Builder/Blogger: Steve Eubanks

The Whitney started out as an experiment and ended up an amazing success. I started out to make a full guitar version of the Santa Cruz electracoustic ukulele. I figured I could start by making a hollow-body version of the Cardiff solid-body guitar, and then figure out what to do about the electronics sometime down the road. The design came together mostly as expected, but the electronics ened up as a bit of a surprise (more on that later).

As they typically do, this build started with templates and glue ups. As I did with the Sant Cruz, I hogged out most of the interior of the body with the drill press, then cleaned it up and finalized the depth with the router. A little bandsaw work, and some cleanup on the sander, and I had three body blanks, ready for tops.

I surfaced and glued up three blanks for tops, one shamel ash, one swamp ash, and one cherry. Each of the tops got a sound hole cut in (roughly) the profile of the west face of Mount Whitney, California's highest peak. An X brace pattern provides strength and stiffness for the top, and the tops get glued to the bodies.

Each instrument gets a fretboard. Two are North Indian rosewood, and the third is a maple and walnut, multipiece board. Fret slots are cut, and the boards are glued to the necks. I use small pin nails through the fret slots as locating pins so the baords don't slide around during the glue up. Then each body gets a neck pocket, and a quick dry fit confirms that everything is coming together nicely

Floating tails and bridges are hand hade from stock that matches each instrument's fretboard. Then fretboard markers are cut from aluminum tube and filled with CA glue and ebony dust (these are the same as the markers on the Cardiff guitars).

Next comes routing cavities for pickups, and openings for controls and control covers. Then frets on necks, a high-gloss Tru-Oil finish (a CalStyle tradition of its own), and on to final assembly.

And now we come to the electronics, which is really the most interesting part of this build. Each instrument is getting on magnetic pickup at the neck, and an under-saddle piezo pickup as well. And if you've ever tried to combine a magnetic and a piezo on a single instrument, you know that it's not a simple task because the impedence does not match. Typically you either add a preamp to the piezo pickup, or you can install two output jacks, or in some cases I've seen a stereo jack with the magnetic pickup wired to one channel and the piezo wired to the other. The thing is, I really wanted to put a blend pot on this instrument, and give the player the ability to blend the magnetic and piezo signals on the fly. The solution I found is the Bartolini buffer preamp. This little unit combines a powered, adjustable buffer preamp with a blend pot that is ready to wire up. So each of these Whitney guitars comes with three controls - a blend, a volume, and a tone. The blended signal from the magnetic and piezo pickups is what gives the electracoustic its amazing and unique sound.

Here are some beauty shots of the completed guitars. Only two have been fully completed. The third has a home already and was waiting for some custom hardware when these photos were taken.