The Difference
The wood
I tend to use localy grown woods as much as I can. Ash and alder for the bodies, cherry-tree, birch and maple for the necks. But what is in my opinion even more important for electric guitar timber than the tree species, is the way how the wood is treated from the very beginning. For my instruments, I use mainly woods from the trees, that were cuted by me personally or under my surveillance. The same for boards cutting and long natural drying. This way I can assure the perfect stability of the instrument for a very long period.
There are two more reasons to use the local woods:
One, environmental responsibility – the demand for exotic woods like true mahogany, ebony or brasilian rosewood has caused so much damage on the planet that it is ireversible. Madagaskar is one of such cases, where demand for special woods completely destroyed the landscape. I don’t want to participate at that. In case that I am using exotic woods, I must be sure about the origin of them.
Two, originality – there are many woods perfectly fitting the needs of guitar building that are accessible for lutiers like me but not for the big companies. Fingerboard made of plum-tree or yew-tree looks phenomenally and you will never see it on a mass production instrument because there is almost no such timber on the market.
Brass nut
I use brass nut as a standard option on all of my guitars. The brass is a very musical material and you can quite often see the bridge saddles made of it, not so often the nut these days. I usually combine it with a hard wood like olive or plum-tree to give it better stability and to calm down the harmonical frequencies of the vibrating strings.
Multi-laminated neck
Multi-laminated neck is my popular choice. I combine three laths of the main material with two strips of veneer and glue it together with polyurethane glue. this kind of neck is super stable and almost unbreakable.
I am dealing with wood and as such, I can never be sure that there isn’t a hidden defect in the wood grain. This procedure strenghten the neck and make it much less sensible to humidity changes.
On request, I make one piece necks as weell.
Different fret dimensions
For those of you that find it quite uncomfortable to play in the highest positions on your guitar with those huge jumbo frets, I offer the possibility to combine the frets of different sizes. For example jumbo up to 12th or 14th position and medium jumbo for the rest. The frets are perfectly leveled to offer you the playing comfort you deserve.
Shielding and electronics
Perfect shielding of all the cavities containing pickups, electronics or wires makes a big difference for the induced noise level, especially for single coil pickups. Unfortunately, You won’t find it on wast majority of guitars on the market.
Similar case is the the treble compensation circuit on volume knobs. Usually, when you turn down the volume knob on your guitar, you notice a dramatic loss of high frequencies. To solve it, or at least reduce the impact of this phenomenon, I enter a simple RC element on the volume knob. It is a 0,5 EUR investment that makes really a huge difference!