
When aging a project guitar, it’s best to take it apart and start small. First, we focus on the metal.
This month, we'll discuss some basics about DIY aging/relic'ing and I'll explain a project I recently did. I chose a budget electric guitar that retails at €199 including shipping (about $217 USD). A guitar in this price range is perfect for a beginner relic'ing project, because if it's not perfect or you ruin something by accident, it's not the end of the world. Besides this, I was curious about the build quality of such a guitar, plus it gives us a perfect base to enhance and make more individual.
I decided on a Les Paul Junior Double Cut copy, a guitar design that Gibson released in 1958 and that's still in production today. It's a basic design: a single P-90 pickup placed above the wraparound bridge, with a Telecaster-like master volume/master tone configuration. This model is called DC-Junior TV Yellow and is made by Harley Benton, which is the home brand of the German-based Thomann company, one of the biggest guitar retailers in Europe.
A guitar in this price range is perfect for a beginner relic'ing project, because if it's not perfect or you ruin something by accident, it's not the end of the world.
The guitar offers good basic parameters: a solid mahogany body with a glued-in mahogany neck, a dark-stained amaranth (peltogyne) fretboard, aka purpleheart, instead of the classic rosewood material. The rest of the specs are close to vintage. We'll discuss single parts and aging them one by one, and replacing some of them for optical or performance reasons, as part of this project.
When the guitar arrived, I was more than surprised about the overall quality and craftsmanship. I brought it up to tune, plugged it in, and could instantly rock. Fret job, paint job, intonation, and action were excellent. The pickup sounds really good. What else could one expect for this price? Especially the fret job and the use of factory D'Addario strings (.010–.046) are remarkable in this price range.
Images 1 (left) and 2 (right)
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Images 1 and 2 show the guitar as received, so you have a first impression of what I'm talking about. It's not a real TV yellow, and more of a butterscotch/caramel/mustard color, but with a nice transparency so you can see the grain of the wood. We'll come back to this later in the project.
Photo 3
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
The first step is to completely disassemble your guitar, as I did, which you can see in Image 3. It's helpful to separate and label all small parts so you don't have any difficulties putting them back together. Take photos of the whole guitar and the details before you take it apart, and get some small containers (empty cans, boxes, cups, or whatever) to store all parts during the project. Store the screws together with the corresponding hardware, i.e. the screws from the pickguard taped on the back of it ... you get the idea. Also, as the proud owner of several cats and a dog, I speak from experience when I highly recommend using containers with a lid so you can close them, at least when your furry buddies have access to your working space.
The first step is to completely disassemble your guitar, as I did, which you can see in Image 3. It's helpful to separate and label all small parts so you don't have any difficulties putting them back together. Take photos of the whole guitar and the details before you take it apart, and get some small containers (empty cans, boxes, cups, or whatever) to store all parts during the project. Store the screws together with the corresponding hardware, i.e. the screws from the pickguard taped on the back of it ... you get the idea. Also, as the proud owner of several cats and a dog, I speak from experience when I highly recommend using containers with a lid so you can close them, at least when your furry buddies have access to your working space.
I completely took the guitar apart except the bushings (aka "inserts" or "anchors"), because it was obvious that glue was used additionally to secure them. It's not difficult to get them out with the right tools, but in the process you could end up damaging the wood, having to repair the damage by re-drilling the hole and filling it with a wooden plug. There's a lot of debate on the possible tonal influence of the bushings, but my experience is that it's very, very little (if any) as long as it sits tight and can't move. I decided to leave them alone, but it's also possible to slightly age the visible part of the bushings so they won't stand out from the rest.
Let's proceed with an easy-yet-effective aging procedure. We will start with all the screws, followed by the rest of the metal parts.
Your shopping list for this is very small. Here we go:
- Goggles, gloves, surgical mask, and a shop apron to protect yourself. (We'll need this all through this series: safety first!)
- Old newspapers to protect your working space.
- A soft piece of wood like spruce, pine, fir, etc.
- Some Q-tips and paper towels.
- An old cup filled with cold water.
- Steel wool (preferably 0000 grade) or sanding pads (e.g. Micro-Mesh).
- Iron (III) oxide (ferric oxide) liquid.
You don't need much of the ferric oxide; a small bottle will do. This chemical is often used for etching printed circuit boards, so it should be easy to find. Be careful with this stuff! Chemicals can do harm if not used properly. Only use them in well-ventilated areas, always wear goggles, gloves, apron, and a surgical mask—and don't forget to protect your working space with old newspapers.
