I’ve had the good fortune to follow the meteoric rise of Misha Mansoor and his band Periphery over the last few years through some guitar forums i’ve been on for quite a while. Once Proto1 was finished, Misha sent me a message asking how he could try it. I told him that when Periphery came to Toronto, i’d get the guitar into his hands. They finally announced a tour date with Veil of Maya and Darkest Hour, and came to town on November 17.

I spent a few hours getting the guitar set up to Misha’s specs… heavier strings, tuned to drop-A flat, and tweaking the neck to get the action as low as possible but still playing clean. I showed up at the venue before the show and Misha took it for a quick whirl, and then played it for the first two songs of their set. (He would have had more time with it, but they arrived in town late and had almost no time to load in and set up.) Here are a couple of videos of his first playing impressions and then the opening of the show.

Enjoy!

I got a lot of positive feedback and constructive critique from Misha, which will help improve future instruments. Thanks again, Bulb and the rest of Periphery for such an awesome show.

I’m in the process of moving into my own shop… there’s still a lot to do, but i’m getting a bit of build time here and there. I’ve built up a small inventory of roughed-out parts, so i thought i’d take some pictures as a little teaser of what’s coming up…

Take a look at the Prototype 1 page for the full progress of this build.

The weather was beautiful this weekend, so i carved the neck on Prototype 1.

On the second day of carving, i slimmed it down quite a bit and made it a lot less blocky. The contour i ended up with actually surprised me a little, because it’s almost exactly the opposite of what i had in mind when i started.

My original plan was to have a soft “V” at the nut end of the neck, and have it gradually flatten out into a thin even “C” toward the body. But theory and practice often yield different results, and as i sat and carved the neck, using nothing but my left hand as a guide for its shape, the neck profile took an unexpected turn.

At the nut, it’s a nice slim even “C” shape, nicely rounded across the whole profile. I’m not a big fan of the “flat in the middle” feel of most thinner “D” type shredder necks. I’ll have to throw the calipers on it to see exactly what the depth of the neck is after i sanded the radius into the fretboard, but my guess is it’s around 21 or 22 mm.

As you move up the neck, it gets slightly thicker, but the shoulders of the neck start to taper down a little bit. Around the 7th fret, things really start to change. The neck starts to get a little more asymmetrical, and a soft “ridge” starts to reveal itself. By about the 12th fret, it’s an asymmetrical soft “V” shape. And it feels wonderful. It’s almost as if the neck is molded from an extruded cylinder of clay, and then shaped to fit a shifting hand shape as you move up the neck. The mass of wood beneath the hand feels the same, but it’s just distributed differently depending on where you are on the neck.

In my experience, i tend to play with my thumb over the neck when playing open-position chords and more complex voicings slightly higher up on the neck. As i move up the neck, my wrist naturally rotates downward toward the floor. The transition from the even “C” to the soft asymmetrical “V” essentially tracks along with my thumb on the bass side of the neck. I’ve never felt a neck quite like this, and i can’t wait to play it. After sitting with the neck bolted to the body, i really think it may be the best neck profile for me. Being primarily a rhythm player, i need good leverage all across the neck to hold down tricky chords and have them ring true without buzzing. I think this neck profile with accomplish that.

Look at more build pics on the Proto 1 page.