 What I want to try and rattle through in the next half hour is kind of two talks. I couldn't really pick a title So on one hand, I'm going to teach you a bit about how I make these. So this is a hand-built electric guitar and I started doing this a while ago and I tried doing it like I was at Liverpool Make Fest recently and what I try and do is show people how these are made And I keep getting people come up to me go, oh, that's amazing. I could never do that And that's demonstrably not true because three years ago. I haven't set foot in a workshop and I'm a software engineer So I have no physical capabilities whatsoever And so the kind of other title of this talk is from Idiot to Imposter, which is like I Know that I come to events like this and I hope In the same way that you will get inspired by something and go on to want to kind of action that kind of passion later But as you leave this place or you know either today or after some more of the festival you get back You may have hit Amazon and bought some deaf boards. That's usually my advice And then you hit work or looking after family or whatever it is that Then you kind of lose the momentum Moment things start going wrong. And so with this this time I try to structure things to Make it more likely I would succeed and it's kind of so I want to intertwine those two two topics So let's see how it goes this is an electric guitar like this one here It's not the world's most complicated instrument once you get to know it It's not piano or violin or a saxophone or something like that So it's actually quite a good place to start out with if you want to get into building instruments It's got a few parts to it. We've got the body you've got the net you've got the electronics that can make it work But it's you can see kind of see the components fairly quickly on a on an instrument like this And that makes it a really good place to start So when I got into the idea of I wanted to build an electric guitar I did a lot of research. I understood kind of the parts, but my first one I started Thank you here With a bunch of parts. I kept it at that level of abstraction So a lot of the topics that I want to cover JP's already mentioned. So the idea of Not trying to do everything all at once but starting small iterating every time Like every time I try and build a new guitar I try and go a little bit out of my comfort zone and I try and keep most things more manageable So this was me as a software engineer keeping the concept You know, I'm going out of my comfort zone. I'm building something physical but I've kind of simplified the problem a lot by Cheating I just bought a bunch of parts and I'm you know, I'm just gonna cheat and try and get to some Sense of achievement quickly. I'm going a little bit out my comfort zone as I say because I'm doing some physical So this body I bought was the cheapest one I could get I knew it would need a little bit of woodwork and I figured that I'd keep that bit manageable and try and Start on that path, but overall I'm trying to keep things kind of simple The other kind of advantage of doing this obviously that I've not spent a huge amount of money on bespoke custom roof free tools and Very exotic woods. So if I get to the end of this and it's a disaster And I actually discovered my passions making kilts or our house films on souffle's then I can change right? I've learned something I can move on that sign So having assembled This kind of pile of parts on the kitchen table. I need somewhere to To to kind of enact I don't have much kind of you know room to do woodwork at home The this here is Cambridge makespace So it's a community workshop or a maker space or a headspace call it what you want to There's lots of these around the country. There's one even in heaven bridge. I believe redirect fire There's one over in Liverpool called does which I occasionally go and visit and these are great spaces and You go there for the workshop because there's space they have You can't say off here. There's a woodworking kind of facility where I have a bunch of tools that I can use But they also have some laser cutter some freely printers. There's a glass kiln over there's electronics bench There's some sewing machines off here There's lots of kind of tool and that's kind of why people sign up and go for this because they see all the toys and think well That's awesome But I choose the word community workshop deliberately because the community is half of Why you want to be here? I couldn't do this if it was just I had access to tools What I need is access to experience. I didn't realize that when I joined up But that's this is what what's important is all these people you can see here the members They all know stuff that I don't know and None of them build guitars Right, not that I'm aware of But they all do Makery stuff. So there's a guy at the back there on the electronics bench He probably knows how to solder better than me and I'm gonna obviously gonna have to learn how to solder electronics at some point So I can you know in exchange for helping him with one of his projects or a beer or just out of you know People just do it because they want to help Being in an environment like this Without other people it's just a huge key to succeeding So if you whatever it is you take away that you want to get passionate about Trying to find a community to be a part of be it physical or virtual You know just Surrounding yourself by other people moving forward in whatever it is they're doing is great and over time I slipped from being in that 80% that JP was referring to when I I signed up to make space I didn't really go that much. I thought it was a good idea. It's like a gem You felt good about it, but never where I went To now I'm kind of slipped into the 5% because I've got the time to help I'm more active