Guitars made from old game consoles
Techeblog has a nice roundup of old game consoles modded into working guitars. The Sega Genesis axe takes the cake, especially for the look of quiet pride on the maker's face as he proffers it to the camera. Go Nigel go!
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Yes yes yes I want I need. currently weighing up the value of my old SNES and the pickups on my current guitar... . I'm gonna do it. Must do it.
They look kinda cool, but surely the sustain and note-clarity on a mostly-hollow plastic guitar is rubbish..
Guitar makers have long searched for different wood densities and shapes that can produce a long clear note. I'd like to hear some demo's or someone who knows guitars offer an opinion on this
The guy in the pic is Nino of Megadriver.
http://www.megadriver.com.br/
He's been around for a while now! Check out his mp3s.
http://www.megadriver.com.br/sitev2.cgi?gigs
The wood actually robs tone while increasing sustain. The character and shape of the wood creates tone by sapping energy from the string unevenly across the frequency spectrum. So, dense woods such as maple have sustain but crappy tone. Mahogany has tons of tone but no sustain. A les paul has a big chunk of maple on a bigger chunk of mahogany.
This guy is using a strat style bridge (hardtail). This sort of bridge uses metal for tone, in the form of a tremelo block. On cheap bridges this is made from cheap metal, on good bridges it is machined from a large hunk of brass or hard steel. That is why a strat sounds metallic (the yamaha sg copy had a tune-o-matic but still had a sustain block, what a great guitar that was). The wood on a strat also contributes, but less than on a tele, which is made from a light dense wood (ash or alder). This gives the tele a nice snappy sound.
Plastic tends to have an even frequency response (this is why good speaker cones are made of plastic - they don't have huge resonance problems). However, it is not particularly dense. So a plastic guitar would in all likelihood have neither sustain nor tone. This can be remedied by distortion and not caring.
thanks for that succinct explanation, always wondered.
Songe,
Is it only the surface that matters or can I fill the body with wood? An old NES is probably chunky enough for instance. If your playing a guitar made out of a video game console, you pretty much need to use metal distortion, but that isn't my style, quite. I suppose a bit of google answers all questions anyway.
Good points Songe, this is what my info says..
"" The important rule is: the harder the material, the clearer the sound (a softer material absorbs more high frequencies) and the longer the sustain (i.e. the time a string keeps on vibrating). ""
"" The layers alternate between a hard and soft type of wood. The presence of the hard layers makes it fairly good for sustain, but due to the soft wood layers, it dampens the higher frequencies a bit. ""
http://www.dr-lex.be/guitar/#Wood
However, distortion and not caring sounds like a winning combination in any pursuit! :)