Saturday was a dull rainy day (and I ended up very busy on other things), so I only had a brief
period on Sunday morning to grab a few shots of the Hexacaster before Steve Harris came to pick it up and take it away (after a couple of hours trying it out).
So here it is in all its glory...
Side view showing the 13-pin GK connector. The 13 wires carry the six individual hex pickup outputs, the standard guitar signal, power and various control signals, to/from the guitar synth unit. The standard guitar jack can be used, and it has a switching jack to disconnect the guitar signal from the GK unit if the guitar is being used just as a guitar, to stop the input impedance of the GK board from loading the pickups and dulling the sound slightly:
The Hexacaster headstock. Graphtech string tree and camel bone nut:
Rear of the headstock showing the Gotoh SG381 locking tuners. These have a great 16:1 ratio. I'd heave preferred the 18:1 versions but they were double the price of these and this is supposed to be a 'budget' build. And the Gotohs were fitted because the Northwest Guitars' locking tuners initially intended for this build had the holes in the posts too high up resulting in almost no break angle over the nut for the low E and and A strings:
Now for all the interesting bits. Two Bare Knuckle True Grit Boot Camp single coils and a Tonerider Rocksong bridge humbucker. The Roland GK hex pickup. Two volume knobs and a standard passive tone control. It's quite a bright guitar, with the Rocksong a good fit for the two medium-hot BKs, with not a huge jump in output or difference in tone when switching from single coils to the humbucker. Steve will modify his SY1000 patches to suit, as his other guitars are all a fair bit darker.
The volume nearest the humbucker is a 500k Bourns audio taper push/pull switched pot, with the switching splitting the bridge humbucker. There is a treble bleed (cap and resistor in series) wired across the volume pot.
The middle knob is the GK synth volume (50k linear), which sends a variable output signal to the synth unit, and doesn't lower the hex pickup signal at all.
The common tone control (on all pickups) is a 250k Bourns audio taper push/pull switched pot, with the 'up' position swapping from GK + guitar to GK signal only out on the 13-pin connector. The tone capacitor is a 0.022uF orange drop. I was originally going to try a PIO cap here, but the PIO was a lot larger than the orange drop, and space inside the cavity with all the extra wiring, so went with the smaller of the two caps. Yes, I could have fitted a ceramic disk cap, but there are limits, you know.
The LED is there purely to show the GK preamp board inside the guitar is receiving power from the synth and reassure the user that they have plugged the lead in and it hasn't fallen out. The mini toggle switch is a sprung-loaded-to-centre momentary contact switch, and sends out signals that can be set up in the synth controller to do things like increase/decrease patch selection values or turn effects on and off, though it does depend on the synth controller as to what it can be programmed to do. On some older Roland/Boss modules, the function is fixed.
The CRL 5-way switch has one side dedicated to the pickup selection, whilst the other brings in a 470k resistor in parallel with the volume pot when either of the two single coils are selected. This made a notable difference to the pickup tone, making them a lot sweeter sounding.
The bridge is a two-point Wilkinson trem, with steel saddles and a steel block. In the trem cavity are two springs and a Hipshot Tremsetter unit, which keeps the trem remarkably stable and under control. There is the standard-sized trem arm, and also Steve wanted to try out a reduced-sized trem arm à la Gilmour, so I got another one, cut it down and stuck a knob on the end. You can see both fitted in various photos.
Now for the cutaway heel and rounded neck plate. I also modified the neck shape so that there was a minimal flat section poking out from the heel joint and a much more gradual transition to the joint:
A player's view of the Hexacaster. You can see the far more gradual neck to heel transition with no step quite well:
And here is a photo showing the standard trem arm fitted:
And here's a very rough video showing Steve trying out the guitar yesterday. He's testing, rather than demonstrating, so it's not the most exciting demo in the world. He runs through some synth patches, then some hex pickup processed sounds e.g. nylon string and steel string acoustics) before moving to the straight guitar sounds.
And just in, a pic of it hanging proudly on Steve's wall:
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Originally Posted by Trevor Davies
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