 So with that, I'm going to introduce our next talk going from idiot to imposter Pol was in the way Give a big stage be welcome to Michael Dales Thank you very much Okay, so this this talk despite if I'm stood here holding guitar is less about guitars and more about Trying to get started in a new field, right? So you've come here. You've had a good weekend. You've gone and seen say the hacky racers You've seen the people doing the forge forge work and whatever and you've kind of look at that and you think That's awesome But there's no way I could do that and that's demonstratively not true because two years ago I hadn't done any woodwork since high school and yet this guitar. I'm holding here. I made I'm from scratch so the idea that if you The idea though it's that anyone can do this and it is just how how do you how do you structure it so that you're Succeed and not get frustrated and give up and that's kind of what this talk is about and the guitars are just an example for that so Give you some background. This is guitar zero. I bought this when I was an undergraduate about in 1996 It was the most expensive guitar. I could afford. I think it's the cheapest guitar Fender made at the time And I liked it at the time But when I got back into guitar playing a couple years ago, it didn't make the kind of noise I wanted it kind of I back in But when I was at university, I wanted to be in Radiohead and nowadays I want to be in the 60s playing blues So it didn't really kind of match. I thought about tweaking it I kind of taking out some wood and putting in a different kind of pickup But the most likely outcome of that is I would destroy it and have kindling And I'd be sad. So I decided not to I kind of left it there But then and this is this is NASA Ames. I didn't go to NASA Ames for two months my other half did But that left me at home with a lot of spare time And I got more thinking about What were the problems around you know overcoming that? Reluctance to to do the change one problem. I said one problem. I certainly suffer from is I kind of see Polished finished products as atomic. I will look at them and I if I understand how to do something I generally think it's easy and trivial which may not always be true But that's what I think But if I see a finished product, and I don't know how to build it. I always assume it's impossible And you know, I'm a reasonably competent software engineer But most video games I look at because I've never tried to design a game I think my god I could never do that and that's again unlikely to be true But that's my instinct. So I spent a lot of time trying to demystify The electric guitar right so I had this kind of finished electric guitar and I wanted to Understand a bit more about how it was put together to get over that initial reluctance to metal with it YouTube Certainly for if you want to get into Lufthuy is a fantastic source of that and I imagine is for a lot of topics but just Go and like buy books watch YouTube videos read wikis Like whatever it is you're interested in someone will most likely have written some instructions of how you get there And the idea isn't you do those instructions straight away like building a guitar Is really you know is hard like doing the next is really really quite difficult But the idea isn't you do everything in stage one you iterate so This is this is guitar one. This is the first guitar I built and there's a picture of it That's what I wanted. It was like my other guitar only blue and it had a different pickup But Yeah, I didn't tackle everything in the first go I cheated I bought most of the parts and I You know kind of assembled it the neck I bought because that's the hard bit I actually bought the body, but I did leave enough to take me out of my comfort zone So the body wasn't quite right. I would have to do some woodwork to get it into the shape that I wanted but a lot of it was already done for me, so I was kind of You know minimizing the amount I'd go outside my comfort zone to keep it manageable and everything else I cheated on and that's fine The other risk you have with these kind of projects is I'm gonna invest a lot of money and If I screw it up, I'll be sad because I've wasted a lot of money and this approach kind of gives has kind of two benefits It kind of well, so one I bought the cheapest body possible, which is also why it doesn't work if you look The kind of on the right hand side. There's two potential meters that should be in that hole not balancing on top of it The body literally wasn't fit for purpose It was so cheap and there's wood where in the kind of pickup cavity on the bridge You can see wood where there shouldn't be wood and so I had to do some work But because I spent 20 quid on this and not 200 400 or however much I finished telecaster body is I didn't care if I destroyed it. I could destroy it 10 times and still kind of be quids it so those and also yeah by Doing it incrementally this way. I haven't bought all the complicated tools at this point So if I get halfway through this and decide I'm not doing this anymore I haven't wasted a lot of