Jamie’s RS Music Man Special

Jamie’s RS Music Man Special

Jamie asked me if it was possible to modify a Music Man guitar to sound like a Red Special.  He already owned an RS, but was endorsed by Music Man, so wanted the guitar to be instantly recognisable as a Music Man, yet play like an RS as he was just about to head off on a tour whereby he was due to play quite a few Queen Covers.

We worked out a way to do it and Jamie bought the orange – sorry ‘gold’ guitar and had it sent to me to be stripped. The plan was to send the body off to Andy Guyton to be refinished, whilst I got on with the rest of the design work, which entailed a lot of CAD manipulation of scans in order to produce the outlines for laser-cutting the routing templates. The hardest part was trying to adapt the feel of the RS pickguard to make it sit well withing the curves of the Music Man body.

Jamie also got in touch with his mates at Dimarzio and had three new BM-spec pickups produced and sent to me.

Once the body came back from Andy and the Perspex routing templates from the laser-cutters, I was able to start the body routing works. Never the best thing on a newly sprayed and finished body, but I was careful and thankfully, there were no issues!

The body had to be routed to accept the switch plate, pots, internal treble booster and pickups. Once routed, it was sealed with a lacquer before being copper shielded.

It was now time to build-in the electronics and start the wiring process. The guitar was fitted with two pull-pots for the volume and tone controls. The tone pull-pot switched-in the on-board treble booster, whilst the volume pull-pot switched the pickup wiring between series and parallel modes.

The finished guitar looked great and sounded very much like you’d expect an Dimarzio loaded RS to sound.