Not an oud, But interesting none-the-less
I know, it's not an oud, so mods can move this if there's somewhere more appropriate, thought you might enjoy!
I will start at the beginning, a very good place to start.
14 years old, Christmas day, mum and dad bought me a squire Tele and it's AWESOME... I can play like rage against the machine and deftones riffs and
it's super 2001, everything is amazing.
5 years later I have bought, sold traded many other guitars and the Tele doesn't get much love. I decide it's time to get out the router and the
soldering iron. On the way home from work I stop in at the local guitar shop and see what's in. A beautiful Boss PS-5 Super Shifter was sitting in the
bargain bin without a box, a customer had bought it, destroyed the case in excitement only to realise it was not the pedal they wanted. So I got it at
a bargain.
The neck pickup wasn't functioning on the Tele anymore and I had wired up the bridge pickup to go straight to the jack and bypass all controls.
I decide that instead of using the PS-5 on the floor that I'd like to use it mounted in a guitar and set about figuring out how to include the
latching switch and expression pedal into the body mount. A couple of months later I had successfull installed my PS-5 into my Tele and added a
springloaded toggle and pot for expression capabilities. Sounds whack and awesome at the same time.
Over the course of the next 10 years the guitar fell in and out of playability with the neck warping and pickup slowely degrading, it was shelved for
maybe 5 years, nothing more than a body with a guitar pedal hardwired into it.
Then, a month ago, inspiration strikes! I order a neck, fretwire, pickups, replacement hardware and set to work on finalising my mods I started all
those years ago.
In the last 16 years since getting the Telecaster I have studied western, Indian, Turkish, Persian and Arabic music and perform regularly on the
guitar, sitar, persian tar, baglama saz as well as other instruments. I wanted something that combined the playability of the guitar but the harmony
of one of my eastern instruments. Microtonal frets were added to the neck first (a strat neck, because I like the look of the tele deluxe with that
style headstock)... I then mounted the neck, positioned the new bridge and wired everything together.
Here's a quick shot of her, I used to call her Penny Lane in high school... don't know if this mod deserves a name change...
I was really inspired by modern Moroccan style guitar which employs adding extra frets at the second and 5th frets to access some key microtones for
maqam performance. I've also been an active fretless gutiarist for years and follow xenharmonics and ron sword quite closely. this is my first
contribution and prototype to the microtonal guitar community.
Videos to come in the next couple of days
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