investment that I can't get back So having got the bits I don't went to my local community workshop. So this is Cambridge makespace I imagine in this kind of audience a lot of people already members of hackspaces You know, this is just a yeah a Cambridge a Cambridge based workshop Where there's lots of people and lots of toys The thing that people tend to focus on when they see these is you know, you've got a couple of laser cutters in there There's some a row of 3d printers. There's a glass kiln. There's some screen printing But that's only half the the kind of goodness of these places and the clues in the name It's community workshop. The other half is the community No one at Cambridge makespace was building guitars, right? So I couldn't go up and ask someone how do you do that teach me how to do that but You would just be around other people building things you even they would help you kind of they'd see you struggling like I was such a Yeah, you know such an idiot That I didn't know the difference between a posi driver and a Phillips screwdriver until someone saw me struggling and said Yeah, it'll be a lot easier if you just use this other screwdriver mate And kind of that or there was kind of you know, I could go and ask someone my soldering sucks I haven't done it for 20 years. Can you teach me how to solder again? And someone took the time to sit down with me and teach me soldering so, you know finding a place where there's a community of makers near you that you can go and sit in even if they Don't do exactly what you're doing is just a great way of short-cutting experience So if you you know find whatever your project is if you can find people working even roughly in the same area Go and hang out with them You know, they will help you in ways that you would never have anticipated So I did learn a little bit of woodwork You know, it would been 25 years plus since I'd been in a woodworking shop at this point But I learned how to use a hand router so I could make the holes bigger I drilled the holes for the string through and at the end of it. I had this guitar. This is my first guitar And I who thinks that looks like it could have been in from a shop Right a few of you So that's success right I cheated on most of that but it's Looks like a finished object and I played that guitar for the next year and a half until I made this one I never touched my fender again after that because not that my original fender was bad It just didn't sound like I wanted I built something and I played it So that's that's the first guitar Now this is also a good point to say do I really want to do this anymore, right? You don't have to when you start trying something. It's perfectly valid to say I've tried it I don't like it. I'm moving on which is another good I say the iterative approach to getting into a new domain is a good one because not only do you minimize the kind of The digression from what you're used to but it also gives you these checkpoints Which you can say is this good or should I go and do something else, right? So I did decide that was fun. I want to do some more So this is guitar 2 So the idea of guitar 2 is again I will just go a little bit more out my comfort zone than I did with guitar one So you know guitar one I mostly bought all of all the bits And unmodified I treat one of them with guitar 2 I was going to build the body because the body is a kind of you know It was solid a solid body electric guitar the body is you know It's a 2d profile with a few you know a few pockets in it. It's not that complicated to shape So that doesn't seem like too big a leap But the other thing I did with guitar 2 which I would encourage you is like with guitar one I wanted to get I wanted to finish product, right? I want I had a need and I was solving that that problem with guitar 2. I didn't need another guitar I already had the guitar that I wanted I just built it So for guitar 2 I went and found Someone else who wanted what I was about to build So I went to in this case I went to my my brother who's a gigging musician and I said can I build your guitar? And he was like of course awesome And so he specced like he wanted natural wood gold hardware He wanted it sound good for his particular genre of music, which I call noise and it's You know, this has two benefits one is this kind of influence takes you into places you wouldn't normally go and Makes you look at things you wouldn't normally look at like his tastes totally different from mine If I built otherwise, I'd probably just built the same guitar three or four times and that I've got very boring So there's that but it's also There are gonna be days no matter how much you love what it is that you've chosen as your hobby You're gonna hate it. I wish you'd never started There you know, you need something to push you through So I people have gym buddies, right? It's kind of to give you a reason to still get up on the days You don't want to and it doesn't have to be a customer in the paying sense Just find a way to you know, you could blog about I'm gonna go into this You know robot pirate pie walls competition