The repair I screwed up is a parlor guitar, an Italian made Douglas of unknown age. I don't even know if this is the same "Douglas" brand available today. A former friend picked it up for me at an estate auction several years ago. I almost forgot I had it until my son found it in the basement and asked me about it. Could it be tuned up an played, he asked? "Probably, but it sounds like a cereal box," I said.
Then we were both curious and I started poking around. The bridge was split horizontally (sorry, no picture) and evinced a previous, poor, glue job. The tuners were horrible. If there is a truss rod it is not accessible. It was about what you would expect from an older, inexpensive instrument that had not been properly cared for.
The first clue that there might be more to this pathetic instrument than met the eye happened when I unstrung it to replace the tuners. A 2" x 1" X 3" block of mahogany fell out of the sound hole. I think it was wedged under the bridge. If you know why, please e-mail me.
One thing I got right on this guitar was I added some radius to the neck. Originally it was entirely flat. I pulled the first three frets and sanded a gentle curve, just in that ar
ea, where we play open chords. I didn't get the frets back in just right, but it is more comfortable to chord now.I decided to give this Douglas a bridge transplant similar to the Yamaha I did last winter. The difference was I wanted to use a Telecaster style bridge. This isn't an inherently bad idea but I didn't think it through and screwed it up pretty badly.
My first big mistake was failing to plan the new bridge's height. For some reason I assumed the Tele bridge's adjustability would cover all of my imprecision. I wanted a piece of wood between the Tele hardware and the top of the guitar and chose a piece of rosewood. I knew it would need to be profiled down but I didn't measure and I left it way too thick. I did not realize this until I had attached everything to the top. At about the same time I realized I had also placed
the whole bridge/saddle assembly too close to the neck.I didn't want to remove ANOTHER bridge from this guitar's top so I got out my files, drill and hack saw and set about further modifying this bridge for action and intonation. In stead of "near perfection" the new goal was "playable." It also ocured to me that lower tension would give a little action, so I strung it up with the lightest D'Addario acoustic strings I could find.
It wasn't enough. I took two further measures. I expanded my adjustment for
action to the nut and 0-fret. I also decided this was a great opportunity to experiment with high strung tuning. This turned out to be fun. Not only did it allow me to put even less tension on the neck, perhaps helping the action a bit more, it also sounds really cool and satisfies some of my curiosity about this practice.
Not being one for moderation I pushed high stringing a little past the "Nashville tuning." If you Google "Nashville tuning" you will get information about a couple of steel guitar tunings and a description of tuning a standard guitar with the additional strings from a 12-string set. Guages would look something like .012, .016, .010, .014, .020, .030 rather than .012, .016, .024,
.032, .042, .053.
I currently have the guitar strung .006, .014., .007, .009, .013, .009. That's right. Nothing big enough to wind.
It is tuned E4, B3, G4, D4, A3, E4. The .006 and .007 are Gary Goodman Octave 4 Plus strings. The others are either DaDdario or juststrings.com bulk strings. Making the Es E5 is possible withOctave4Plus strings but I wanted to keep the
tension down. Also, these specific strings were not designed for that.Because the note names match standard tuning any guitarist can play a guitar set up this way. If I had more time I'd post audio. You'll just have to string up a guitar this way yourself.
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