Photo 4
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
So here we go. Remember basic rule #1: break the shine! All screws on this guitar are nickel plated and very shiny. First, lightly rub them with steel wool or a fine-sanding pad until the glossy shine is gone and the color is dulled. Don't forget the edges of the screws. Image 4 is a before/after photo of this process. I used a flexible Micro-Mesh pad with 400 grid.
A lot of people are happy with the optical results after this simple treatment, but for more effect, we'll add some light signs of corrosion in the next step.
Photo 5
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Take a piece of soft wood and screw in all of the screws with a screwdriver that matches the head type and size on your screws (Image 5). You don't need to screw them all the way in—just until they can't move or tip over. To keep the overview, arrange them in groups and make a kind of roadmap of what goes where. This way you won't mistake any of the screws as you reassemble the guitar.
Place the wooden piece with the screws on an even surface covered with old newspapers in a ventilated area. Place a cup with cold water within reach. Now dip a Q-tip into the ferric oxide liquid, but remember to use gloves, goggles, etc. to protect yourself. Place the Q-tip on the head of the screws to apply the ferric oxide. The oxidation process will start immediately. Depending on the metal of the screws and your personal taste, this process can range from seconds up to a minute, so it's a good idea to get a feeling for this by first testing it out on a few extra screws. To stop the process, simply dip the screw into the glass of cold water near you and rub it instantly with a piece of paper towel. Caution: Ferric oxide can color the coating of your sink. That's why a cup of water is advised here instead of rinsing screws with running water under a faucet.
Photo 6
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
You can see the process and all three stages side by side in Image 6. If you feel the oxidation process was too much and you don't like the look, you can use steel wool or a Mesh pad to remove some of the oxidation.
Don't overdo it. I've never seen any rusty screws on a vintage guitar. They're usually a little bit dull, showing some light corrosion, if any. Perhaps breaking the shine will be enough without adding any of the ferric oxide. Simply test it on some extra screws and see what you prefer.
Next month we'll perform a different guitar mod before we return to age more metal parts: the bridge, strap buttons, and the tuners. For this, I'll leave you with a little homework to prepare: Get yourself a small bucket with a lid (larger yogurt buckets work perfectly) and collect a nice mixture of funny things like rusty nails, broken glass, gravel, sand, little stones, basalt, etc. to put in your bucket. Until then ... keep on modding!
[Updated 7/26/2021]
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Acoustic players, this one’s for you! Win the LR Baggs Venue DI in the I Love Pedals giveaway and take full control of your live sound. Enter today and return daily for more chances!
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The National New Yorker lived at the forefront of the emerging electric guitar industry, and in Memphis Minnie’s hands, it came alive.
This National electric is just the tip of the iceberg of electric guitar history.
On a summer day in 1897, a girl named Lizzie Douglas was born on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi, the first of 13 siblings. When she was seven, her family moved closer to Memphis, Tennessee, and little Lizzie took up the banjo. Banjo led to guitar, guitar led to gigs, and gigs led to dreams. She was a prodigious talent, and “Kid” Douglas ran away from home to play for tips on Beale Street when she was just a teenager. She began touring around the South, adopted the moniker Memphis Minnie, and eventually joined the circus for a few years.
(Are you not totally intrigued by the story of this incredible woman? Why did she run away from home? Why did she fall in love with the guitar? We haven’t even touched on how remarkable her songwriting is. This is a singular pioneer of guitar history, and we beseech you to read Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues by Beth and Paul Garon.)
Following the end of World War I, Hawaiian music enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity. On their travels around the U.S., musicians like Sol Ho’opi’i became fans of Louis Armstrong and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, leading to a great cross-pollination of Hawaiian music with jazz and blues. This potent combination proved popular and drew ever-larger audiences, which created a significant problem: How on earth would an audience of thousands hear the sound from a wimpy little acoustic guitar?
This art deco pickguard offers just a bit of pizzazz to an otherwise demure instrument.
In the late 1920s, George Beauchamp, John and Rudy Dopyera, Adolph Rickenbacker, and John Dopyera’s nephew Paul Barth endeavored to answer that question with a mechanically amplified guitar. Working together under Beauchamp and John Dopyera’s National String Instrument Corporation, they designed the first resonator guitar, which, like a Victrola, used a cone-shaped resonator built into the guitar to amplify the sound. It was definitely louder, but not quite loud enough—especially for the Hawaiian slide musicians. With the guitars laid on their laps, much of the sound projected straight up at the ceiling instead of toward the audience.
Barth and Beauchamp tackled this problem in the 1930s by designing a magnetic pickup, and Rickenbacker installed it in the first commercially successful electric instrument: a lap-steel guitar known affectionately as the “Frying Pan” due to its distinctive shape. Suddenly, any stringed instrument could be as loud as your amplifier allowed, setting off a flurry of innovation. Electric guitars were born!