or something and give yourself a kind of semi-public or you know Let your friends know you're gonna try for it just to give you There are days when you're gonna hate it and you just want some motivation to get over that So I bought this nice slab of wood off eBay I learned how to use the CNC router. It makes space and I cut out the body using a 2d Kind of a vector file. I found off the internet. So I didn't learn anything particularly complicated here I just learned how to use one more tool and and applied that and then I end up with this quite nice guitar body Right, I think you know most guitar bodies are fairly plain and this one included but this one looks quite unique But I didn't have to stretch myself too much I learned a little bit more and move forward And that would have been good had I not broken my first rule and slight and actually try to groove out my comfort zone twice on this guitar and this nearly undead undid me right the If you go into a guitar shop and find a guitar with gold hardware, which is what my brother had asked for Most of them will still have Nicholas stainless steel frets and my brother had asked for bling and he was gonna get bling So I found a neck that was unfretted. It had the slots in it So I'm still buying the neck which is quite complicated mechanically And I didn't have to worry about the spacing of the frets, which has to be reasonably accurate to get the right notes But I thought I'd do the fret work. I've watched all these YouTube videos. I you know, it can't be that hard Correct So fret wire is the coil that you see on the left a kind of Fret wire comes in it's kind of a kind of mushroom shape as a profile So you've got the kind of semicircular bit that's on top of the neck And then there's a descendant with some teeth on it that goes into the slots And you take the hammer there and you you know cut little strips you hammer them in And they sit home Unfortunately, no level now because you've just hit them with a hammer So now if I don't have them So If I tried to play this note and this fret was shorter than the following one, I'd play I'd go for that But I'd get that and my song would probably sound rubbish So you then cover all the frets with sharpie you get a file You file them all down till you see silver Then you take a little rocker kind of bar and you make sure that find the places where it's still not quite level and then you repeat And this takes half a day or so At which point you've now got a bunch of frets, which are all scratched and not round anymore So then you take another file which is round and then you put the The shape back in but at this point they're all scuffed and so if you're kind of doing That kind of thing you'd hear it scraping and so at that point you don't have to polish them and It's it's it's quite laborious and tedious And generally takes me once two days and it's very frustrating and this is where I really wanted to throw in a towel I had to do it three times to get it right And each time I got it wrong is because I was impatient and thought I would just do it quickly And if you can't do it quickly you just have to put in the graft to get it right But this is where knowing that my brother wanted the guitar saw me through right I knew my brother was looking forward to this guitar and It was worth it because this here is my brother in King Tut's Wawa her in Glasgow Which is a fairly famous venue in Glasgow playing to a room of about 200 people with a guitar that I made him And that in all the things I've ever I've been working software about 20 odd years Of all the things I've ever shipped. This is the most proud. I have ever been stood in that room watching this gig I can't tell you it was worth it. All the swearing was definitely worth it and so so that's You know guitar to we you know, so the lesson there is is the iterative approach is good Don't try and get ahead of yourself, but it you know, but set up a structure so that if you do find a way to keep going Through those through those tough days because they will happen So I've now done the fret work. I might as well just make the whole bloody thing So guitars free and for the aim was to build the entire entire guitars from scratch I'm doing two at once here because there's a phase in the middle where you're just applying a coat of stain Once a day to the body and then once that's done a coat of oil once a day to the body So it makes sense to kind of have have a couple on the go Here is the wood. There's a plank of maple and a plank of ash from the local lumber yard that maple layer is this neck here and This is the body that's from that plank. I took the planks. I chopped a mitt chopped in four kind of did the jointing on the edge glued it Back to the CNC router, you know, this is all well. We've been comfort zone here now And now we now have to actually make the neck. So necks are hard. I keep saying this. So let's look at why So there's two bits of wood on this neck There's the main bit and then there's the fretboard and in the middle is a adjustable metal rod called the truss rod Which you can see in that picture there