Build your DREAM Les Paul for LESS than $300!!!

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] hey guys good to see you again you guys have been requesting for a long time for me to do a dream build from a Les Paul kit so I've got this cheapo Les Paul kit that I got from Tom top and it wasn't exactly a stellar kit but if you want you can check out my review on that before you watch this video but we're gonna go ahead and build this thing up into a high-end tone monster that sounds like something you want to see and hear then stick around I'm Dan this is Gunz guitars [Music] all right real quick before we dive into how I built this awesome guitar for about 300 bucks I want to talk to you about guitar EO now Randy from guitar EO reached out to me a few months ago to see if I'd be interested in trying out some of his online guitar tutorials so I'm gonna talk about it a little bit more later but the bottom line is it's been really helpful for me to kind of polish up some of my technique and my guitar playing a little bit and hopefully you guys have noticed over the last few months that I've actually gotten a little bit better at guitar so this video is actually sponsored by guitar EO thank you very much and I did get them to hook us up with a free online music Theory course there's a link in the description if you aren't interested in taking your guitar plane to the next level if 2019 is going to be your year that you take your guitar plane seriously you want to learn how to construct your own licks you want to learn how to improvise solos or write songs it all starts with music theory so definitely check out that free course just follow the link in the description and let's dive into this build okay first order of business we're gonna have to make some modifications to this guitar body so you guys have been asking for a long time for me to install a kill switch into a guitar and so I've got these cool kill switches right here that I got from Iron Age guitars you sent them to me to evaluate in demo and you can get these on Amazon so I'll put an affiliate link in the description there for you but they're really cool I'm really excited and I can't think of a better project to try them out on so we're gonna need to put a hole right there to install our kill switch hopefully right above the neck humbucker there would be awesome and I don't know about you guys but my belly is kind of starting to grow a little bit and this thing doesn't have any comfort carves in the back of it so playing this thing is not gonna be very comfortable for me so while we're at it why don't we go ahead and just carve out a nice belly cut there in the back okay first thing I did obviously is just measure where I want my kill switch to go and I was sure to drill all the way through the body and then on the backside I kind of just sketched out where I want to extend that control cavity so I have access to screw on the backing net for the kill switch and then just freehand routered out that area I know I'm gonna be covering that with the cover plate so I didn't have to be super pretty next I'm just gonna clamp down the body real quick and use my angle grinder with a sanding flat disc to kind of carve out that comfort cut for my belly and I always use this setup for carving guitar bodies because it's extreme productive just be careful because things can go south are really fast with this tool it is a little too productive and then my favorite tool my dremel with the flex shaft kit and a sanding drum I'm just gonna use that real quick to kind of clean up some of these edges make those transitions nice and smooth lastly I'm just gonna cut out a quick paper template of what I want my control cavity cover to look like and then I'm going to just jigsaw that out of some scrap basswood that I have laying around that basswood I get in sheets from the craft store for about two or three bucks a piece and I just have it on hand for little things like this now then I'm just gonna trace out real quick where that cover is going over the cavity and then I'm gonna rout out a little notch for that cover to sit in so that it will sit flush with the body alright we've had a very productive morning pretty easy I just rounded that out and then I made this custom little control plate cover so that fits on there just like that oh and the belly cut turned out wonderful so it fits me pretty good if I get too much bigger I might have to carve out a little bit more just kidding me no but that'll definitely get the job done now it's time to finish sand this thing so that we can get on to the fun part the staining and dine let's go ahead and get rid of these nasty glue marks that are plagued on this thing and see if we can't get this thing ready to be turned into a some sort of nice looking guitar I hope now you guys know I'm not really in the business of making beautiful looking guitars so I typically don't spend a whole lot of time sanding but this guitar does have a nice flame maple veneer on it and it seems like the tiger striping in it does have a lot of depth so I did really want to show that off so I did spend a considerable amount of time finish sanding that maple veneer just starting with 180 grit and then stepping up to 220 grit and 320 grit and I used 3m sand blaster Pro sandpaper for this because it's the most productive so I can spend the least amount of time sanding possible for the color of this finish I'm going to be using liquid Rit dye starting with black this is gonna be the base color for my purple burst and you guys have seen me do bursts before with RIT dye and I feel like the best way to do it is just to start with your