Part 1: Walnuts and Zebras

Building my first guitar was such a rewarding experience that I thought I'd try it again. I love the sound and feel of my Telecaster more than any other guitar I own - and that's saying' something seeing as I own quite a few guitars. However, because I have a lot of guitars already and wasn't really prepared to dive into 6-7 months of living with/creating another guitar when I have more than I can play now I decided to build something different - a lap steel guitar.

For those of you who are not familiar with Lap Steel guitars they came to prominence in the 30's, 40's and 50's centered mostly around Hawaiian and Country Music. Lap Steel guitars are also commonly used for Blues and Bluegrass (which is more my speed). I would guess that the most 'popular' player using lap steel guitars on a regular basis today would be Ben Harper but his stuff is just the tip of the iceberg.

I was introduced to the idea of lap guitar while working at Blue Man Group in Boston. One of the band instuments is part Lap steel and part Zither. The sound was raunchy and bluesy with the right amount of growl. It was good stuff and I've always wanted to mess around with one.

For the uninitiated - a lap steel has anywhere between 6 and 12 strings, is played with a slide (metal or glass usually) instead of your fingers, and is tuned to an open chord so that any where you place your slide on the 'fretboard' will make a useful chord. As the name suggests the instrument is placed in your lap instead of around your neck with a guitar strap and is quite often played with finger picks instead of the normal pick.

I decided to build my lap steel out of walnut - mainly because the chunk of wood that I found was the nicest looking piece of wood in the store that was also the right size for what I needed. So I bought a piece of 36 inch by 7 inch Walnut that was about 1 and 3/4 inches thick. It had a nice grain to it (burl?) and promised to be somewhat good looking when finished. As you may be able to see in the photo above the Walnut had some imperfections when I got it. It had a few burn marks where the wood planer got stuck and the end had what looks like some skips by the saw that cut the face of the wood. All of this will have to be sanded out.

I also picked up a 24 by 2 inch piece of zebra-wood that was about 1/4 of an inch thick to use as the fret-board material. Which is strange to say about a lap steel - seeing as they need no frets.

But we'll get to that...

Fuzzy close-up of the Zebra wood

So, I bought my wood - $30 for the two peices and I have an idea for how I want this thing to look. Now it's all about cutting and economy.