and the what happens on a guitar is when you string it up the strings pull the headstock this way Right, there's the strings on a guitar quite high tension So they are bending the guitar and the truss rod as you adjust it plies counter pressure the other way Which is why if you ever change gauge of strings on your guitar You should do a truss rod adjustment to try and get the action back to the right term height But you've got this constant battle between the strings and the truss rod So, you know, there's mechanical stuff going on there that you need to get right the fretboard You have to get the spacings correct. So here I've got the fretboard with the fret slots on it. I glue it on Then do the inlays and what's happening here and then carving the neck where you just take a really brutal file Just remove the bits. You don't need that's all just remove the excess It's every time I touch this neck. I'm invested heavily Because I started off with a bit of wood You know 10 pounds for the for the maple. Okay, that's not much I see and see around it. That's a few hours gone. Okay, so 10 pounds in a few hours Put in the truss rod and the fretboard Now getting up to like 40 50 quid plus it's a day for the glued set, you know And this is a hobby not my day job. So, you know times racking up now I've got a drill holes in it for the inlays. Come on So you you get to this point I deferred doing the neck because I came up with so many excuses not to do the neck today I'll do that tomorrow when I you know when I feel less harassed or whatever and it you That's you know, you just have this in sunk cost that you are never gonna get back if you screw it up And that you just have to Get through and you know again, this is we're having someone who wants what you're building helps you kind of get over these humps So I did it, you know, I built I built my first neck. I was quite pleased I'd managed to get everything roughly right It wasn't perfect, but you know, you look okay And then I was just finishing touches. I was putting on the tuning pegs here First screw goes into the bottom fine second screw goes in the bottom find first screw as I'm talking it the head snaps off the screw So and there you go. I've just turned I've you know, I can't put screw in here anymore I can't put machine heads in this neck is now now useless I was upset But this is again where community comes in so like a lot of people I have an Instagram account I have a separate one for guitars. So I didn't bought my my friends too much But I post pictures of guitars in progress and I follow a lot of other people building guitars professional and amateur And they follow back because they're doing the same and I just want to see what other people building and how they're doing it And in general the temptation is to post your success. Isn't it awesome? Look at what I built this, right? And that's what we do and that's fine. You should should be proud of your accomplishments But also you should post your failures So I posted this picture very despondent late at night and in the morning I woke up and found that I had free messages from professional luthiers around the planet saying don't worry that happens Here's what you do right and because I kind of Kind of I don't know stupid it felt stupid to do at a time, but because I've you know, I Got into this community of guitar builders by sharing in-progress pictures and what I was doing This then paid me back when I showed my mistake people like no, it's cool. This happens to you So they I got three techniques. So being an engineer I reproduced the problem and So I only have one shot at fixing this if I'm gonna save it So I got a bit of wood that's got the same physical properties. I put some screws in it I sawed off the heads of the screws and I tried the three different approaches In the end I found You can drill to the side of the screw that's lost its head And if you do it you can see it as a faint pencil mark of where the machine head is going to be So I'm doing it on the side. You won't see I was able to drill a hole and wrangle out with some needle nose pliers the screw And you can see I slipped at one point and gouged back of the head Which was annoying But you know that sands out then you know the standard woodworking technique of filling a hole is toothpicks and wood glue And then at the end you send it all down and then this is it this if you there's a dark patch here I don't know if you can match it to that but that picture there That's this neck this neck failed and if I hadn't spent five minutes telling you you'd never know Which brings me on to the other benefit of having someone who wants what you're doing or is keen to see what you're doing As a maker you often just see how far short you fell like I had this objective I came you know close, but it wasn't what I wanted and so you see a negative It's hard to see the positives and what you know whereas my brother didn't have a guitar and he's then had a guitar and he thought it was awesome and You know I look at this guitar and I see all places I went wrong if you get me later I can give