Free · 15 videos · 21 hours 35 minutes
A complete course on building an electric guitar from scratch — design through to the final wiring, plus pickups, jigs and restoration work. Nothing gated, nothing to sign up for.
Start at part one and work through. Each stage assumes the one before it.
Everything downstream inherits the decisions made here. An hour and a half on turning an idea into a drawing, and a drawing into templates you can cut against.
What genuinely matters in timber selection, what is folklore, and how to buy stock that is dry, stable and will not twist itself into firewood a year after you finish.
Nearly two hours on turning a blank into a body: joining, shaping, routing every cavity, and laying a veneer top without bubbles or blown-through edges.
Nearly three hours, and the longest video in the course for good reason. This is the stage that decides whether the finished guitar plays like an instrument or like a plank.
An hour on inlay work, from simple dots to a photo inlay technique — cutting cavities, fitting material, filling and levelling without wrecking the board around it.
Two and a half hours on the stage everyone underestimates. Prep, colour, clear, then the levelling and buffing that separates a decent finish from a professional one.
An hour and a half on the part that intimidates people unnecessarily. Four components and one signal path — once you know what each does, you can choose instead of copying.
Watch these whenever they become relevant. Nothing here depends on anything else.
Two and a half hours on the deepest rabbit hole in guitar building. Magnets, wire, turns and pattern — and what each one actually does to the output.
Eleven minutes, start to finish, on winding a matched pair. The condensed version if the full pickup video is more than you need today.
An hour and a half on reproducing an existing neck accurately enough that the replacement feels like the original. Essential for restoration work, and a useful skill in its own right.
Two hours on a build with no neck joint at all. Harder to get right, unforgiving of mistakes, and there is nothing quite like the result.
Commercial neck jigs cost more than most people's first build. This is how to make one that does the same job for a fraction of the money.
Forty minutes of shop-made fixtures. Most guitar building tools are simple objects with a specialist price tag, and these are the ones worth making.
Half an hour on turning ordinary tools into guitar-specific ones. Cheaper than buying the specialist version, and often better suited to the job.
The accumulated small stuff. None of it is complicated, and every one of them saves time, money or a ruined piece of wood.
Full build videos, start to finish, including the parts that went wrong.
Build series · New video most monthsBecause nobody wants to scrub through two hours to find one measurement. The written guide carries the numbers, the tool list and the mistakes, so you can read it at the bench with glue on your hands and no headphones in.
The videos are hosted on YouTube and only load when you press play, so a page full of them still opens quickly on a phone with one bar of signal.