The fact that Rickenbackers are largely 'collectors guitars' and are seldom seen in live perfromance says to me that while they are indeed beautifully crafted instruments, they're not the most user friendly guitars I've ever played.Īre the changes I've made on mine indeed improvements? That is indeed highly subjective. My 'rockers have a much better presence and sit nicely in a live mix where nothing is mic'ed. When it came to the bodies, I left the area behind the bridge solid because I don't like the way my 360 got swallowed up by the band. There's nothing wrong with that unless you have big hands likie mine. The neck on my 360 was just under 1 5/8' wide at the nut and not quite 2' wide at the heel. My necks are 1 11/16' wide at the nut and 2 3/16' wide at the heel with medium jumbo fret wire. I set my necks deeper into the body to keep the bridge lower which creates a more comfortable feel when playing. I increased the finger board thickness and tilted the peghead back an extra degree to get a steeper string breakover angle to those tallish Schaller tuners. My 'Rickenrockers' differ from the 360s in that I made my scale lengths 25 1/2' and 22 frets. I owned it for a year and tried to get along with it taking the approach that, this is a Rickenbacker and it is unique in it's own right.

I found the 360 unplayable because of the skinny neck, short fret wire, and basic ergonomics of the guitar.

Well, as a gigging musician of 35 years and a builder for the past 30 years I have a pretty good idea of what I like. I've built, rebuilt, and set up hundreds of Rickenbacker guitars and basses over the years, and none has been unplayable once the neck width thing was gotten used to by the player.Īnyway, as with all appearance mods and many functional mods, too, whether or not you've improved on the already-classic Rickenbacker look and playability, is a highly subjective matter. I think, offhand, that you just wanted to try out your own 'improvements' on the Rickenbacker design, and the 'unplayability' issue was a good justification, hey? I wonder what made it 'unplayable', Telenator? I'd venture a guess it was the neck width, which takes some getting used to. Telenator wrote:A few years back, I bought a brand new 360 and found it to be unplayable so I used it to make a set of templates and scratch built the two guitars below.

Rickenbacker 325 copy