So the Gretsch is gone and a Warmoth hardtail partscaster has arrived

[Jim Soloway]

This just arrived an hour ago. The tone control for the neck pickup has not been hooked up. It needs heavier strings and it's in desperate need of a setup but all that being said, I think this sounds great. (And I suspect it sounds nothing like it looks)

[Stringswinger]

Congrats on the partscaster. I am building one myself (slowly). It will be a Warmouth body with a Korean made neck and a single neck position humbucker. A Hardtail Strat as well. I expect I will like it. It will weigh under 7 pounds.

[sgosnell]

That pick holder should come in handy for you.

[John A.]

Jim sells this one and gets one with a whammy bar in 3 ... 2 ...

It's your destiny. Don't fight it.

[Jim Soloway]

Jim sells this one and gets one with a whammy bar in 3 ... 2 ...

It's your destiny. Don't fight it.

In 60 years of playing guitar I have never once owned a guitar with a whammy bar, at least in part because I play with my hand so far forward and I can't reach the bar .

[EllenGtrGrl]

Very cool Jim. Why did you get rid of the Jet? Was it the FilterTron sound that didn't cut it, or did the thin necks drive you away from Gretsches, like they drove me away from playing them?

[Hammertone]

Jim has been here before...

[Jim Soloway]

Jim has been here before...

This guitar was both one of the most creative idea I ever had and one of my biggest commercial failures. It's absolutely NOT a hard tail Strat but you did just illustrate the problem (and the lesson I learned). This model was called the NYA (Not Yet Another ... as in not yet another Strat). The sounds are actually much more Tele than Strat.

The neck and middle pickups are both DiMarzio Area T hum cancelling neck pickups. The bridge pickup is a DiMarzio Virtual Solo (also hum cancelling with a warmer slightly hotter output than most Strat bridge pickups).

The knobs are Master volume, tone control for neck pickup, tone control for bridge pickup (no tone control for the middle pickup)

Using a 5 way Super-switch, the options are Neck; Neck+Bridge; Middle; Middle+Bridge; Bridge. So you get a traditional Tele Neck sound and a traditional neck plus bridge sound in position two.
Position three is that Tele pickup in the middle with no tone control. It's basically a ultra-chime preset. Position 4 is middle plus bridge. It's got that classic position four quack and it's the only really Strat-like sound on the entire guitar. Position 5 is the bridge pickup only (with a dedicated tone control) and it sounds very much like a Tele bridge pickup but without so much of the ice-pick.

So it's a really versatile setup and I thought it was very useful. The problem was that it was too hard to describe and everyone who looked at the guitar expected it to sound like a Strat. I shipped around a demo guitar and kept getting the same response: "but it doesn't sound like a Strat". Even with a nice review in Premier Guitar and Steve Kimock using one on the road for a while, I just could not sell these guitars. So not many ended up getting made. It was a hard pill to swallow but the lesson was learned: if you have to use more than one sentence to explain a product then it's probably going to be too hard to sell.

On the other hand, isn't this pretty?