It's not a small thing. Get any Tom Thumb associations out of your head. This thing combines a six string electric guitar with a five string bass, And it's a solid body. It's aimed at musicians who are both masochistic and foot fetishists. Tagline: The Thumb Guitar... It will break your foot if you drop it.
How did we get here? Well the story starts perhaps 45 years ago. I got a guitar. I have to learn everything the hard way, so rather than get help, I just worked it out for myself. Because of this, I developed an almost unique playing style. I play guitar like it's a piano.
Almost unique. A decade later I discovered a dead Canadian rock and blues guy called Jeff Healey. Now I had a brother in technique. I still wasn't very good at it. As the years went by I continued to improve. These days I'm competent, though limited, and my technique allows me to do things no other guitarist can. I'd love to hear what someone with real talent could do with it.
Then about a year ago, I had a thought... Nobody has ever made an instrument based around this method. But what would such an instrument be? What did I need to change? Well, when I bend the strings, I push them with my thumb. On the top string, and even the second, this meant I push the string off the side of the fretboard. So it needed a wider neck. Space for the string to move into. Also, I realised that, since my hand isn't gripping the neck, it's free to move across the fretboard, as well as up and down it. Why limit myself to 6 strings? I've settled on 11. A 5 string bass mounted alongside a 6 string treble. Some early and grandiose ideas had upto 29, incorporating a 6 string unfretted lap steel section and 12 chromatically tuned drone strings on an preposterously wide neck.
Eventually, I felt I had enough of an idea of what I wanted to try to make it happen. I'm not a self confident person. I didn't feel I had the skillset or the mindset (or the toolkit and workspace) to do it all myself. I thought of a luthier, but then thought of working with my local FE college. They weren't interested. Neither were the luthiers I contacted. They're there to make bespoke high quality stuff, not a rough prototype that gives you splinters and looks like it's made out of plywood offcuts. And how could you price such a job? Very little about it is conventional.
I despaired but a few months ago, I mentioned it to my Dad, and he was immediately interested. And he does have the skillset, the mindset (and the toolkit and workspace). Between us, we've thought and discussed, and thought again. The design evolved. Every bit of it has been considered, and we changed the design radically, mostly for the simpler. It's gone from being a complex, three dimensional thing (the original had a triangular extrusion that went between the player's legs that would contain electronics like pedal effects) that vaguely resembled a guitar to a rectangle. A plank with a curved end where the tuning pegs go. This is fine. We're not trying to make a guitar. We're making a thumb guitar and it can be anything.
I bought furniture - fret wire, tuning pegs (2 sets of 6 normal treble guitar ones, I hope they can handle the bass strings), pickups (a 5 string bass pickup and a 6 string pickup) and bridges (ditto).
And having this stuff helped my old fella to understand better what he was being asked to do. He's never learned to play guitar and there were gaps in his understanding. Here's an example. He was worried that I could be electrocuted if he made a mistake. Once I explained that the vibration of the strings over the pickups (which are basically just magnets and an armature) push milliamps of current through the wiring, which then are amplified by an external amplifier that is connected to much higher voltages, he was reassured.
Where are we up to? I'd say we're 85% of the way to a rough but playable instrument. It will then presumably need to be fine tuned, if you'll pardon the pun. This string catches on this fret here. The bridge is 2 mil too high. There is a buzzing noise. Whatever. But it's almost just an assembly job now. The last piece of the jigsaw has been a part called the nut. This is a raised ridge at the tuning peg end that guides the strings into position just above the fretboard, Nobody is selling 11 string nuts. We're making our own. We tried various plastics, but these were either too soft or too brittle. I wanted to use brass but my Dad was unsure. Again his concern was the electrics. Only millivolts perhaps but it somehow stop it from functioning if the signal went up one wire, across the metal nut to the next string The metal would create a short circuit. But those tiny currents aren’t really travelling into the strings. They're travelling through the wires leading from the pickups to the volume control and output jack. Also he'd never seen a guitar with a metal nut. Presumably to avoid such shorting. We went and watched some YouTube videos about nuts. He was enlightened. We found a small sheet of fairly thick copper that will do.
One outcome of this was the discovery of a guy called Tim Sway. Tim's an American guy that builds guitars and stuff using old doors and plywood offcuts. He makes his own everything, including the tools he uses to make everything. He has a YouTube channel too.
See, I feel like I might be onto something, and if word gets around, other people might want to buy them. Being an ocean apart might be a problem, but he might be a good person to get to know, Watch this space.
I took some pictures this afternoon...
Bridges, pickups and some frets. The white thing is from a broken vertical blind. it's pushing the saddles up because the strings were too low at the bridge end. We will find a more elegant piece of scrap for it at some point.
Frets. Lots of them.Wider than most. What I am doing here is making a 5 string bass and a 6 string treble that share the same fretboard.
Holes,. tuning peg holes. There is another base layer to be added to the bottom of the instrument. It will mirror the shape of what you see here. This will be countersunk, with channels routed for the sticky out bits.
The pickups. The one top left is a 6 string single coil. The big one is a bass humbucker. We will cut a channel to break the wires out then add volume knob and output jack.
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