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Comment by The Phrygian Kid on May 29, 2010 at 8:37pm

For my second picture I give you a close up of the body and bridge. As you can see I've crossed the bone bridges one over the other, and they sit on a biscuit of neck scraps. The crossed strings may appear daunting to play but it actually comes quite easily. by shifting your picking focus forward or back you can add in the other neck more and less, making use of it as drones or as sympathy strings as you see fit. When picking on the lower neck, I like to alternate my bass note with its octave and the minor 3rd from the neck above under my thumbpick, this give me an instant 5 string banjo, reentrant tuning vibe.. The resonator cone is from Old Lowe from this very community, his page can be found here.
http://www.cigarboxnation.com/profile/OldLowe?xg_source=activity I bought a few of these cones from him a couple of months ago, at that time they were US$25 each. They are probably the same price now. To fully put this in perspective, I re-coned a National probably eight years ago, and the cone was over $500!! Take it from me, a professional dobro and steel player of over ten years, this is an amazing product at its price point. If you want a great slide sound or if you just want your cigar boxes to be loud enough to bug your mum, this is the stuff, message Mike Lowe right now.. The sympathy string idea worked far better than i dare expected on this cone. I can pick my low e string and watch it excite its brother to exactly the same amplitude. This kind of softens the attack, combining the picking attack with a much gentler, bow like attack from the sympathy string. If you mute one the other, which is still singing, excites a harmonic from the first! Its like an almost infinite sustain! Wow huh.. I didnt even anticipate that.. You can also see in this pic I've used a mirror to show you then end of Mundfick, she has a tail piece made of a brass cupboard drawer handle in a scallop shell shape. This was a couple of bucks at my hardware superstore. There are two output jacks on a merbau plate (fingerboard scrap) This is a smart stereo circuit like you will see on many fx units and synths, if you use only the bottom jack you get the summed mono output of both pickups. The second, optional jack plug is a DPST switching jack. When a cable is inserted here the upper pickup is switched to this jack, leaving the other pickup where it was at the other. This is a very important part of this instrument as it really comes alive when you have a second amp and/or some effects. After a few hours playing with it I've come to really like adding overdrive and some time based fx (delay, flange etc) to the drone/sympathy strings only, leaving the main neck sound rather clean. The rhythmic wash of the sympathy strings can create hypnotic riffs and patterns very easily and is a ton of fun to mess about with. Pickups are a pair of 4 string Stonehenge units from Ted Crocker. Ted makes the finest handwound pickups i've ever heard and his prices are staggeringly low for the quality you receive, i'd definitely recommend them. The sound is a very pleasing clear and bright tone, a very Fender flavour. They respond to a pushed valve amp very nicely indeed. Ted also has the knowledge and ability to give you what you ask for so if you want a very hot one for mounting further from the strings or more bottom end or a nice thin jingle jangle neck pup you only need to ask.. You can contact Ted at
http://handmademusic.ning.com/profile/TedCrocker He also also sells a lot of pickups on ebay. Jeez its all starting to sound like an advertisement huh? Sorry not my intent, just a very happy man with a great new instrument that I feel is possibly going to win this thing and wanting to give all credit where credit is due and convey all the things that really please me about this instrument.. The pickguard is bookmatched from a leftover piece of the spotted gum. This bookmatch (my first) gave me no end of trouble, it fell apart on me twice because i just cut too much of the glue away i imagine, so in the end out of frustration i laminated it onto a white disposable plastic plate. I hope the resulting pinstripe underneath is not too obviously a sign of my error. Each pickup has its own volume control, I turned a matching colour hardwood knob for each. I had a bit of purpleheart so that was easy, the other pickup is rosewood capped, I have none of that and its real expensive here, so i hope merbau will do. The purpleheart knob is still really dark, its a funny and strange wood, it does this when you sand or cut it, it may take many weeks to become purple again. I also added a toggle switch to flip the output jacks, so if i have a different sound for my sympathy strings and for my main strings but I then want to switch the neck I'm playing I can just flip this rather than swap the cables about.
pic is at
https://api.ning.com/files/w-JjRhXO8Gk2ZbkPBHO-wPQV5wHFUWzKBB6v458571*tXFl3zuudv8MBCNRD0MVdOsHF2JZY4XvcP-5B7Crj-NmgFBZcCO9s/P10100111.JPG if u want to zoom