I kind of help improve the workshop and over time that will wax and wane right and there's workload change and things But it's it's yeah being part of community is is a hugely important So yeah, I got these people to teach me how to use like pillow drill and It's even the unobvious stuff. So as a software engineer, I thought there were two types of screwdriver There was the one with the minus sign at the end and the one with the plus sign at the end, right? That's that screwdrivers covered. It turns out there's more And just being in a place with more experienced people I read the civil coming up to me and say Michael That's that's the one kind of screwdriver for that. So it's not even proactively seeking help just surrounding yourself by people who Have more experience and you know of a positive attitude So through that kind of you know, I took the body I learned has to cut some holes in it and put some other holes in it There I made my first guitar Does this make me a master luffery yet? No, clearly not. Um, does it matter? No Not in slightest. This is still the guitar. I play most days when I do my morning practice This is here my seventh guitar and this is all kind of hand-built and kind of you know Kind of old-grand but this is still guitar that I made because I wanted a guitar that made a particular noise And so it does the job and I still play every day if I hand this to someone who's a guitarist They'll they'll not start questioning. Wait a minute. Didn't you just cheat and but they don't care. It's a musical instrument so In taking those baby steps You know, you can achieve things and kind of start to see your progress and measure them a kind of not in a I want I want to grasp but just Having checkpoints if you set yourself a very grand ambition, it's hard to see your progress It's hard to work out what's going on particularly when it all starts going wrong. Is it inevitably well? So that was guitar one and You know, so so let's delve down slightly so the electronics and electric guitar are fairly dumb, right? So the Nationally, I did two years of electronics at university and I've forgotten pretty much all of it Which is okay because I say that I don't need to understand much here. You've got on the electric guitar you have Kind of this one has two pickups and these are essentially A bunch of magnets with wire called around the detective vibration strings and turn into a small very small current You then have optionally volume and tone controls which are just variable resistors and I've got select to hit let's me change between them But ultimately I could have just one of these and a jack to connect the cable to and it would work And it would be playable and if you get many cigar walks guitars, that's all we put in them And so there isn't much 2d electronics This is a quite complicated wiring. It's got ten components, right? And most things like one of the big pickup manufacturers called Seymour Duncan has on their website pretty much all the All the circuit diagrams, so I don't even have to sit and figure them out I can just go to the Seymour Duncan's website and say, oh, it's got two pickups and free controls or whatever And it will generate the circuit diagram for you. So you don't need to kind of have a great in-depth of And this will be true of most domains, right? You try and focus on the bit that's interesting to you and kind of push the others to the side so like the pickups I Really would like to mine my own pickups because it sounds Interesting right? There's some kind of magic here. You got a bunch of magnets. You vary the amount of wiring you do And you get a really different sound how close that? But it would be a total rabbit hole and I would never learn to do woodwork if I did that and I've made a very conscious decision to stay away from this As cool as it seems I'm learning enough and again, it's very tempting to go down every rabbit hole you come across, right? I make most of this but I did I was time to try and do metalwork to make the bridges because I don't make those But again, that would just be a total distraction and that's okay If that's what you want to do go down that rabbit hole But just acknowledge that you can't do everything so if you're going to go and mine pickups or you know Make sparrons for your kilts that you're making maybe just focus on that and do a good job of that and Kind of outsource the rest. I'm fortunate I know a chap in Chester who makes pickups and I get you know I work with him and can outsource that bit the body So the body on electric guitar is what most people kind of look at It's the bit that differentiates it most from other guitars. I mean it kind of in a immediacy sense On a typical solid body electric guitar like this. It's the bit that matters the least Right, it's the bit that you focus on and that's why because we can do all these kind of funky designs and stuff Because it doesn't really matter It just has to be a thing that bolts everything else together And so it's a good place to start with my next guitar, right? I bought all the bits for the first one for the second one I'm just going to make the body and I'll still buy all the bits. So I'm still iterating keeping it simple Going a little bit out of my comfort zone each time So I got people in the makespace community will do teaching sessions on on different bits of kits So I attended one on the CNC router, which is a computer-controlled wood cutting machine. Essentially I downloaded a design off the internet for the guitar, so I cheated again It looks very much like the design for the last guitar. Deliberate. I'm keeping it. I'm trying to Make sure I understand what success looks like Right, so if I tried to design a really wacky guitar on my second one I put it together and it's slightly wrong. Well, what bit did I get wrong? I