Wyn Guitars

Visit the Wyn Guitars blog to read about the making of Edwin Oliver’s custom 5-string Cocobolo Wyn bass.

Visit the Wyn Guitars blog to read about the making of Marc Bergeron’s custom left-handed Wyn bass.

Here’s a Photo Gallery of our whirlwind weekend at NAMM 2010!

Video from NAMM of me being Interviewed by Bass Gear Magazine

Here’s another NAMM interview with me and James Lomenzo by Owen of GearWire.com

Wyn Guitars: Megadeth Bassist James Lomenzo Interview From NAMM 2010 (Video)

Here’s an interview with me by Owen of GearWire.com

Wyn Guitars: Interview With Bass Guitar Luthier Randall Fullmer (Video)

I’ve been building four, five, and six-string taper core necks for the last seven or eight weeks and thought it was time to share some of the steps I’ve been going through. By the end of this entry, you’ll hopefully know what in the heck a taper core neck is and why I think it’s one of the truest and best ways to build a bass guitar neck.

The first photo shows some Wenge lumber in the rough. These boards are 1 1/2” thick and 48” long. Wenge to me is a magic wood that produces a throaty and yet focused lower mid and a really dynamic low while still maintaining a clear defined upper range. All I know is that I’m never sorry when I’ve used Wenge on any part of a guitar I’ve built! As you can see, it doesn’t look too promising in the rough. When the driver delivered the boards, he asked me if i was building a fence. Yikes, I’m afraid the fence would be worth more than my house!!

Building a neck with tapered boards is a good deal harder than working with parallel boards. Any time you throw your boards out of square, you’re in for some fun! So why am I bothering to do this? Well actually that’s a pretty good question. (I knew you’d be asking, so to avoid embarrassment, I have come up with some answers.)

First off, a taper core neck looks very cool. It’s beautiful to look at the back of the neck and also see it come through the front of the body as a long graceful taper. It gives the guitar an aerodynamic look. (like you could put it in a wind tunnel and it would travel well over 200 miles an hour!)

But there’s much more to it. When the core is tapered, the grain in all of the boards, more closely aligns with the string direction and of course the vibration of the strings. I experience the sound from a taper core neck as being more focused. This more accurate grain alignment produces longer sustain and a clearer sound with less potential for cross grain wave interference, resulting in the cleanest transmission from tuning peg, to nut, to bridge. I admit it’s a subtle difference over a parallel laminated neck, but high end refinements of most things come in small percentages at the top.

I always work from a full scale pattern. This helps me to visualize and avoid mistakes, and takes the guess work out of the angles I’m using. I can lay the boards right down on the pattern and confirm that I’m getting absolutely perfect angles. On a neck through bass, the neck is it’s narrowest at the top of the headstock and gets progressively wider as it works its way to the base of the body. Basically it’s a 48” long continuous taper. Usually that taper is achieved by using a solid piece of wood for the neck or building the neck out of parallel laminations and then sawing the taper on the outer edges of the neck block.

The way I build a taper core neck is to first cut two tapered boards, (always quarter sawn for stability and a book match of each other for perfectly opposing tension). These two tapered boards run down the center of the neck with a thin accent strip separating them. (this middle strip gives me a nice centering line for every measurement and sighting I will do in the assembly of the guitar) For a seven lamination neck, I next add two more thin accent strips to the outside of the tapered boards followed by two thicker parallel boards that will comprise the outside edges of the neck. As you can see from the picture of the strips of wood in the gluing jig, I have two additional boards next to the clamps that are part of the clamping jig. These boards are the complementary angle of the tapered center core boards to bring the neck assembly back to parallel, allowing me to clamp squarely when gluing. I also use these jig boards to run along the fence when I band saw the core to maintain my 48” taper.

Of course the next thing is to use way too much Tightbond glue and squeeze the clamps until you make a mighty mess. I seem to maintain about a 50/50 ratio between glue that goes into the joint and glue that I end up scraping off of the outside. I’ve never completely decided whether this is wasteful or pure genius to assure yourself that you’ve gotten complete coverage throughout the joints. We used to cheer when the glue drips hit the floor in eighth grade wood shop. I’m probably just wanting to relive this amazingly sophisticated thrill from my youth!!

