this guy is a great youtuber
Would you buy an ikea guitar?
@Victor weigh in
I would. Probably even if it was pretty bad. I think they could do some kind of sears-roebuck-silvertone thing but not for amps (if they made an amp it would just be some bluetooth mostly-junk I think… but they had some limited teenage engineering collabs I see looking at reverb. I think their price scheme is the exact opposite of what they would need to do to create a selling/good value product)
But I bet they would make a neat guitar
Mandela effect tells me they already did but I think I am mentally combining it with the volkswagen first act
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for me it’d have to be like $99 or very distinct because at $200 Ibanez and Squier have good budget options and variety, particularly scale length
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Hmm
Kit build with easy snap in connectors, acrylic pickguard with slide-in color inserts, flippable control panel for 2 colors
Pickup or pickup location swapping?
Extremely cute and new knobs they can manufacture at scale (or beautiful control panel engraving like any old analog synth or a Les Paul Recording)
ONBOARD EFFECTS AGAIN
Single pickup with some well-voiced varitone-style baked in eq selections?
Comes alongside a set of $20-more-than-donner pedals that are at least good looking? (I would certainly buy one of those as a “generic” pedal vs give money to jhs for their $100 ones)
Or they make the monoprice tube amp with something a little more novel/simple than those even, like a single knob tilt eq
Ur right though about the price/value deal. It’s sorta amazing how all this guitar stuff is half figured out and down to price shaving and component availability and cnc mass production but then there ARE new inventions a lot? Maybe? like I have no idea who makes potentiometers (who is “alpha” anyway) but their unavailability in different values/form factors actually makes plenty of different wiring configs impossible without active circuitry or finding random old stock. If you go so far as to look into specific taper push/pulls, center detents, no load pots, different amounts of rotary switch positions, it’s really over, CTS et al does not care about your dreams. The whole thing is just magnets, so why is there only one e-bow competitor? (It’s not even a competitor it’s DTC Instagram ad stuff). Why haven’t we seen a sliding pickup since the grabber? I actually destroyed my bass (still working on fixing it) to get an extreme-neck jazz single coil (mudbucker position but not already-intentionally dark) cause it’s something you absolutely cannot buy non-custom
Folks have made widely-regarded better tuners and bridges and trems and stuff but the actual meat is untouched, it’s so weird. I have seen in 15 yrs of reading about gear and barely playing the inclusion of onboard passive diode clipping (aka “black ice” distortion) go from hyped to widely disparaged to being featured in boutique instruments
I should fix my bass. And learn to play 4 real.
I did buy plywood to get my single-speaker Leslie rehoused tho
ikea that’s what I would do anyway
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on reflection i think if it was electric at all it’d probably be like a budget acoustasonic hybrid thing. which I wouldn’t mind but certainly isn’t department store rock and roll
Yes, with app controls
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yes
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piece of sheet metal painted white for a pickguard, no pickup routing at all, the thin foil style pickups just stick onto the front of the guitar. a little touch panel instead of knobs. body has that birch veneer on honeycombed paper thing that they do?
Yeah, connects wirelss to an amp with a bluetooth dongle, partnered with BOSS for an app with effects for sale ten bux a pop.
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nothing Ikea could make at a price I would like is likely to have any features that would appeal to me, tbh
this is genius
I guess ikea makes lots of stuff - I built an ikea kitchen which is mostly mdf, these very bizarre white melamine fronts with inset handles that came with 4 color “cards” to stick inside (on the cheap cause they were discontinued) but also really great solid birch countertops cause I didn’t think I had the skill to hide my cuts well with veneer (also it usually feels like shit). whole kitchen was like $3k and my labor which would have been obscene custom or even kit-built from a dedicated kitchen supplier, five figures either way, with no less quality unless I was paying for nice plywood throughout (pointless) or solid wood fronts or something.
They even have plenty of decent real wood (pine or birch ply) furniture, not cheaper than thrift or even antiquing most of the time but easier to transport in a car and much tinier than most older furniture (necessary if you have a small home) and their particleboard stuff is always much easier to build and sturdier than pseudo-equivalents from wayfair, etc.