don't know whereas in fact all these guitars at this point look like the one I bought at university So I have to rest of guitars that all look the same But it's deliberate because I know I can then assess whether they're good or not Or kind of and kind of understand again when they go wrong as they know what we do where the where the mistakes are So so yeah at the end of it. I have a nice right body for for this guitar and Yeah, did I cheat again? Yes, I have master luthier at this point. No, does it matter? I don't think so Because I've made progress I've learned I'm moving forward and at some point this guitar was for my brother And he was over the moon at this kind of beautiful bit of kind of wood that was unlike other guitar bodies he'd seen The wood was cheap off eBay So the bodies again, you can you know, again, it's it's less scary making the body because If you get it wrong, it doesn't really matter You can kind of smooth out that divot that you took out and and kind of no one really knows The one bit you have to get right is the fret positions on On the neck. So these are the frets So this is a guitar This here is the scale length. So the thing that's kind of important on an electric guitar is This is your nut and here is the saddles on your bridge. This is called your scale length Um on this guitar, it's 24 inches on the previous guitars. It was like 25 and a half The bass the bass guitar is just the same only it's a longer scale length. So they are like 32 inches Um baritone guitar kind of 27 inches a ukulele somewhere down here I don't actually know the number but ultimately they're all working on the same principle. You're just very the scale length Um, I'm not sure how many people were prepared to this I probably should have put a warning up that we were about to do a gear shift from woodwork to uh javascript. Um As I said, I have a lap software engineer. Um It's how do you work out where the frets go? It's actually not that hard It's only this line here that really matters in all this and if we look at the This messed up power is just like doing powers. So you can do that on a pocket calculator, right two to the I divided by 12 where I is like one two three four, right? We've got a divide and we've got a minus and we know the scale like because we've measured the point from here to here So that means if you're building a guitar It doesn't really matter what number is here, but once you've worked it out If you sit down with a bit of paper and a pocket calculator You can just do this kind of take you 15 20 minutes whatever and you can work out a position of all these Right. So again, even though you need to know this number and these frets have to be accurate relative to that It's not rocket science to work it out I'm as I say, I'm a computer scientist and inherently lazy. So I write a webpage do it for me Um, so these numbers here are just calculating the positions for a 25 and a half inch scalex guitar and You know, it's found out the other guitar builders are lazy as well because a bunch of people now use this tool that I wrote for myself Which is a nice way being able to kind of give back bringing Some of my expertise from my domain to bear on the kind of thing I've taken up means that you Often have a different view on what it is you're doing or a different approach And I'm not exactly the world's best luffy, but I've been able to help other luthiers, which is kind of cool. I think As an idiot, I'm helping other people. So it's good However for the for the First time I did the frets. I cheated. I bought a neck without frets and I just put them in The reason I did this at all was because For guitar two with my brother wanted Gold kind of hardware on the guitar on the grounds. Presumably has no taste but the If you look at most uh, guitar next they'll have silver. I've sorry not silver I've stained the steel or nickel frets and I I wanted gold fret wire for this my brother That's the gold hardware. Damn it. He was going to get it and so I found somewhere that did kind of gold alloy and did the frets myself um This was really stupid on my second guitar. I broke my own rule here um So to do the frets you cut this wire up into strips and then you hammer them into the slots um That's a bit annoying because the slots are really narrow and ultimately you're trying to kind of press them in While hammering so they don't really want to go. So this takes me like, you know a couple of hours or something um However, because you've hit them with a hammer, they're not all flat. They're all kind of up and down and it's So as I'm sliding my finger the note only changes when I hit a fret, right? So it's the fret that's defining the note and if if this fret was too low Instead of getting that I might get that note which would be sad when you're in the middle of your, you know Rock god moment on stage and you ring out the wrong note because I've messed up the fretting So I have to you're masking tape up the fretboard. I take some straight edged files and I file all the frets down um That takes a bit of time However, these frets which are nice and round when I bought the wire are now flattened and so As I do that, there's a kind of if if they're not round my finger will stick and again, I'll not get the nice The kind of slide I want So I have to take more files and round round the fret back over Um, I really hate this um Yeah, and then obviously I've because all the sandpaper here is because you know having um Filed them If I do that you'll hear the strings scratching over the fret um And that would be sad as well And so all in all it takes me two working days Now this is a hobby a side like you know when you take up these kind of The things it is the thing you do when you're not at work or looking after your family or you know combination of the two or whatever