Building the Ergonomic Guitar

In this final installment, we look at the last of the progress pictures as the extended range bass guitar by Crimson Guitars comes to completion.

A Custom Guitar Bridge

You just can’t go out and buy a bridge for an instrument like this, so Ben at Crimson Guitars came up with a rather ingenious custom guitar bridge assembly. Note the L-shaped brackets that attach to the surface of the bridge area and act as anchor points for the bridge saddles. The arrangement is simple, elegant and effective.

BTW, this custom guitar bridge has applications in conventional guitars as well. Think about the flexibility this provides. It can be built simply. You can make the spacing anything you want. You can use bridge saddles with piezo pickups already built in for an acoustic like tone. Surface mounting eases installation. It can be built at low cost.

To make this work, the extended range bass guitar uses a string through body so here’s a look at the back where we can see the string ferrules:

ERB Guitar Completed

We jump past the finishing process (final sanding and applying a finish), the assembly of the last few pieces and here it is strung up and ready for 05Ric to try it out:

This final shot includes the location of the volume knob:

But where are the pickups? They’re actually hidden underneath the top wood! Custom pickups were wound just for this purpose.

Guitar complete.

For more, check out part 1 and part 2 as well as the initial coverage of the ERB.

Many thanks to Ben at Crimson Guitars for generously providing BTEG with all of these progress pictures!