Ever since AxAxSxS posted his doubleneck in the let's see your guitar thread, I started looking up cheap Chinese bass/guitar doublenecks and bumped into this ridiculously cheap Boris-esque thing (360 dollars on AliExpress).
It immediately started imagining wacky mods I could do to it to turn it into some kind of drone allrounder. My imagination got the better of my financial responsibility and I ordered one yesterday. Here's what I'm planning.
Guitar side:
- High output rail humbucker in the bridge (Probably GFS or Artec)
- Sustainiac in the neck to get some drones going
- Master volume and some filter options on a 4 or 5-way blade switch (filter bypass, high-pass, low-pass, high and low pass at the same time)
- Maybe I'll stuff a piezo under the bridge too
Bass side:
- Probably install blade humbuckers similar to the guitar bridge humbucker
- Maybe just wire them in series or parallel all the time to keep things "simple"
- Volume and tone filters the same as guitar side.
- MAYBE replace one of the humbuckers with a lo-fi microphone from a telephone or something (got this idea off weed_killer's tele if I remember correctly). But I will see how I like the sound of the pickups first as the neck position is very close to the neck and the bridge position is very close to the bridge, so maybe I need both of them to get a good sound going.
Onboard drone-synth:
- Dual oscillator (2 frequency controls and 1 volume) with a filter knob based on the Big Muff tone control. I will build the oscillators such that there will be no high-end squeal but only low-end rumble.
- White/pink noise generator (only volume control)
- OR another idea is to try and squeeze a Skychord Deses Parva in there but I'll prototype my own drone-box first to see how that turns out
- Stacking as much of the controls as possible in concentric pots (I will also do the guitar and bass volumes in a concentric pot) to save space/fit them in the existing holes.
- Power supply for the drone-synth and Sustainiac will be from my board through a 4-pin XLR output(according to the Sustainiac info site the ground of the Sustainiac and the signal ground of the guitar need separate paths to the power supply so a TRS won't work).
- 4-pin XLR will be the main and standard guitar output, with separate outputs for bass and drone-synth. So I'll use three outputs but I will install switches to switch bass to guitar side and the drone-synth to guitar or bass side to be able to use everything with 1 or 2 outputs if necessary. I'm not going to run three amps all the time.
- I ordered one without finish as I will be applying a wacky finish to go with all of this. Probably going to do a fabric finish (wallpaper) on the front and leave the back bare wood with a faux binding between them. I asked chrome hardware instead of black too since I think black will not work with the ridiculous finish I have in mind.
- I already came up with a name for it too: Onamazu, after a Japanese legend of a giant catfish that causes earthquakes. Which is exactly the sound I'm after with this thing.
I'm open to any suggestions! Since this project has gotten this elaborate, I might as well throw some other mods in!
