"Introducing the CMS Guitar" photo session

I did a photo session at "LHC Point 5" where the CMS detector is located 100m underground. The area with the detector itself is not accessible due to ongoing collisions, but we also have a great 1:1 scale photo of the experiment there, which you can see in the photos below.

Go to this gallery on flickr to see the full set. All photos by Julia Hoffman.

Neck refinish

The neck refinish is done. Here is the back of the neck, sanded down to bare wood:

And here is is a few days and about 8 coats of Danish Oil later:

The heastock had some little irregularities in the paint over the decals for some reason. I decided to get rid of that, sanded the finish flat with P1000 wet&dry sandpaper, shot a few more coats of clearcoar and leveled that. Then followed up with a set of micromesh pads and finally buffed up to a mirror shine. Here's the result:

And here's the fingerboard after a re-leveling, P600 sandpaper and some Danish Oil.

Now I can put the new strings on and do a photoshoot and then a videoshoot hopefully. Stay tuned!

New pickups

The new set of pickups is here so I disassembled the guitar to put them in. These are Merlin Pickups (a Sabotage humbucker and a Twins mini humbucker), should sound awesome!

In the beginning I encountered a slight complication: the body cavity for the neck pickup was matching the stock pickup shape (the top pickup on the photo below) whereas the Twins mini humbucker has a little protruding plastic part at the bottom (which is in fact common for pickups of this type).

I had to make room for that so I used a dremel to sand away some wood in the cavity:

I painted the cavity with black conductive paint and installed both pickups:

Can't wait to hear how they sound - I just have to do the neck now. I decided I will strip the stock paint and just give it a matte danish oil finish. Should be ready in a few days.

In the news

The CMS guitar is getting noticed! I wrote a small note for the CMS experiment website and we have been spotted by Discovery News. Wow!

Meanwhile I'm working on a few minor upgrades. I will change the strings to flatwound with wound G, that should help the sustain. I need to get new pickups for her - the cheap stock ones sound ok, but get microphonic feedback when playing loud (i.e. live) which I had to fight with through the Hardronic show. Finally - I need to finish the custom volume knob.

When all this is done I have some recording projects queued up for this guitar. Stay tuned!

First live performance

Here it is - video from the first live performance of the CMS guitar, less than a week after I finished putting it together:

MC Hammer

I'm still working on the videos from the Hardronic performance, so in the meantime I thought I'd share another video that I made recently. The song is "Hammer of a Down" - a blend of MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This" together with "Chop Suey" by System of a Down. And the video is about... what happens when people working at CERN need a little break.
Check it out:


The video of the debut performance of the CMS guitar is coming very soon!!

CMS guitar @ Hardronic 2012

Wow.
This year's Hardronic broke all the records. We had over 1000 CERN personnel plus guests rocking out!!

The guitar played great. I tried to play great. The videos are coming, watch this space.