Comment by The Phrygian Kid on May 29, 2010 at 8:37pm

For my third and final pic I give you your full body shot. As you can see these are quite radical fretboards. They are basically only modal strummers but the addition of the minor third to the tuning adds some complexity. As you can see in this pic I have both necks capoed to the 3rd fret or G. This puts the upper neck in the lydian mode, the lower in the mixolydian mode. These are both major modes. If you look closely at the position of the capos you will see there is no fret under the G (minor 3rd) string. The capo engages the string at the next fret up, shifting us to a major chord. Which brings us neatly to my coup d'état. Each correct chord to the scale can be voiced with only one finger, barring across at the appropriate position!! I'm not talking strumstick fudging it with power chords, I'm talking about the triad. The labels I've photoshopped down the side of each neck demonstrate the correct chords which will work together in this scale and makes this instrument a fantastic compositional and educational tool as well as performance instrument. Ooh, one more plug.. Frets from Ben Gitty. Purveyor of the cheapest fretwire to be had on this planet and all round nice guy. Ben's store can be found here
http://www.cbgitty.com/cubecart/ Buy your frets off Gitty guys, they chop up real good :D

http://storage.ning.com/topology/rest/1.0/file/get/153179898?profil... Thanks for taking a look folks and sorry to give you so much reading.. Congratulations to all of you for your fine entries, especially I must say to Henry, great job love to see a real thinking mans instrument bravo.. Best of luck to you all and special thanks to Shane for running this thing and inspiring me to make this happen, I couldn't be happier..

Comment by Leroy Beal on May 28, 2010 at 1:48pm

Craig, your guitar looks great ( you too Tom). Make sure your hot and ground wires at the mono jack are not reversed. I did that once and it made a God awful humm. With single coils, I think it is a very good idea to shield the electronics with copper foil or conductive paint. Here is a picture of the electronics on my double neck. I used blue masking tape for insulation because the silicon tape kept falling off. Out of sight and works fine.

Good luck to everyone!

Comment by Albert J. Guilliot on May 28, 2010 at 1:36pm

How would any guitar player not love these?

Comment by Albert J. Guilliot on May 28, 2010 at 1:35pm

Wow! man this is the shit! You guys are really inspiring... no bull. I would love to pull out this lit up one at the gig and rock it out, Congratulations... and the red one is really pretty, very clean looking. How would any guitar not love these?

Comment by Tom Caneschi aka cbg tom on May 28, 2010 at 7:09am

I call it the Mantarfier Mandolin - Guitar – Amplifier. Here’s my entry that I started building in Feb when the contest was first mentioned and before the rules were posted it’s a DBL neck fretless slider made from a 10x12x3 wine box and two cigar boxes. Oak necks with maple fret boards 15 degree scarfed joints with bird beak headstocks and counterfeit diamond plate fret markers. Top neck is a 3 string 24 ¾ “ Les Paul Scale Guitar. Bottom neck is a 3 string 13 7/8” Scale Mandolin. Both necks have Les Paul copy tuners and separate Les Paul copy volume pots and knobs powered by separate piezos. Chrome sound hole cover is an old rear interior side light from a 1987 Chrysler Lebaron. Chrome bolt spacer sleeves for nut and bridge. LED light kit powered by 2 AA batteries operated by switch from the same bad luck Les Paul Copy with an old dice knob on top. Screwed in and adjustable 6x9 Padron cigar box in the body of the guitar was an experiment to try to achieve different sounds what I got was a lot more volume. Bolted and glued to the bottom is a 6x8 Sancho Panza double maduro cigar box with amp built in. I chose this box for its small size and thought the word double worked well for it being a dbl neck it also excuse the word doubles as a guitar stand by holding it upright. It can be played 3 ways, acoustic, on board amp or plugged into an external amp. I’d like to thank Shane for keeping me busy for the better half of the winter and I hope this qualifies for the contest; I had a lota fun designing and building the MANTARFIER. It’s lit up and ready for bring your homemade guitar to work day.

Comment by Jon Pruett on May 28, 2010 at 5:32am

That's a beauty Craig!

Comment by Craig Winkelmann on May 28, 2010 at 3:37am

Sorry about that, I posted an IMG code out of habit.

Comment by Craig Winkelmann on May 28, 2010 at 3:33am

So ... we're coming down to the wire, it's a holiday weekend, and I am working on a double neck, but, I ran into a couple of problems.

I thought I had one the peg holes drilled and reamed to the correct diameter ... Oops! Now I have to paint the headstock.

My next problem is a grounding issue, my build is buzzing like a beast. How are those who've used single coils grounding your double neck. I wired mine like a would a normal build To top it off I shorted out one of the pickups (Stonehenge) which I now need to do a rewind on.

Here's what I have so far:
[IMG]http://i141.photobucket.com/albums/r54/crumpred/My%20Favorite%20Axe...[/IMG]

Comment by HENRY LOWMAN on May 27, 2010 at 4:47am

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