The Clean Machine: Alan Murphy hybrid mishmash thing

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Advanced warning:  Progress has been slow on putting this build together.  At least 6-12 months to assemble parts as I was looking to get the best value for money.  Anyway here goes:

I've been nurturing an Alan Murphy obsession for a while now and he played Esprits while with Go West.  They provided those pristine, shimmery stabs thanks to a unique electronics package.  However, not to get to fetishy about it, while he regarded the Esprits as great for cleans they were seen as just tools, like his other guitars.   He was essentially a Gibson guy at heart.

I also nurse a building obsession when finances and time permit and, after repeatedly missing out on Aria RS Esprits, I decided to see if I could do my own take on it...with an opportunity to make things my own as it were.   While the core of the RS Esprit's unique sound is its pickups and electronics, the rest of the guitar is fairly mundane, alder body, bolt on maple neck, floating knife edge trem, 22 frets on a rosewood board. 

The active electronics packages featured in the Esprit (along with the RS750, RS850 and SB Elite basses) were licensed from bass makers Alembic.  The pickups consisted of two ceramic single coil neck and bridge pickups and a middle humcanceller dummy coil.  The pickups were actually made by Kent Armstrong for Aria and the design specs for them are still stashed away somewhere according to his son Aaron.   The dummy coil idea is a little long in the tooth as far as pickup design goes but I guess it did the job back then.  Even Alembic offer stacked humbuckers as their after market pick up solution for strat owners but they're expensive.  Esprits also feature two low pass filters (remove the highs) with a boost available for each filter at the shelving point. 

So the challenge was on acquiring the electronics package.  One option was to cannibalise an old Aria but that would be an expensive and relatively drastic option.   So I decided to talk to Aaron Armstrong about the pickups and was about to commission a set of stacked humbuckers when I spotted a set of Alembic Activators on Reverb for nearly half what Aaron would have charged for a new set of Aria replicas.   And Alembic pickups don't come cheap even second hand but these were too good a price to resist.  



Next trick was finding the lo wpass filters.  Again, Alembic would have been an option.  They sell low pass filters for bass and they can be used on guitar as well but they're not cheap.  I did have one spare off a bass but would have still needed to source another.  A supplier on Ebay offer upgraded sweep filters based on the Alembic design but again they're pretty expensive and both options would have needed slight modification for the boost switch.   A better solution would be to find a maker who offered their own versions with boost switches and I found one called Lustihand.  Again, normally they make filters for bass but a chat to the owner suggested versions customised for guitar would not be difficult.  



Next was hardware.  It was relatively straight forward as I've stashed various bits and pieces over the years as they've popped up online.  For the bridge I wanted to use a no longer made Wilkinson VS100C convertible vibrato.  Back in 2015 or so I managed to stumble across Kate Wilkinson selling off NOS on Reverb and snatched two chrome ones up to match the two in gold I already had.  This bridge has a spring loaded whammy arm that locks the bridge in place when not in use so it can be tuned like a hard tail once set up properly, a really nice bit of kit.  The story goes that were some US patent issues with Gotoh or Kahler or Steinberger, depending on who you talk to, over the design back in the 1990s.   And they have never seen since.   I've had one on my main strat for 15 years and never had an issue with either setting it up properly or using it. 



For tuners, because I was in two minds about whether to go with gold or chrome finish, I got a set of no name locking tuners in gold and a set of PRS SE low mass locking tuners in chrome (because they aren't offered in gold). 

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With the key pieces assembled, I started to think about how to layout the electronics and it seemed like there were two potential opportunities to go above and beyond where the Esprit was.

1) Three pickups instead of two.
At the time I decided to pull the trigger on the Alembic pickups, I realised that because they were stacked humbuckers, the middle pick up position would be available.   So there was the potential to have positions 2 and 4 available as well as the neck and bridge position.   But I would need some special switching to achieve the neck and bridge together along with 2 and 4. 

2) Piezo saddles
The Wilkinson bridge is easy to get aftermarket spares for, including piezo saddles.  Given the theme of the instrument was all about cleans, it seemed a shame not to install an acoustic option as well.   So I ordered a set of Graphtec piezo saddles as well...to fit an old Graphtec acoustiphonic/hexpander pre I had lying in my spares department for years.  There's also a possible of pitch to MIDI capability but that's really more than I want to handle at this point in time.





I'll spare you the details of the wiring but it uses a  6 way  2 pole rotary switch to achieve the following: 

1) Piezo only
2) Bridge only
3) Bridge and middle
4) Bridge and neck
5) Neck and middle
6) Neck only

Each pole of the rotary switch connected to a  low pass filter.  The connections of what pickup goes into which filter depends on the position of the switch.   Aria used rotary switches on the Elite basses which featured the Alembic electronics so there's some resonance.  The nut will probably be a teflon impregnated jobbie by Graphtec and the knobs are going to be either black (with the chrome hardware) or gold (to match the gold finished hardware).  Not sure yet but I have a set of black knobs already that fit.

It's late where I am so I'll cover wood work tomorrow perhaps.

Football

How are you coming along with this project?

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Football said:

How are you coming along with this project?

Thanks for the interest!  Recent developments have been...interesting.

I put together a CAD drawing for the body and aligned all the pickups after measuring the neck scale only to discover the measuring tape I used was out by a few mm.  A serious face palm moment - steel rule from now on!

Getting the front and back bridge routs aligned was a challenge also, but we got there after the scale issue was sorted.  I sent the drawing off to a guy who could make templates and he offered to grab some lightweight alder and shape the body as far as the carved top.  That was all going to plan until his router slipped and gouged a 33mm deep control cavity where the edge of the body would have been 28mm thick after the carved top was finished.  He asked for more money to replace the alder and I declined but he will continue to finish the templates and I've since invested in a router of my own.  

So once I have the templates back from him, I'll probably end up doing my own version if I can find any lightweight alder where I am.  The current COVID crisis has affected shipping significantly and suppliers I've spoken to locally have already run out of alder and swamp ash.  Plenty of cheaper, lighter woods available but I've never used them before...still, they might be worth a try if the price is right.

Neckwise I had a 5 piece laminated neck from maple with two mahogany stringers and an ebony fingerboard to play with, modified for a simple (non tenoned) glue in neck joint and strat dimensions (25.5" scale length) I'm also looking into the feasibility of using the spare Graphtec boards I have and buying all the wiring vs buying a new board and wiring as a complete package.  Cost wise, just buying the wiring separately seems to be more expensive than buying the package with the new board...!