“At the time it was positively futuristic, with its lack of f-holes and way-cool art deco design on the pickup.”
By this time, Memphis Minnie was a bona fide star. She recorded for Columbia, Vocalion, and Decca Records. Her song “Bumble Bee,” featuring her driving guitar technique, became hugely popular and earned her a new nickname: the Queen of Country Blues. She was officially royalty, and her subjects needed to hear her game-changing playing. This is where she crossed paths with our old pals over at National.
National and other companies began adding pickups to so-called Spanish guitars, which they naturally called “Electric Spanish.” (This term was famously abbreviated ES by the Gibson Guitar Corporation and used as a prefix on a wide variety of models.) In 1935, National made its first Electric Spanish guitar, renamed the New Yorker three years later. By today’s standards, it’s modestly appointed. At the time it was positively futuristic, with its lack of f-holes and way-cool art deco design on the pickup.
There’s buckle rash and the finish on the back of the neck is rubbed clean off in spots, but that just goes to show how well-loved this guitar has been.
Memphis Minnie had finally found an axe fit for a Queen. She was among the first blues guitarists to go electric, and the New Yorker fueled her already-upward trajectory. She recorded over 200 songs in her 25-year career, cementing her and the National New Yorker’s place in musical history.
Our National New Yorker was made in 1939 and shows perfect play wear as far as we’re concerned. Sure, there’s buckle rash and the finish on the back of the neck is rubbed clean off in spots, but structurally, this guitar is in great shape. It’s easy to imagine this guitar was lovingly wiped down each time it was put back in the case.
There’s magic in this guitar, y’all. Every time we pick it up, we can feel Memphis Minnie’s spirit enter the room. This guitar sounds fearless. It’s a survivor. This is a guitar that could inspire you to run away and join the circus, transcend genre and gender, and leave your own mark on music history. As a guitar store, watching guitars pass from musician to musician gives us a beautiful physical reminder of how history moves through generations. We can’t wait to see who joins this guitar’s remarkable legacy.
SOURCES: blackpast.org, nps.gov, worldmusic.net, historylink.org, Memphis Music Hall of Fame, “Memphis Minnie’s ‘Scientific Sound’: Afro-Sonic Modernity and the Jukebox Era of the Blues” from American Quarterly, “The History of the Development of Electric Stringed Musical Instruments” by Stephen Errede, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL.
With authentic stage-class Katana amp sounds, wireless music streaming, and advanced spatial technology, the KATANA:GO is designed to offer a premium sound experience without the need for amps or pedals.
BOSS announces the return of KATANA:GO, an ultra-compact headphone amplifier for daily jams with a guitar or bass. KATANA:GO puts authentic sounds from the stage-class BOSS Katana amp series at the instrument’s output jack, paired with wireless music streaming, sound editing, and learning tools on the user’s smartphone. Advanced spatial technology provides a rich 3D audio experience, while BOSS Tone Exchange offers an infinite sound library to explore any musical style.
Offering all the features of the previous generation in a refreshed external design, KATANA:GO delivers premium sound for everyday playing without the hassle of amps, pedals, and computer interfaces. Users can simply plug it into their instrument, connect earbuds or headphones, call up a memory, and go. Onboard controls provide access to volume, memory selection, and other essential functions, while the built-in screen displays the tuner and current memory. The rechargeable battery offers up to five hours of continuous playing time, and the integrated 1/4-inch plug folds down to create a pocket-size package that’s ready to travel anywhere.
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The guitar and bass modes in KATANA:GO each feature 30 memories loaded with ready-to-play sounds. BOSS Tone Studio allows the player to tweak preset memories, create sounds from scratch, or import Tone Setting memories created with stage-class Katana guitar and bass amplifiers. The app also provides integrated access to BOSS Tone Exchange, where users can download professionally curated Livesets and share sounds with the global BOSS community.
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The versatile KATANA:GO functions as a USB audio interface for music production and online content creation on a computer or mobile device. External control of wah, volume, memory selection, and more are also supported via the optional EV-1-WL Wireless MIDI Expression Pedal and FS-1-WL Wireless Footswitch.
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We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
The Chicago-via-New York trio of best friends reinterpret the best bits of college-rock and ’90s indie on their new record, Phonetics On and On.
Horsegirl guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein are back in their hometown of Chicago during winter break from New York University, where they share an apartment with drummer Gigi Reece. They’re both in the middle of writing papers. Cheng is working on one about Buckminster Fuller for a city planning class, and Lowenstein is untangling Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story, “Three Paths to the Lake.”
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.