So a working day is what's that for most of us? It would be we'd be lucky if that was a week of hobby time, right? So if this is taking me two working days to do that's probably taken me a couple of weeks to get to this stage I hate doing this Because i'm not a patient person and in fact so I found in prep I found this picture Of that my brother's guitar strung up and I now just reel in these are all not rounded off That's not nice. They're too high. It's dreadful and I know it's dreadful because I had to do it three times to get it right And this nearly broke me as you know, it says like I just can't get this right. I've committed to do it It's just going wrong and um Yeah, it It took me I think the first picture I've got of this is like November. I finally got it done in january um But the thing that kept me going is The guitarist for my brother he asked me to make it for him having seen mine Because he's not paying for he just you know, I'm doing it because I want to An excuse to do stuff, but I said to my brother. I will deliver him a guitar So I have someone out there who hopes I will succeed right And the thing that kept me going when after the second time another two weeks has gone and I still Not done a good job and it is not an instrument. It is just a bit of sculpture at that point And why am I going to spend another two weeks here? It's because there's someone who hopes I'll succeed out there and that's something I encourage you to find in whatever it is you try your hand at is I use the word customer, but I don't mean customer. I just mean someone who's engaged with what you're doing Uh, I write a blog every week of things that go right and wrong and part of the reason I do that is again Like people expect me to have done something every week no matter how small So when it's all overwhelming and I'm looking at this thinking I can't do this again It encouraged me just to do a little bit each week And just move forward a little bit. So I've got something to write in my blog So he's kind of finding that structure where there are people out there who can Who are kind of willing you to succeed and and finding that could be signing up for a show Again taking part in the community anything that helps you Externalize that kind of desire to succeed Um, and it's worth it because this is my brother On stage at King Tutswawa in Glasgow behind me are like 200 people having a blast and In all my life Of shipping software and making things. This is the most proud and happy I've ever been right I was in a venue that I used to go to when I was an undergraduate And there's everyone's having a blast and in some small way I'm a part of that Um, and so that kind of persistence pays off But I would have given up had it not been for my brother because I would have gone and done for me else Um Cool the neck the frets sit in the neck The neck is the bit that is like with the frets and is the bit you have to get right It's the bit that no one looks at or thinks too much about But it's the bit the musician interacts with And the neck is frustrating in the way that you put it together Um So you start with a plank of maple in this case You kind of cut off the bits kind of from the side. There's the thing in the middle called the truss rod Who's seen a truss rod before? Um This here is the metal rod that goes inside a guitar neck And the nice thing about it is it's adjustable So if I twist at the end you can come and have a play if you can't see it bows out in the middle Um, the strings when you put the strings on a guitar We'll try and pull the headstock around this way And there's about 50 kilos of pull there Um, so this is giving some rigidity But it's also adjustable because different strings will require different kind of balance And so that's how you control the action of the strings above the frets And kind of if you are happy unhappy your guitar because the strings are too high or too low a small Like an eighth of a turn at most on the truss I had a truss rod adjuster is will uh, will will kind of move you in a direction So something to keep in mind Um, most people are scared of adjuster gigs and where it does snap the neck So, but it's fine as long as you do my new adjustments Um, anyway, so I've cut this out. I've put that and that's like another half working day again So, you know a significant time you glue it up with the fretboard Um, oh, yeah this remember I did this Um The good thing about being in A workshop that right the bad thing about being in a community workshop is it never has exactly the right tools you want Or if it does they're blunt Um However, you know, there are upsides to be in a community workshop beyond just the people themselves that make it worth persevering One is you have tools that other people don't necessarily have So in addition to calculating the positions in this table up here I have this button over here that says generate DXF or scg So I can actually take this and put it onto the laser cutter as it makes space And so I I I'm not like a caveman with a pencil and a ruler I put the entire neck into the laser cutter and just say etch me a line where I should cut the frets I can't use the laser cutter to cut the frets because the channel it makes is a v shape I need a kind of straight edge, but it it saves me I've got a friend who who makes guitars professionally It takes him like an hour hour and a half just to mark out the frets to soaring time. It takes me two minutes And that's because I'm in a workshop which has all these fun toys So look around and find, you know, what you could turn to, you know, it might not be the perfect tool But you can bend it to your will so then I'm doing all these actions from here on in where I'm removing material and that's terrifying Because you're investing time in this thing. There's some money as