darkest color and then sand it back and put your light colors on top so I'll show you how I do that one thing that I love about using liquid rich is the dry time is super fast I mean about 10 or 15 minutes and you're pretty much ready to go ahead and move on for the back and sides of the body as well as the neck I decided to use Minwax true black stain and I did this because I like the feel of oil based stains much better than water-based dyes so especially for the back of the neck where I'm gonna be running my hands up and down all the time I did want to have that smoother finish that I get from an oil-based stain so just like the writ die I'm gonna use a clean rag and just wipe it on to the back and sides and you can see that it's not a perfect match for the black the reason on top but that's okay because we're gonna be sanding away most of that black anyway so flipping back over to the top I'm standing back that black die with 320 grit sandpaper and I'm just sanding the area where I want the color to start popping through when we start adding our different colors for our burst one of the reasons why I did this dye over the entire guitar is as you can see it does help bring some dimension to that Tiger striping okay next I'm gonna be adding some royal blue RIT dye to this now I am doing a purple burst finish but I found that with RIT dye whenever you're doing a burst finish it's best to use three colors on your color spectrum and now you can see how that black underneath really makes that Tiger striping pop once you start adding different colors on top of it so again just like I did for the black I'm sending it back a little bit with some 320 grit sandpaper and I'm not sanding away all of the blue just most of the blue and this is what's gonna give us a really believable transition between the purple and the black as well as adding tons of dimension to that Tiger striping lastly I'm going over the top with this purple RIT die and this is where you're really going to see those tiger stripes start to pop so this is a great example of how using the three different colors just adds so much dimension so this burst is just absolutely turning out beautiful the tiger striping just looks absolutely stellar with all of that added dimension after it was dry I went back with some steel wool just to kind of blend in some of the burst areas a little bit to give it a real believable burst with a nice even transition between the colors now I feel like this guitar is looking a little bit too pretty and doesn't really look like a guitar I would build it looks like something you would buy off of the shelf in Guitar Center so I'm gonna go ahead and use this black RIT die right now and add a little bit of splatter on to it just to give it a little bit of Dan Flair looks a little bit more beat up and so to do this I'm just using a paintbrush dipped in the RIT die and I'm just throwing it on there and kind of blowing on it to get some good random kind of splatter effects and after the splatter I went back over it with steel wool again just to give it a nice smooth finish I didn't want to actually feel the splatter when I run my hands across the body so did that and then buffed it up with a cloth and got it ready to apply the final finish but before we apply the finish we need to scrape the binding clean and this is a tool that I made out of just an old pocket knife and I grind it out a little notch about the size of binding and then I just sharpen it by placing it on this file at a slight angle and run it across a few times until I run up a nice little burr and I'll check that burr just with my finger real quick and so then I'll just hold my thumb at the width of the binding and kind of lightly kind of start to scrape and once I feel like I get a good grab and I'm not pulling away any of the wood I can just kind of keep that scrape going and it just kind of scrapes off pretty cleanly like that so I'll just show you again again some light scrapes to make sure I'm in the right spot the right depth and once I get a good grab then I can just pull it along like this now I am making this look really easy it does take quite a bit of practice and as you can see right here some of the edges don't work quite as well as if I had a real binding scraper but as you can see I do get good results with this method but it does take a while it is kind of a pain in the butt if you guys know of a better method be sure to let me know in the comments cuz I am always looking for the best DIY ways to do this without buying an actual binding scraper tool after I was done scraping the binding it was noticeable that this kit did have a couple of flaws you can see right there where the binding had some gaps or air bubbles or something in it which is a little bit frustrating and of course but I think stuff like that just gives guitars a lot more character so now I'm gonna go ahead and apply my favorite finish for bees tung oil finish I feel like this finish just feels so good in the hands and it gives it a good protection from moisture and UV not so much from scratch and dent but I do like my guitar still look a little scratch and dented real quick I'm in a level crown and polished the frets using my favorite method using a baroque prep file a little bit of ultrafine grit sandpaper and my dremel with a cloth polishing wheel and polishing compound and this is super fast it is the fastest way I've found to crown and polish frets and it takes me probably maybe 30 minutes max to do a neck like this and I'm using the second generation baroque fret file the one that I don't like quite as much as the first generation one but I did want to give