you a big list, but Everyone I've given this guitar to and letting them play it they go oh, that's awesome And it's I that's why I really get a kick out of giving my guitars to people to play because I then get to see the Positive in it, so that's another way find a way to make sure you see that positive side Not just the bits where you felt think you fell short I Didn't want to build an amp so technically this is a failure What I wanted to do is build more guitars But again, it's simplifying so having this guitar was the last one I did where I just found the design files on the internet and copied them What I want to do is do my own designs eventually, but 3d modeling is hard And so again, let's keep it simple an amp is a box, right? So I so as my first project of 3d design and kind of manufacture. I made a box It happens to be a useful box because this is I kind of cut it out and there's an amp But it's it's again. It's the same principle. How can I dumb down the problem that I'm trying to solve or find a stage? You're a stepping stone on the way because then I now in the next guitar was done in 3d design and kind of looks exact kind of kind of recognizable So that guitar there was made in made space the wood was done on the CNC router I laser cut the scratch play I 3d printed the controls and you know But that's this is take a view by this point six or seven guitars to get to this point where I'm fabricating And this is still someone else's design. I've copied. This is based on a fender Mustang Next guitars will be my own design But you know, it's taken me getting on for a nine guitars to get to that point Where I wanted to you know in theory get to all that time ago so and that's I guess that's you know, it's It's very easy to get overwhelmed and disillusioned when you when you pick up Are you number of people that come up to me and look at these guitars and go I could never do that That's utter rubbish Like anyone can build guitars to to misquote radio head This is this here is a picture of things gone wrong again on the low right You can see what a CNC router suddenly decided my program was rubbish and actually wanted to cut into the neck It was kind of some art project I guess on the CNC routers behalf But this is me fixing it manually and that forced me to learn about templates and routing out by hand, right? Turn your mistakes into a lesson. Just how it's gone wrong. I was very diswandant when it happened But I found a way to learn something from it So this is my kind of list of things that I the rules I try and apply and if you do project management or kind of engineering of any sort lots of these will be familiar Just applying them to your hobbits as well, and it's just you know, you get to have fun You get stand in front of a room full of people With it with a guitar that you made which is a kind of fun fun sensation That's the other thing I do is I write up each week I have a kind of on a blog I make sure I write up every week what's worked and what hasn't worked and how I think I'm gonna gonna fix it Yeah Yeah, it's kind of a weak weekly scrum rather than a day scrum I guess but again, it's it's public I've got people have written me kind of send me emails. Oh, I had that problem. Thank you for sharing But it's as much just a tool for me to I know people are watching it and if I don't post for a week They're gonna think I've given up and it's kind of Just another structure to try and motivate me to keep going when things really suck and I say a lot of times They really suck But they do it's just getting through and enjoying the upsides And if you want to see pictures of pretty calf complete guitars Then you can go look at my Instagram as well That's it. Thank you very much Thank you very much Do we have any questions? If you have a question throw up your arm Do I will not do you stay away to heaven? Do you want to wind your own pickups? I Would love to wind my own pickups at some point But again that goes against my rule of incremental like I would love to do everything like I saw on that The most recent guitar belt I say I 3d printed the controls There's no sane reason to do that. It's certainly not cheaper than buying them But it is just that kind of incrementally. I want to do other bits. I'd love to wind my own pickups, but I fortunate that Again, you get that imposter syndrome so the title is idiot to imposter Yeah, I have imposter syndrome bad time when I speak to proper people who did this for a living, right? I do not feel like I'm a Luffy about any stretch. I went to a guitar show and I was chatting to guy wands pickups and now I he He saw like a couple picture of a couple of guitars. I don't and now I get trade rates from him And it's great. I email him and say this guitar is gonna do this kind of music and stuff And he goes right. I'll wind you some pickups and you know, and it's so again, it's kind of Having the confidence to go out into your community and not be ashamed of what you've built because again Even though you think it's amateurish. That's not what other people assume Anyone else in which case a random applause You