I use different pairs of tapered boards for gluing four, five, and six string necks since the tapers are different for each. Even though I work in California where the air is generally warm and dry, I try to allow at least 48 hours of drying time before I remove the clamps. That’s probably complete overkill, but I figure it takes a long time for the moisture inside the glue to escape and I’m doing everything I can think of at all times to make these necks as perfectly straight as possible.

I now have tapered laminated blocks roughly 48” long by two inches thick, with a width that varies from something around 1 3/4 ” at the headstock on a four string to as wide as 4 1/4” at the base of a six string.

I next joint, surface and thickness sand the necks to dimension. I route a channel down the center of each neck for the truss rod, again using my tapered jig boards to guide the router. I joint roughly 3/16” off the top face of the neck where it intersects the body. This allows for proper spacing of the bridge, pickups and string heights when the guitar is assembled.

My next step is to laminate headstock wings to the top of the neck. I’ve decided on this particular set of necks to laminate an accent strip and a thick strip on each side of the neck in keeping with the overall neck lamination scheme. As I’m typing this, I’m just realizing that at the headstock, that makes 11 laminations going from one side to the other. I was pretty sure I was reasonably sane before this dawned on me. That’s just crazy now isn’t it?? (but it looks very cool) Okay, moving right along………….

So on this next picture we see the headstock end. Yep, there are 11 laminations there! Every time I do a major gluing like this, I end up buying more clamps. Come on you guys, you can never have too many clamps, right?

This next photo is of five six-string necks - all built with layers of Wenge and accent strips of Padouk. Besides the beauty of these laminations and accents, this gives the neck an amazing stability in all directions.

The next laminating step on these necks will be to add a veneer on the headstock to match the body top. This headstock veneer will actually tuck under the fret board so it has to go on before the fretboard. I have now cut and sanded the headstock angle on the front and back of each neck. I left it extra thick at this point and I’m leaving the neck as a block until I’ve glued on the headstock veneer and fret board as this makes it easy to clamp.

Here is my little army of necks getting ready to do battle in the big world of music. Can you find the left handed neck?? That wasn’t so hard was it?

I’m now starting to select body woods as that obviously has to happen before I can know what the headstock veneers should be. So this feels like I’m coming to the end of a chapter. I’ll pick it up next time with the operations on the fretboard including radiusing, fretting, abalone side markers, and the selection, lamination and cutting out of the body wings. But wait, there’s more! There’ll be the carving of the neck, the carving of the bodies, drilling for the tuning pegs, ………………….

Stay tuned and we’ll go through every phase on these guitars until they’re complete. All the best, Randy

It’s a luthier’s dream to make an instrument for an artist with the stature and playing chops of Jimmy Haslip. I of course handled this assignment with complete calm and professionalism. It was basically five parts intense euphoria and eleven parts terror ride. ( a player like Jimmy I figured would have no interest at all in an average bass. It would have to be nothing short of a better bass than I was capable of building!!)

It would be great to tell a story of how Jimmy Haslip sought me out - “Randy Fullmer at Wyn Guitars, famous luthier to the stars.” The pleading he must have gone through to get me to focus on his musical needs. All of the “I’ll pay you anything if you’ll just design something for me” moments. I’m pretty sure you’ve already guessed that the story goes nothing like that. However, I must say it was one of those life changing collaborations that only comes along once in a while.

The story
In late 2008, I had finished a prototype for a Quilt Maple and Wenge five string bass that I was pretty excited about. I started emailing pictures to friends and players I thought would be interested. This including Therese Ulvan, an up and coming female singer I had met while taking an educational course. A year or two prior, she had done an album with Jimmy Haslip. She got right back to me and said that she bet Jimmy would like to see it. She kindly introduced the two of us through email and I sent him pictures. Six weeks went by and no word from Jimmy. That lovely negative voice we all seem to have in our heads was concluding that my bass was nothing and he was just not interested.

But the sky soon parted!! Jimmy called out of the blue and said he was doing some recording in my area and would be driving right by my shop on the way. How about he stops by and tries out that prototype bass? “You bet!!” I said.

So there he was, we said hello, he turned my prototype upside down and just sat there and wailed on it. Yes, he’s one of those rare left handed players who learned on a right handed guitar and never looked back. Apparently, many times he was informed by fellow musicians that he had made quite a mistake learning to play the bass upside down like that. I guess they kinda got it wrong!!