it a full test through the ringer and I did get really good results with it now broke is really awesome and they are working with me for the third generation baroque fret file to get my opinion so I actually have two prototypes of the third generation baroque fret file in my hands that I haven't tried yet but they do have some improvements that I suggested over this second generation file so I'm gonna try them out and get back to them and hopefully this third generation will come out perfect moving on to wiring one of the things that really set me back in this build was that one of my pickups that I had set aside for this build actually stopped working these are Seymour Duncan invaders and I got them for free actually in a trade doing some work on a buddy's guitar but you can get them used on eBay a reverb for about 50 or 60 dollars a piece and the neck pickup on mine the North coil actually went bad I wasn't getting any resistance reading on it at all and it took me a while to track down the issue but I was able to perform surgery and get that coil working again now one of the mods that I'm doing to this is I'm adding in a coil splitting feature so I did want to sheõs my control cavities really well with some copper foil tape now I do have a method that if you don't have any copper foil tape but you do have heavy-duty aluminum foil and spray adhesive I've actually gotten just as good results using that as I have using this copper foil tape now if you don't have heavy-duty aluminum foil and spray adhesive then it's actually cheaper to just buy this copper foil tape well go ahead and put a link in the description there and it did a really good job this guitar is surprisingly silent especially given all of the wiring that I've put in this thing I thought it was gonna be a lot more susceptible to interference but it actually is pretty quiet even in the single coil operation now wiring this thing up was quite a bit of a pain because of how I laid out the control cavities and the controls so starting at the pickups I had to run the wire down to the lower control cavity where the coil splits which was then up to the upper cavity where the pickup selector which was then back down to the lower control cavity for the master volume master tone and preamp and then back up to the kill switch and back down to the output jack and then of course I also had to run my 9 volt power for the led for the kill switch up there as well so tons of copper wire in this thing and if I had it to do over again I probably think out my control layout a little bit better but ultimately I am happy with where all the controls are and if you'd like to see a diagram of how I wired this all together check out my patreon page if you were a dollar month or more patreon you get access to all of my wiring diagrams then once I was done wiring up the kill switch and the pickup selector switch I could move on to wiring up my master volume master tone and then I added in this tone monster full throttle mid boost preamp and this is mounted in a push-pull pot where the pot determines how much mid boost you want so you can go anywhere from 0 to 5 DB of mid-range boost and then you pull to activate it or push to bypass it after I was done wiring up the guitar I went ahead and installed some new hardware and I really wanted black hardware for this build because I thought the chrome wouldn't look nearly as good so I went ahead and bought just the cheapest to nematic style bridge and Les Paul style tailpiece that I could find on Amazon so I think it was nine dollars for this set and I don't have a tremolo or anything on this build so I wasn't looking for anything absolutely stellar just the one thing I noticed about this is that the black coating that they used is not conductive so to get a solid grand connection at the bridge I really need to get continuity all the way to the strings to help extend our shielding for the guitar so to do that I went ahead and use some sandpaper to remove some of that paint at the contact points from where the ground wire connects to the bridge post where the bridge post connects to the tailpiece and then I ended up using an engraving bit from my Dremel chucked into my drill to scrape away some of that paint where the Bowens of the strings rest in the tail piece and then I double-checked that I was getting continuity from where the post connects to each individual string and once I verified I had continuity I was good to go ahead and install it lastly for the knobs I use my typical shotgun shell guitar knob design and just painted over them with some black nail polish and I knew that black nail polish would work better than spray paint because it's far more durable and it makes a nice hard ceil okay real quick before I demo the sound on this I'm just gonna explain the wiring again real quick in case you didn't pick it up during the time lapse tutorial so what I got our two Seymour Duncan invaders wired to a humbucker or coil split switch up as coil split down as humbucker and then I've got my tone monster full throttle mid boost preamp and then I've got a master volume master tone 3-way selector switch as standard on most Les Paul's and then my Iron Age kill switch up here as well and you might also notice that I wired up the kill switch led to activate with the mid boost preamp which I thought was kind of a nice little touch there so we'll just start with the neck pickup coil split and this is just a nice clean sound [Music] so you can see just a nice clean sound and middle I guess it's not actually all that interesting and then bridge there's actually one of the best clean sounding bridge pickups in a