well, but it's mostly time that's precious so I keep Kind of spending half days here and there every time I touch it another half day to do this I'm rounding off the I cut the headstock shape out I have to drill the inlays every time I touch this I'm removing material and there's one good outcome And an infinity minus one bad outcomes And it's terrifying the tense like so, how do you do the back of the neck? Well, you just take a brutal rasp and remove the bits you don't want I procrastinated about six weeks before I did this for the first time Again, the only reason I did it was because I'd promised myself and I'd said to my parents I was going to make this guitar for a friend for Christmas and Christmas has a fixed date That's how I created that kind of structure Fixed date in modern times, maybe we should say So you kind of spend all this time you get to the end And here's here's me putting on the tuner tuners So I put one in fine put the second one in screw it in fine put the third one screw it in Oh, dear The head sheered off To say I was upset at this point Um Because I've just put in all this effort and I I've just demonstrated that I am the idiot. I think I am You know all these people say oh, you're making guitars. You're you must be awesome. No, I'm an idiot I just a screw it's just ruined. I spent how on this And this is where again community plays a big part So I have a second kind of community which is Luthiers like instagram. We just share photos of guitar builds in progress We kind of like to see what other people are doing. We like to show off We just like to learn techniques from each other and what have you and even someone like me who's around amateur Professional luthiers will follow because I will do weird things like use a laser cutter, right? So it's kind of So I post this picture mostly wanting sympathy If I'm brutally honest, I felt sad and frustrated and annoyed. I posted this picture um The next morning I found three professional luthiers from around the world had sent me say, oh, it's fine. It always happens Uh, here's what you do And so I ran back into makespace. I recreated. I'm an engineer. I recreated the Scenario cut off the screws tried out their techniques Uh managed to get the screw out. It's patched under where the the tuner is going to go That was another thing they told me to do And this is how you patch wood holes like, you know guitars are probably about five percent toothpicks and glue um And it's it's actually work and it's because I've shared a negative thing with a community, right? Like if the temptation when you're in part of that Community is to just post the positives. Can you want to look good, right? I think that's natural I don't know if it's anything to be ashamed of But it's also important to post your failures because things go wrong all the time and you're doing two things here One is you're opening yourself up to people being able to say, oh, no, that's okay. That happens here Let me help you And also you're normalizing the fact that this is bad things happen, right? I've not yet worked on a guitar where something hasn't gone wrong this guitar, which I think looks okay Um, I actually had to patch it where to see and see router to try to break it And so right it put everyone who picks this up and looks like oh, that looks amazing. They don't think oh look Yeah, oh went wrong there. Didn't it mate? Right, I mean you guys are going to think that now, but you know not kind of the rest of the world don't Okay, this is kind of the last bit because it's An adjunct to the guitar. We've gone through the body the electronics The amplifier is an important part to your guitar. This amplifier here Is the one on any amplifier I built I didn't want to build an amplifier. So from that point it's an abject failure The what I wanted to do was build more guitars However, the way I wanted to get into doing my own designs rather than copying other people's designs Was I wanted to learn CAD kind of drawing Kind of them 3d modeling on computer getting them out to Manufacture and an amp is a box. So it seemed a good first project, right? The insides electronics aren't kind of outsourced that but the box was what I made first in CAD So I spent a couple weeks learning how to Design design box how to tell the computer to cut the box out and then cutting the box out And I'd encourage you when you do this you end up kind of this box and a finished amplifier It's always my goal is making guitars This was just kind of sorry kind of distraction in one hand But it had a purpose But I think I'd encourage you to do when you do this is take them to completion Because I made that look like a linear process and it's not like what happens is you don't stop playing Thank you You draw the box and you think you're you're good at this now and then you go to try and Lay it out and then you realize. Oh, this is too tight a corner I can't do this. I have to go back here and yada and then when you try and make it you realize You can't lay it out on the sheet of wood because the wood's actually not as big as you thought it was So you have to go back here And it's a so pushing through small projects to completion is always important Because it will reveal the gaps that you would otherwise have missed And then I was able to draw a guitar which then became a guitar, right? So This is kind of the rust of tips And I say I use the guitar as an example here Whatever your passion is whatever it is you leave here inspired with on wherever inspiration next hits you These are kind of this is a structure that I've used to try and help me succeed Community is a huge part of it just getting other people to interact with And again, that's that kind of iterate do small things often rather than try and do one massive thing There you go. That's uh, that's that's me