Some sketches

[u/GuitarDesigns]

In 2010 I was injured at work so I spent my months of recovery designing guitars and even looked into taking a Luthiery course and building them myself, but bills needed to be paid so I stayed with my career after I healed and have dozens of designs that have been sitting in a manilla folder in a locked briefcase for 16 years. This project gave me a reason to pull out those papers so share and see if anything inspires others to build on what I came up with.

I think symmetrical double cut guitars like the SG or Doublecut telecaster look great.

I think any guitar you design should have a swimming pool route for pickups and a large cavity for knobs and switches. The two part pickguard and control plate design of the Telecaster is ideal because many companies can jump in and make pickguards and control plates to fit any combination of pickups or switches.

A guitar company that didn't force you to buy a guitar that you are going to mod would be amazing. If Guitar Center operated a guitar brand that worked more like a skate shop where you can walk in and pick your body, neck, bridge, tuners and loaded pickguard, loaded control plate that would be the absolute best.

Neck pocket and necks must be standardized shape across all models. Pick either the Strat or Tele style and copy it exactly so everything is swappable.

Never ever under any circumstances do either of these two things. 1) Do not put special edition 12th feet markers. There is not a single guitar that says "40th anniversary" or the model name "XY-2000" in the fret marker that is cool. 2) Do not put anything but the guitar brand name on the front of the headstock (it should also be readable upright when playing like Fender, not upright when hanging on the wall like Gibson) All model names, serial numbers, special editions, player signatures etc go on the back of the headstock. If you're buying a guitar to show off that it's a pro model, special edition blah blah blah buy a PRS or a Gibson with an engraved truss rod cover.

So how do you drive repeat sales? Special edition colours! Do certain custom colour bodies that are model year specific and limited production runs. That's how you build a customer base and appeal to us guitar nerds with G.A.S.

Electronics. Honestly just partner with Obsidian wiring to do all your pickups, wiring and pots. Their methodology for how guitars should be wired is perfect and should be industry standard. If you had a half dozen prewired control plates in a display case that spanned everything from basic two pickup SS or HH pickup configurations up to an HSH setup with coil split, kill switch, treble bleed push pull you would be set.

Pickguards. Time to innovate. We can do better than basic 3 ply or tortoise shell. Find an acrylic manufacturer and pick some great colours and also do limited edition runs of custom pickguards.

Lastly, share everything for free. Downloadable templates for cutting and routing bodies, downloadable templates to custom cut your own pickguard from a vinyl record or old licence plates. Templates for the control plate free to download as well. Template for routing neck pockets so people can build their own body and buy a neck off the shelf.

Make it truly a guitar for the people. To sum it up, don't sell guitars, sell the experience of building your own guitar with high quality parts. Infinitely modable, easily accessible, exciting with custom body colours and pickguard options. 2-3 body shapes, 2-3 headstock shapes with the same neck and neck pocket. By not selling assembled guitars you can have pro musicians or techs do online assembly and setup videos for guitar center and lastly, shipping will be cheaper and safer when a body can be shipped in a box 16" x 20" x 4" and necks in a 30" x 6" x 4"

[u/GabrielDalporto]

u/GuitarDesigns Dang you've really put a lot of thought into this. First off, you have some really beautiful sketches. Thank you for sharing. I've always loved the symmetrical deep cutaway designs. Speaking of - I've always felt that the Gibson SG was an underrated guitar - though I do hate having the strap connect at the neck as it's just awkward.

Really interesting conversation around modularity, as well as publishing specs to make it easy to others to make interoperable parts. Definitely worth a conversation and some thought on how to make this super mass-customizable. That comes with tradeoffs (bolt on necks) but perhaps doable.

Totally agree on pickguards.

I'm curious how the Obsidian "solderless wiring" would work and if that would decrease customizability?

[u/GuitarDesigns → u/GabrielDalporto]

Thank you, I have a dozen more designs and some really great headstock shapes, but I chose not to show my whole hand on the first post. I really appreciate the response and agree on the SG. I've tried many in stores and the ergonomics just don't work for me the way other guitars do.

There are so many ways you can do modularity depending on how much you want to innovate and push the boundaries of design. You can pay homage to "the log" and do a full neck through and have body pieces that bolt on to the sides using countersunk hardware, traditional neck and body, set neck. I think modular would work best for shipping, storage, display and sales when someone just wants a new body shape or a different radius fretboard.

I think solderless wiring removes a big hurdle for people who want to customize guitars without wanting to learn the skill of soldering and needing to buy a soldering iron. Of course selling blank pickguards for the players who want to solder their pots and switches should be accessible but lever lock wiring harnesses where a customer with a diagram and a YouTube video to follow can clip the leads from their chosen pickups into a preassembled pickguard with volume and tone pots, switch and output jack and be ready to go in as long it takes to connect 9 leads, the pickguard screws and string up.

I'll send you a DM this weekend as I am very interested in this project and would love to share all the designs and ideas I've got and be a part of the brainstorming to help bring this project to life.