Anyway, he loved the prototype and ended up asking me if I wanted to make him a bass? “Yes sir Mr. Haslip sir” I stammered, saluting wildly!!! Our collaboration had begun. Besides being by far and away the best bass player I’d ever seen, he turned out to be a world class nice guy and a great pleasure to work with. (Jimmy also plays and endorses MTD, Roscoe, and Yamaha basses. I figure if I fit into that lofty crowd in any sort of way, I’m doing just fine!!)

I drew up a full sized set of plans after asking him a long list of questions. I took several measurements from his favorite basses. He had me make minor shape adjustments to the body I had drawn which instantly made it better. I spent hours dragging out more than a dozen different species of hardwoods from Africa, South and Central America and the U.S. and laid them out with a transparent template. He gave serious attention to every set up I made for him.

He finally selected Cocobolo, a Central America Rosewood, for the body top and back. It was some pretty wild stuff with light amber sap wood mixed with very intense red heart wood. He noticed a completely amazing shape of a rose that naturally occurred on one of the boards. (Artist/ designer/ luthier Randy had completely missed it)

He said his daughter’s name was Gabriela Rose and he’d like to have that rose placed front and center with her name engraved around it. Really? At first the idea of engraving her name into the front of the guitar seemed like a pretty scary bad idea. My mind raced as to how I was going to either talk him out of it, or if I couldn’t, how in the heck I would accomplish such a thing. To buy time, I told him I’d give it some thought and we’d come up with something. “Fine!” he said.

I built a tapered core neck with African Wenge, Padouk stripes, and Eastern Rock Maple as the outer edge. It came together incredibly well. I was so focused on this project, I was completely working over my head. I laminated the body wings using Cocobolo with the rose shape on top, then a Wenge layer, Sapele core, another Wenge layer and Cocobolo back

I photographed a mock up with the neck and body wings and sent it to Jimmy. He was touring all over the planet, but kept in touch every step of the way. I would update the progress and give him choices for the next phase. He would swing by when he could and we’d marvel at how it was coming together, just like he imagined it would. He selected a beautiful piece of figured orange red Cocobolo for the fret board.

Finally, in choosing the approach for the etching of “Gabriela Rose”, we settled on a font and I called in a talented laser artist named Haryn De Leon (haryn.deleon at gmail.com) to take it on. (She also handles the laser cutting of the Wyn inlay on my headstocks)

Obviously a lot had gone into the guitar up to this point. I was sweating bullets at the thought of burning Gabriela’s name into the top. We did a number of test runs on various scrap materials, had a cup of tea, stalled a little bit with idle chit chat. Finally we convinced ourselves that we’d done all the checking it made sense to do. Haryn’s laser cutter engraved the name with total precision in one pass and perfectly. I started breathing again. What a relief that was!!! Etching his daughter’s name into the guitar had completely personalized the bass for Jimmy, a very nice thing.

I wired in Bartolini pickups and pre-amp, installed Hipshot tuners and bridge. A clear hard shell finish with a slight amber tint was the next step. It was time to have Jimmy play the bass and request any last minute refinements before the finish went on. One of the goals from the start was to have a punchy sound. To me, the guitar sounded great, but I was anxious to hear him play it and see what he thought. Jimmy and his wife came over on a Saturday with their daughter Gabriela to see the guitar. He had saved it as a surprise for them. They were thrilled and I was thrilled!! I did a final very slight slimming on the neck, but otherwise it was a go.

The amazing thing of course is that the minute Jimmy picked up the guitar and started playing, it sounded like Jimmy Haslip. In his hands, it had all the punch in the world. Amazing!!! I seem to constantly have to learn the lesson that no matter what you think a guitar sounds like, it will be different in everyone’s hands that pick it up. I could go on and on about that day, but suffice to say, it was truly satisfying to hear one of my guitars played so well.

I have since seen Jimmy play a couple of times at the Baked Potato in Studio City and the Catalina Club in Hollywood. No experience can match it for a luthier!! And as a bonus, with the thoughts that Jimmy contributed, I could probably point to 15 or 20 new and very subtle things that I learned in the making of his bass. All Good!!!!!