Harley Benton Telecaster Kit - Part 1

As many of you will know I recently receiving the gift of a Harley Benton Telecaster Kit and as my degree is coming to an end I have been able to begin the project!

The body of the guitar came fully sanded and sealed so was ready for the application of primer. I bought all the finishing sprays from manchesterguitartech.co.uk, and I can definitely recommend that site - Steve was very helpful and patient answering my questions. I strung up the guitar body using an old wire coat hanger to an old clothes dryer in my garden as it is important to spray in a well ventilated area, such as outside. After reading the instructions from the website and doing some Youtubing I had in my mind the basic form of how to spray. This included starting the spray just off the body of the guitar as a buildup of paint can often occur at the beginning of the spray. With long, repeated motions the primer was easy applied. After three coats of primer I was happy the guitar was covered nicely and no grain was visible.

Guitar body with primer applied

I left the primer to full dry for 24 hours before spraying on the nitrocellulose finish. I decided to go for the sonic blue colour, a colour which I've always loved but never chosen for a guitar before, sticking to more traditional reds or blacks, but it seemed right to go for a bit of a different colour for this project. Spraying on the colour I took more care and attention not to let the lacquer build up as I knew this would be visible on the final finish. Again the process was simple and the results were really good.

Applying the sonic blue nitro

Makeshift guitar spraying solutions

Due to the nature of nitrocellulose lacquer, the colour finish itself would be an acceptable top coat, as it has a slight sheen and with some buffing would come up nicely, however I wanted to protect the body of this guitar so decided to add a few coats of a clear gloss lacquer. Again it's a nitrocellulose lacquer, so would not be like the thick poly finishes on some guitar bodies, and hopefully will age nicely. Applying the gloss in the same method as the primer and colour coats was simple. I am now in the stage of waiting for the gloss coat to fully dry - I am going to leave it for a week before buffing the finish to a mirror level of shininess.




Whilst waiting for the finish to dry I have begun work on the neck of the guitar. On the uncut headstock I copied roughly the Fender headstock shape and cut it out using a coping saw. This proved quite challenging, mainly because I haven't done accurate sawing before, but with some sanding I am happy with the results. No one looks at the headstock that much anyway... I also attached the tuners to the headstock, which was easy to do and they look fairly sturdy. This was one area a guitar luthier friend of mine suggested might need pretty immediate upgrading, however I will see how they cope with a set of my favoured 10-52 D'Addario strings.

I am really looking forward to hearing this guitar, it is slowly looking more and more like a telecaster, I just really hope it's usable and playable! Hopefully by this time next week the project will be complete. As well as these blog posts I will also create a video which will show the process of building the guitar as well as an audio demonstration.

Pedals In Parallel? Inspired by the Strymon Sunset

Following the release of the Strymon Sunset dual overdrive pedal and it's possibility to run two different overdrive sounds in parallel rather than in series (as would be normal for using pedals in between guitar and amp or in the effects loop), I have become really interested in the availability of having different pedals running in parallel into a mono amp setup.

As I'm sure many guitarists will testify, the tones which come from having a two amp setup can be really inspiring. The way the guitar can interact with two different preamp stages with different levels of drive and compression as well as the variations in alterable tones by using the same pedal on both amps can create really unique sounds and if I'm playing a larger gig I do prefer to use a dual amp setup. This does take some preparation however, as I use my delays and reverbs in the effects loop and it is not possible to run parallel effects loops (the two preamps will blend in the pedal creating a messy sound) so when I do use two amps one is "dry" with no reverbs or delays and one is "wet". This means before the gig I have to go through my pedals and presets ensuring that the balances on each are correct and working well - basically it's a hassle. When I heard of the Sunset's parallel capabilities I was really interested, as it led me to thinking that similar dual amp tones would be possible with just one amplifier.

To reassure myself that I didn't come up with the idea and therefor owe it to the guitarist community to create and develop a pedal which does this, I did a bit of Googling and found Saturnworks Pedals who make a variety of summing/mixer pedals which could be the solution. My idea is that I could use a pedal which has more drive and therefor compression, such as my tubescreamer, in one "channel", and either a clean (although my clean is slightly pushed) or a Blues Driven channel to retain that upper-mid/treble clarity and string attack.

Issues I can foresee with a passive blend/mixer pedal thing is crosstalk and interference from the two inputs, as well as doubling the volume by simply summing the two inputs, so some sort of active balancing could be required. Routing of the pedals would also be an issue, as I definitely see a place for just having one pedal on, or having one drive pushing into another in series, however my imaginary blending pedal-thing could have a three way toggle which could cycle through various options, such as A->B, B<-A, AB=, giving even more tonal exploration possibilities (especially if each mode was foot-switchable).

I'm currently trying to find out a bit more about if there is anything like this currently on the market, so if you know of anything which could work on a pedalboard then please do get in contact - I genuinely think it could be a very cool way of getting unique guitar tones.

Harley Benton Telecaster Kit - BYOT

Recently I received the Harley Benton Telecaster kit for my birthday. This kit consists of every part needed to build your own telecaster and it looks like it is going to be a fun project! With a basswood body, this tele is going to be quite different to any other telecaster I've played before, but my Gretsch has a basswood body so I've no reason to doubt the tonal quality (yet!).

Obviously the base materials aren't going to produce a telecaster which is worthy of guitar of the year, however with my little bit of soldering experience and never having built a guitar before I think that I'm going to have fun putting it together, and I will of course write blog posts about my progress.

My plans at the moment are to paint the guitar and varnish the maple neck and headstock. Other upgrades of hardware and electronics might come later depending on my opinions of it once I've put it together. After some googling I found the website manchesterguitartech.co.uk which stocks a wide variety of lacquers specifically for guitar - the finish I think I'll go for is the sonic blue nitrocellulose lacquer, hopefully it will be recollective of the retro Fender finishes. I will also stain the maple neck to make it look a bit more professional.

All the pieces of the telecaster come fully cut and ready to put together except for the headstock which is an uncut rectangle shape. This is one area which I am slightly apprehensive about because woodwork is definitely not my thing. I expect I will attempt some sort of Fender-esque shape for my headstock and maybe even write my name on the top!

I will make sure that I write blog posts all about my progression on this project and maybe even record a few videos of what I do. Once I've lacquered the body and the neck I don't think it will be particularly difficult to assemble all the parts, especially because all the cabling is solderless! If you have any suggestions for my project please do let me know, I would love to fit some aftermarket pickups, and maybe even a new bride and tuners to aid in stability, so any advise for parts like that would be brilliant. In the mean time please do check out my Youtube Channel, and if you do enjoy reading The Pick and feel like you would be interested in supporting it financially, please do check out my Sponsorship Page. Any donations would be excellent and let me continue to work on The Pick.