Building the Ergonomic Guitar

Rick Canton and guitarist Tim Miller have been collaborating on a new Tim Miller hollowbody electric guitar. The prototype you see here was built as an extended range instrument to allow Tim to explore the expanded range of an extended scale guitar.

Tim’s final guitar will be more “standard” from a scale perspective but its electronics and amplification will be significantly more elaborate. The instrument will include internal mic’ing and piezo elements both inside the body and top of the instrument topped off with a Roland GK3 pick-up – all designed bring out Tim`s studio sound in his live performances.

Rick took this opportunity to take a “green” approach to this prototype when he salvaged the neck from the original Equinox build. It had a chip near the back headpiece area but Rick cut it wider and filled it in with epoxy and purple heart dust.

Specs

Custom Tim Miller Model – 30″ extended scale guitar
Tuned to C or C# with a set of D`Addario .010 – .46`s
6lbs. 14 oz.

Guitar Body

• Custom ergonomic hollow body design
• Engleman Spruce top – a wood also used for its resonant qualities in piano sounding boards and violins.
• Honduras Mahogany core with integrated “S” brace
• Curly maple back
• Reed James custom wound low output passive A2 pick-ups
• Bondy hardtail bridge
• 2-CTS 250k pots for volume and tone
• Single mini 3-way switch (Bridge- Both – Neck
• Oval sound hole
• Flush mounted strap locks and output jack
• Gloss finish

Extended Scale Neck

• 26 medium frets
• Purpleheart fretboard
• Curly maple back
• Canton extended heel design
• Steinberger headpiece & string adapter
• 2 way truss rod
• Mother of Pearl side dots
• Oil finish

And finally, here’s a walk around the guitar – something I’d like to see more custom builders provide.