This guitar has been a long time in the making.
I started on it about six months ago. I wanted to wait until I had the
necessary tremolo cavity router templates. These had to be custom made
by a local machine shop to my specs. After going through 3 machine shops
I finally got my templates. I also had to wait a long time to get my
ZachAttack pickup masters made. The first two were ruined by the machine
shop and two new ones had to be made. This all took a lot of time.
In addition I thought for sure I lost the body
when I noticed that the Bloodwood was chipping like crazy on my router
table. Bloodwood is very hard and very brittle. Instead of cutting it,
a router bit just rips it apart. Luckily I avoided disaster. There was
just no way I would loose such a nice piece of wood and expensive too.
The guitar plays great. It has the big fat frets
I love and a very fast action. The tremolo is flawless and works together
with the "Mission Impossible" nut to give you virtually perfect
tuning with madman whammy abuse. Please note that my guitars are always
set up with 2 heavy duty springs. This is what works best and the springs
do not bottom out. The pictures of this guitar were taken showing 3
light springs but this was just an experiment and I did not like the
way they felt and since the trem travels all the way down the springs
bottomed out at the end of their travel when they lost tension. I quickly
converted it back to the 2 spring set up which is fully floating and
very sensitive and light to touch. The tremolo becomes addictive and
you can't help but do all kinds of weird tricks with it. In fact you
spend more time doing that than actually playing tunes. Its more like
a trick guitar. I could never understand how VanHalen only wanted his
trem to go down. Might as well have it go both ways, you have a lot
more to work with and you can be that much more expressive. Eddy, if
you want to comment on this, just send me an e-mail but I thing you
are really loosing out by using the trem to just go down in pitch. I
know why SRV only wanted his trem to go down. He was lucky to keep that
crappy guitar in tune after he even touched the trem. He also had a
terrible time keeping the strings from breaking. I know that he had
to puit a rubber under the high E string where it comes out of the block
and this helped slow down some of the breakage. He sure had great tone
though.
Anyway, it took talent on loan from God to eliminate
these age old problems of tremolo guitars but I did it. No longer will
your trem guitar go out of tune and you will not break any strings either,
or at least it will be very rare. Oh well, its just part of making the
best electric guitar in the world.
The new pickups are a perfect fit and they look
great too. I wanted them to look aggressive and one of the reasons I
wanted pickups that I designed myself is to get the polepiece spacing
correct. Many commercially available pickups are not exact in the pole
piece spread and trying to get them to change anything is impossible.
Mass production pickup makers only care about units sold, they don't
really care about making perfectly designed products. That sure goes
for guitar manufacturers as well. If crap sells, they will make crap
and lots of it.
It is a magic moment each time I plug a guitar
in for the first time. Its almost a sensual experience. The guitar looses
its virginity. This is when I get my first and a very immediate impression
of what the guitar plays and sounds like. All Zachary guitars play very
much the same but there is sound variation between them and a different
resonant character due to the large variety of woods I use. This guitar
was also unique in that it was the first one with the finalized version
of the ZachAttack pickups.
What did it sound like when I first plugged it
in? Brown sound. That is how I can describe it. Playing it clean it
is very warm and big. No harshness, not metallic sounding, no peaks
or valleys, just a very smooth thick and warm sound. A big sound with
lots of sustain. I have never heard a tremolo guitar sustain like this.
When putting the gain up all the way the sound is just so thick you
can cut it with a knife. Just a huge wall of sound, with endless sustain
so that you can do all your fancy tricks, including endless taping and
huge powerchords. Yes, it does remind me of VanHalen. You know that
thick warm distortion that feels very comfortable to play. You also
get the different switching options as well. With just a flick of the
switch you can cut a coil in either pickup and make it into a single
coil. Its a very versatile guitar for any type of playing. Enjoy
the pictures, I am going back to play.
