Get Started Making a Electric Guitar

Series Summary

Electric guitars were first invented as a result of the "Big Band" era and the need for amplified instruments. First made by Rickenbacker, electric guitars were rare and hollow bodied. Les Paul, during the forty's was working after hours in a guitar making company and developed the first solid body electric guitar now known as the Gibson Les Paul. Not too long after, Leo Fender developed the first commercially successful solid body electric guitar, the "Telecaster." Ever since, electric guitars and the making of them has grown to become an integral part of music and instrument craftsmanship.

In this free video series, watch as professional guitarist and skilled craftsmen Frank Pope teaches how to build an electric guitar. Learn how to cut the body, install the truss rod, make the fingerboard, make fret inlay, install the bridge, set the wires and electronics, and stain and finish the wood. With this easy step by step tutorial, you can finally get an electric guitar that is exactly what you are looking for. Take the art of guitar playing to the next level with the help of the experts from ExpertVillage!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Frank Pope, FBI Guitars. I'm here on behalf of Expert Village to give you some tips on how to build your own guitar. Now I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how to start out with a guitar plan and ultimately end up with a guitar. The plan that you are looking at is actually the original blueprint that I drew for the guitar that you see under construction behind it. I'm going to talk to you in a minute about some of the adjustments I made after the original design and where the guitar has evolved to at this point. But I wanted to talk to you just a minute about the importance of doing a full scale drawing. If you do a drawing and you've already draw the shape of your neck, you can then use that as the top template for your neck. You can lay out your scale length, you mark it, you can have a general idea of exactly where the bridge is going to need to be on the body of the guitar. You, can get, even if it's cartoonish in nature, you need to make sure that all those measurement are going to fit. In other words, that you have enough body so that the neck will be solidly within that body. That you haven't cut away too much of the horn to not allow yourself somewhere to mount the neck. The other thing is that once you've drawn that, then you can transfer it to a piece of wood. You're going to cut it out with a bandsaw and then you're going to sand it into its final shape. What you consider it's final shape on paper may look a little different when it's in 3D. For instance on this particular guitar you can see, this was the original horn design, which I had envisioned. After cutting that out, I decided that it did not fit with the overall contours and curves of the guitar and that well, it just looked plain geeky. So, using the sander and my eye and a little bit of artistic liscence I changed it to the curvature that you see now. This will be the new final design for this particular guitar. Again a good drawing plan will prevent you from getting halfway into the project and having to go back and decide, what or where, you want to do with this particular part of the guitar or its design. A good plan can save you restless nights wondering, if you've done everything you're supposed to do."