coil split I really like this tone typically I like humbuckers in the bridge but the single coil tone actually sounds pretty good take on the mid boost preamp and it's pretty sweet and then you can obviously kick it into series humbucker mode to get even more crunch out of it I'll demo that for you again real quick so you can see what I did there so I've got the bridge pickup in single coil mode now we got humbucker and now mid boost preamp so you can see how that mid boost preamp really kicks it an overdrive sounds awesome but it's still even with humbucker it gets kind of dirty and then you can obviously run it with single coil with the mid boost preamp sounds a little bit like the humbucker mode but just a little bit brighter so kind of cool really good versatility there just playing through that bluesy boutique tweed amp simulation so now I'm going to switch over to a more metal style guitar amp simulation so I can really show off what these invaders do because plane invaders clean really doesn't do them justice they're not really meant for that so let's go ahead and switch over to that [Music] [Music] [Applause] so a piece of hardware that I forgot to tell you about while I was building it that I used are these cheap locking tuners that I got off of Amazon for 17 bucks I think there came eyes I don't know I'll put a link in the description and they are locking tuners so if you look on the back they do have the the thumb adjustment screws that have that little post that just clamps down on the strings right there the one issue that I had with them is the same issue that a lot of other amazon reviewers had and that's the the post for the tuners that you you know for locking down the string inside the tuner it just wasn't long enough to contact some of the strings so my fix for that was actually just using common sense these things are manufactured to pretty loose tolerances so they're not every screw in post winds up perfectly with each tuner so I just took all those little screwin posts out and I mixed and matched them until I found a combination of where they all actually did a make good contact so after I mixed and matched them actually got good tight contact on all of them so if you use a little bit of common sense you can actually get a half decent mocking tuner for 17 dollars which is you know they're not the best tuners in the world they're not super smooth they don't have super fine adjustment so since you guys asked me to try them out I went ahead and tried them out and I did get decent results I mean all things considered the price is seventeen dollars and I did get decent results [Music] [Applause] of course the mid boost preamp just you know makes it a lot sunnier and stop here for those like me [Applause] [Applause] Hey [Music] so that's just dry I don't have any like reverb or delay on as [Music] man coos witches are so much so much freakin fun so much fun they should be banned with like mumps [Applause] [Music] anyway I just have too much fun with this guitar man I really enjoying again I'm not much of a metal player but I find myself practicing my metal likes a lot more often playing this guitar for some reason so can't imagine why [Applause] now a lot of people ask me where I get the licks and stuff that I play in these demos they ask me what songs I'm playing and stuff like that I'm not playing anything I'm just making those up myself just like that little lick that I was playing earlier so and then of course you know that lead that I played that kind of stuff I just make it up myself and that's because I have a really good solid foundation in music theory so I used to make my living as musician I went to college for music you know I have a really good music theory background so I don't really copy licks from anyone else well I do sometimes if I hear a really sweet lick I'll just try to figure it out by ear but again that all starts with music theory so if you want to be able to make up your own licks the way that I am and obviously I'm by no means an expert but I am pretty proud of the licks that I've come up with I just really think that you guys would really benefit from it and I actually benefit from it as well so I'm gonna be completely transparent for every person signs up using my link I get like a dollar or dollar fifty from guitar EO so that would be a huge help to me it would help me out but actually don't let that be the reason if you want to get better at playing guitar in 2019 let that be the reason that you signed up for that music Theory course so again check out guitar EO use the link in the description and let me know in the comments - if you signed up for that course because I'd love to thank you personally for helping me out like that if you want to learn more about building hang guitars out of cheap do-it-yourself kits on a budget then check out this playlist right here where I build all kinds of guitars out of cheap do-it-yourself kits and I do it on a budget that anyone can afford also don't forget to check out that free music theory course from guitar E oh I am Dan this is guns and guitars thanks so much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Guns and Guitars

Views: 1,174,169

Keywords: les paul, dream les paul, guitar building, guitar modding, diy guitar kit, build your own guitar, diy guitar, custom guitar, seymour duncan, invaders, duncan invaders, gibson, gibson les paul, iron age, kill switch, guitar kill switch, iron age kill switch, tone monster, full throttle, mid boost preamp, full throttle mid boost, full throttle preamp, tone monster full throttle

Id: hDzU7jwbVjE

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2019