingtrack.com is a site with thousands of these tracks, all for free. Not surprisingly the genres represented best are rock, pop and blues. The quality of each track varies widely as all tracks are user submitted. Some are the actual track, processed through software to remove the guitar parts, others are done as cover songs, or played completely with midi instruments.
It’s a great resource and may be just the thing to get you out of a rut, or make guitar playing more fun so you’ll end up playing more.
DorkbotPDX is offering custom PCBs based on your own designs for a very reasonable $5 per square inch for 3 copies of your board. They say that the low price comes from creating large circuit boards with dozens of small boards ganged together. Great idea.
The boards are 2-layer, with soldermask and silkscreening on both sides. Shipping cost is even included.
So once you have breadboarded that perfect pedal design, this seems like a great way to turn it into a “real” effects box without buying the equipment to burn your own boards.
Here’s DEVO playing the single off their new album, the first in 20 years. It even features the famous “Blue Potato” Ibanez that guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh sold in the mid 80s for $250 to fuel his drug addiction. In the mid 90s he sobered up and regretting he sold his beloved potato he set off in search of it. But it took him a decade till he finally tracked it to pro skateboarder Jason Jessee.
That’s right, Devo on a guitar blog. Everyone else already has plenty of Satriani, Vai, Beck…The guitar is the people’s instrument. It’s not just about the “gods”.