(I mean my favorite way to shop for furniture is the side of the road but it doesn’t always work out like that)
So basically I am an ikea minmaxer and have an imagined quality that’s probably incorrect or at odds with most people’s perceptions (cheap and hard to assemble, which I think is a dated take from the 90s when an existing alternative was heavy, joined (or at least already built) expensive furniture, not wayfair or big box store imprints that are flimsier with less customer support and even worse instructions) and was stuck imagining a reasonably solid body and a regular bolt-on neck plus 1 kind of middle-of-the-road pickup, a fat single coil, firebird, mini-hum kind of thing. I do like their cheap things but I usually just get their rare underpriced nice things (but not the IKEA x ROG gamer poncho… yet)
but your imagination is much more powerful in a google cardboard/labo kind of way, a nearly disposable guitar
Searching for “ultra thin pickups” shows me some incredible looking cheap surface mount pickups for cigar box guitars (see “wickedbucker”). I dunno what you mean by “foil” (like gold foils or some kind of super thin aluminum foil thing I dunno about?) but mounted to the top of the pickguard is a great idea. Piezo sounds bad mostly but can also be really tiny
I loathe a touch panel but certainly some kind of little pcb deal instead of big pots sounds like it would keep prices low
Inspiring is the gorgeous weir guitar I think @annetts posted (right???) awhile back that has an acoustic-style bridge and saddle instead of regular electric bridges with a bunch of screws, they also have headless options which could shave costs down too potentially
But also…
This is absolutely what they really would do but this is so distasteful to me! It’s true of course but i never want to touch my phone or microtransact or here that Bluetooth pairing beep when making music! Maybe I am a minority
this sort of exists:
https://versoinstruments.com/guitars/
i don’t buy guitars i can make instead now, but shit like this tempts me
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remembered this DIY thing that recycles ikea pieces into a guitar
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honestly i was thinking not so much disposable, but along the lines of Danelectro. Danelectro (hate that Dano has become someone else’s trademark so we can’t just use it as an abbreviation for Danelectro anymore) has done that sort of semihollow guitar with the paper honeycomb for a long time and they’re great and long lasting guitars.
And when I mentioned foil before I was meaning gold foil. I’ve had some experience with them in the past and it’s been pretty great, kind of a cross between a jazzmaster and a lipstick, but with a pretty low output. Most important if it was an Ikea guitar would be that most of the maintainance could probably be done with one size of alan wrench, probably a second smaller one for intonation but both are probably on one key and there’s a compartment for storing it built into the instrument.
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Not perfect (I did it with a dremel with router base and a stewmac template) but I finally cut the wood. Feels good, getting there
Gotta enlarge the spot for my now quasi-humbucker, decide how best to get the wires to the control plate, choose where the switches go, duplicate my cuts on the pick guard, wire it up, reassemble, get it set up (needs a new nut too), but that’s the idea
The bass will still use two pickups at a time with normal VVT controls, the two switches selecting “which neck” and “which bridge”, ideally keeping hum canceling from the rwrp sets. I picked up another squier vintage modified 70s pickup set for comparison’s sake but it was from a later year of manufacture… not sure about the tone or if north and south are the same north and south or if I’ll have to flip a set. Anyway, you should be able to select 4 combinations:
- original bridge and original neck (neck shifted a bit for symmetry’s sake)
- original bridge and new extreme neck (wide spread… what does that jazz bass both-volumes-on-full scoop do now?)
- new bridge (basically old neck position) and original neck (super close together, basically a humbucker. What frequencies are scooped here? How fat will they sound in series?)
- new bridge (basically old neck position) and new extreme neck (the true goal of this exercise, geezer/Cisneros/Mikami doom and Shakespeare/barrett dub)
(4 pickup with on/offs is not a pleasing option to me, but an everything-on blower switch or sending the two unused pickups two a second jack, Rick-o-sound style, were considered but there’s been enough butchering already)
Should rip well enough, also series/parallel as any sensible bridge-pickup-avoider does. There are not many of us
One day I’ll replace tone knob with a rotary switch with stepped caps for LPF and incidental resonant bump just below cutoff point to get extra extra extra thick
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a cajon that is portable, looks like a ideal thing for me, wanting to do finger drumming but not tech minded enough to really want to go in on an Akai or an Electribe. Would likely want to make a DIY strap cajon instead of dropping $400 on a ready solution, especially since I’d want, nay need, a piezo in it to amplify so it could be played live if need be. I haven’t been musicking as much ad have not played out live sinnce pre-covid and it’s getting me itchy. Is @Focus still on here? I’m almost near KC now.
Anyway, I’m adding this to my .plan list that I need to get some carpentry gear to complete. This one should be much simpler than a jagstang bass though.
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i watched some marc ribot videos and i want a jaguar now
need to sell this epiphone it just doesn’t fit my body 
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i’m a big fan of 24” scale and offset bodies like the jag’s. great for playing seated
surprised to see ribot’s is using ordinarily single coils but i suppose i can get jazz tones out of my jagstang’s standard jaguar neck pup with the tone rolled back and the right amp sim
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yeah I like ribot because it’s not a typical jazz tone it sounds a lot more like a low passed garage rock sound to me
Hendrixy almost, got that distant howling quality
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oh wow this rules
EDIT my electric kettle ticked to say it was done the exact moment the first song ended, nice
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I love Marc Ribot!
This is my fav track from his classic 1992 album
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