Because Gibson won't make a Jazzmaster copy themselves.

[Ace Flibble]

• Swamp ash body
• Maple/rosewood neck
• 24.75" conversion scale, 12" radius, .87"-.97" full C profile, 22 6100 frets, bone nut and glow-in-the-dark side dots
• Axesrus staggered high-ratio tuners. Work very well, I must say. No problems and half the price of some Gotohs or Grovers or whatever.
• Spray can pre-cat nitro finish: dark candy purple (ice blue base*) and a freehand black burst; black headstock and amber tint neck
• Two generic humbuckers, salvaged from an Epiphone Firebird Studio; screw pole pieces have been replaced with black hex poles from a broken DiMarzio PAF Pro. Did it just for looks, but it seems to have opened up the sound, too. I suppose it must have caused the magnetic field of the coils to become unbalanced, like having one coil underwound.
• Tonerider Rebel 90 Neck in the middle, screw poles replaced with black regular screw poles. It turns out Tonerider pickups are out of phase with the Epiphones, so there's that Peter Green/Joe Perry/Richie Sambora rhythm tone in one position. I thik most people would be pissed about this, but luckily I was considering flipping the phase on one of the pickups anyway as I've always had guitars with out-of-phase pickups. Happy accident, here.
• 5-way goes: bridge; bridge & neck; neck; neck & middle out of phase; middle. I've always found with 3-pickup guitars, switching the neck and middle pickups around in the switching makes so much more sense in terms of the tones I actually use.

*I can't stand how red most ''purple'' guitars are. This includes Warmoth's finishes, even though their site's photos depict a much bluer shade. Transparent purple over an ice blue base was the only way to get what I consider to be a proper purple hue. Plain silver resulted in pink.

This is the result of my love for Les Pauls, my love for all things purple, my passing appreciation for offset bodies and my spine's inability to keep up with the weight of mahogany and maple after surgery.

If I were to make it again, I'd have the bridge routed for a stopbar, rather than string-through. Never liked string-through, but I also don't like dealing with bolting on a neck with an angled pocket. There's always one or two screws which bind and I can't be arsed. I'd also consider switching to a 3-way toggle switch and ditching the neck pickup; for whatever reason, this middle P-90 has a much more balanced tone than other middle P-90s I've had, and as a result I'm using it where I'd usually use the neck pickup and the neck&bridge combination, and the neck pickup itself is going largely unused. Though the neck & middle out of phase tone is too useful, so there are merits to both configurations.

I also intend to switch out the tuners for a TronicalTune/Gibson Min-ETune system, once I've got the spare cash to order without worry; £300 is a hell of a lot for some tuners! I think it will be worth it, though, as I switch tuning pretty much every song.

The neck really does feel like my past 1959 VOS reissue LP, and just a touch thicker than the real '58 and '59 LPs I've been able to play. The 6100 frets are a bit of a jump up from the normal LP thing, but being used to be ESP guitars, it's a comfortable fit for me. The JM body isn't as comfortable under my arm as an LP is, but it's half the weight and that's what's most vital to me these days. Finish is scrappy, but if I wanted to do a full glossy smooth finish I'd not have wasted it on a guitar with generic pickups and standard CNC parts :icon_thumright:. Being a parts guitar, I was quite happy to just use spray cans and get on something that looks nice enough and protects it enough to be practical. It does the job.

Also picked up a Marshall JVM205 head recently. Together, these two have been raising merry hell in my quiet little street. Been cranking out some Birthday Massacre, Prince and Halestorm all hours. :headbang:

 

[mayfly]

nice!

I was hoping you were going to say that was a warmoth finish so I could get one as well!

 

[Ace Flibble]

I've been begging them to impliment a basic 'custom burst' option, like Carvin have, to pick any body colour and add a basic black/cherry/blue/etc burst, but alas, they will not do it. You get transparent colours with black burst edges coming up on the Showcase now and then and they used to say on the website that if you ordered a dye top with a black back you could order a wider burst edge for a small upcharge, but that seems to have disappeared from the page now. I would hope now that they have a small selection of metallic burst finishes they might consider candy bursts, but eh.

C'mon, Warmoth, custom bursts, you know it makes sense.

edit: not that doing it yourself is too hard. Like I said, this was just basic spray cans and I rather rushed through it as I can't say I care too much about getting parts builds looking 100%. If you wanted to take the extra few weeks to let it fully cure and buff it out properly smooth and shiny, you could do so. Plus it's much cheaper than paying Warmoth to finish the body. Of course there are also lots of luthiers who will do whatever finish you want, if you're willing to pony up for it.

 

[SustainerPlayer]

Wow! That guitar is max cool on so many levels. 

 

[drewfx]

Very cool.  :icon_thumright:

 

[croquet hoop]

Beautiful. If you have other pictures from different angles, I'm interested to see how this candy purple reacts to light.

 

[Ace Flibble]

There's not too much of a reaction 'cause I only left it to cure for a week and haven't bothered to buff it up. So being semi-gloss, it basically just gets slightly bluer and darker; that photo shows it at its very brightest and pinkest. I'm tempted to build some sort of carved top next (Starcaster, maybe?) and repeat the finish but give it the full gloss treatment that a carved top justifies and deserves.

 

[ihavenothingprofoundtosay]

Technically, they did make the non-reverse Firebird, which is definitely Jazzmaster-esque.  :icon_jokercolor:

Still, there's no way in Tartarus that Gibson would ever make anything as cool as that. Very well done - more pix if you got 'em!

I'm a little surprised you went with generic Epiphone humbuckers given the quality of the rest of the parts, but if you're happy with the results, that's what matters.  :icon_thumright:

 

[Ace Flibble]

Eh, I had the pickups sat in a drawer for ages and I don't see much point in spending money on fancy pickups when you've no idea how the guitar is really going to sound. I've made that mistake with a Warmoth build before, choosing a set of DiMarzio pickups based on what I thought the guitar would sound like, and having to replace them with totally different Seymour Duncan pickups to make it actually sound how I want.

But also, the basic Epiphone pickups aren't too bad. Neck pickup is a little too thick, even with the coils unbalanced and just the single control pot, but it's not too far off. The bridge pickup sounds indistinguishable from a SD Full Shred I have in another guitar, which makes sense as the Epiphone's wire and magnets are the same as in the Full Shred and it's wound to the same DC. So I may change the neck pickup somewhere down the line, but for now this does me fine.

I'm going to take some more pictures once I've flipped the 5-way; right now the bridge selection is the one furthest up/inwards, and given I use a pretty wide strum with the bridge pickup a lot, I'm hitting my hand on it occasionally. Going to take a while to get used to the switching going in the opposite diection to the pickups selected, but practicality must prevail!

 

[TonyFlyingSquirrel]

Did Warmoth do the Glow in the Dark side dots?

 

[Ace Flibble]

Well, I'm months late to replying, but hell, just in case somebody is searching for such info and sees this, I might as well answer that question:

Nope, Warmoth don't do glow-in-the-dark. That was another company that sorted those for me. Maybe that can be the next option Warmoth adds to their repertoire.

 

[OV7]

Now that is one amazing looking build!