Building an electric saz

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epizootics
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Building an electric saz

Post by epizootics » Thu Sep 02, 2021 10:21 pm

Hey OSG,

Sazes / baglamas seem to be popular on this board of late, so I thought I'd join in with this build. ;)

I have two brothers, seven and nine years older than me. They were a big influence on me as I was growing up, most notably by passing down their record collections to me when they left home (and taking me to David Bowie gigs when I was a teenager). They are reaching their forties now and I told them I would build them an instrument each so they wouldn't have to buy a motorcycle or a water scooter to cope with mid-life crisis.

Two years ago, the older one got this:

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...which he played religiously every day ever since (and had him commissioning me to build him the Kay-inspired semi-hollow I finished recently.)

Now the younger of the two is turning forty in a few days. He has the oddest musical tastes & practices. On top of being a more-than-able guitar player, in the last decade he learnt Mongolian overtone chanting and Inuit throat-singing. He has been interested in Sufi chanting for the last few years, but like many western Europeans he struggles with quarter tones, so I offered to build him a saz so he could play those notes on an instrument and get his ear tuned to them a bit better.

So here we go. This one took a bit of planning, most notably with regards to fret location. I went with a short-neck scale (27"). A cool Turkish dude on TDPRI was nice enough to give me the link to a saz fret calculator, which I wouldn't have found otherwise (my Turkish being limited to "Hi", "Thanks" and "Goodbye"). These numbers I turned into a CAD file for a fretting template I could use with my primitive slotting jig. I got it laser-cut in 3mm acrylic:

Image

The douglas fir board I used to make my other brother's first guitar was effing huge and I had a bunch of it left, so I decided to use the same wood for the saz in order to get some family mojo going. I also had a badly split Macassar ebony fretboard which would have been unusable for a guitar but managed to trim down to baglama dimensions. I went with our local, soft maple for the neck.

So it was a matter of turning this:

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and this:

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...into this:

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I am using standard 6-in-line Kluson-type tuners and low Sintoms fret wire. Working with all those extra frets gets confusing. The bolt-on neck will be about 30x30mm thick & wide, with no taper. Apart from using fixed western fret wire instead of the traditional nylon, I also took the liberty to have the top of the fretboard sticking out of the body. I hope I won't offend anyone by doing so, but I don't want my brother to be too confused by the layout.

Still unsure about the finish - might go with a burst of sorts. Thankfully, I won't see him until three weeks from now, so I still have a bit of time :)

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by noisepunk » Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:02 am

it's really hard to not wish this was one of your other body shapes, because they're so damn cool. really nice take on the original saz shape–and really tear-drop body shapes generally–though. excited to see how this progresses.

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by Flurko » Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:05 am

Following with interest !
Pretty fun to see how the 6 strings and the body shape, standard for acoustic saz, are also very standard in the electric guitar context. If you don't look too closely at the frets this could look like a baritone vox teardrop, which would be pretty cool indeed 8)

Also, I envy your brothers, so I guess I will have to become the guitar building kid brother in my family ;D

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by solfege » Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:02 pm

I am so interested in how this comes out.

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by kick_the_reverb » Fri Sep 03, 2021 8:32 pm

Very cool, Following!

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by epizootics » Sun Sep 05, 2021 12:34 am

noisepunk wrote:
Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:02 am
it's really hard to not wish this was one of your other body shapes, because they're so damn cool. really nice take on the original saz shape–and really tear-drop body shapes generally–though. excited to see how this progresses.
I think part of it was my wanting to make a teardrop-shaped instrument for so long :) The other thing is that my brother will want to take lessons at some point. It's bad enough that he'll end up with a solid-body instrument with metal frets. I didn't want a potential teacher to go 'what the hell is this? this is not a saz!' by straying too far away from the original instrument. I did make sketches with a much wilder control plate and tailpiece, though. I'll see how I like the instrument and maybe build another one for myself? :-[
Flurko wrote:
Fri Sep 03, 2021 7:05 am
Following with interest !
Pretty fun to see how the 6 strings and the body shape, standard for acoustic saz, are also very standard in the electric guitar context. If you don't look too closely at the frets this could look like a baritone vox teardrop, which would be pretty cool indeed 8)

Also, I envy your brothers, so I guess I will have to become the guitar building kid brother in my family ;D
You might find that your siblings' companions will start resenting you after a while - "put down this guitar! the kids need feeding". Seriously though, it is incredibly satisfying to build gift instruments. It seems to make people very happy.


Image


Fret dot markers are in. Neck pocket & control cavity routed. I am hoping to finish it by the end of next week, so I can go back to the Bobkats I started a while back.

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by N0_Camping4U » Tue Sep 07, 2021 6:20 am

I like the look of the first pic a lot. What is the tuning on these?
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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by antisymmetric » Tue Sep 07, 2021 1:01 pm

Subscribed. 8) 8)
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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by epizootics » Sat Sep 11, 2021 10:14 pm

N0_Camping4U wrote:
Tue Sep 07, 2021 6:20 am
I like the look of the first pic a lot. What is the tuning on these?
There are almost as many tunings as there are players, but the 'standard' for a short-neck instrument like this one would be C - G -D (each course of strings a fifth apart, with the strings in the two outer courses tuned one octave apart and the one in the middle tuned in unison.)

Electric saz strings are a pain to find over here so I designed this one with guitar strings in mind. This way, my brother can go into any guitar store and ask for individual strings (1 x 22 ; 1 x 15 ; 2 x 11 ; 2 x 7).

This thing is almost there, by the way. I'm a bit worried because I will only have two days to spray the finish before the weather turns to s**t (which is usual for Lyon in September) but I've been on tighter schedules before :wtf: :fp:

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(giving this neck a profile was fun - it has no taper in width or height, 30mm from nut to butt and 28mm in thickness)

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This was my first time using ebony for a fretboard. Banging those frets into an uncooperative, hard and brittle piece of wood with almost no space to hold the fret onto the slot with my left hand gave me cold sweats all the way through. I have a newfound respect for mandolin builders :derp:

Once the finish is done, it'll just be a case of winding the pickup and making the bridge. I was going to do something similar to what I did on my last build - two posts with thumbwheels to make the height adjustable - but then I stumbled upon Dave Weir's method, which has to be the most elegant height adjustment mechanism out there: a block of wood with its top slanting down, on top of which he places a single-block saddle with a slanted bottom. Just slide those two around until you get the intonation perfect. Voilà. If you are not familiar with his work, I suggest you take a look at the first few pages of his thread on the Gear Page ( here) - his concepts are both deceptively simple and super-effective, from the one-piece necks with the (home-made) truss rod inserted into a 20" hole he drills with a lathe to the inverted brass nut that keeps the strings pressed down onto the zero fret. He really is one of the more interesting builders out there.

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by epizootics » Fri Sep 17, 2021 8:21 am

There we are...Done!

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There is something strange in completing an instrument one is not familiar with at all. I never actually played a saz. I picked one up in a store once to look at the dimensions and feel of the neck, and I own a few Turkish folk song albums, but that's pretty much that. So I have no basis for comparison :derp:

It is really fun, though. The extra frets, low-tension doubled strings and tuning confuse the hell out of me, but they feel logical and the tone is really nice. I might build another one for myself now that I have all the templates ready :)

This was also my first attempt at a rattle-can burst, I am not 100% satisfied with it but it'll have to do (the forecast looks bleak and my brother's birthday party is in a week). I wanted to give it a slightly worn look so I deepened the softer areas of the grain with still wool before finishing. The bridge was made with an offcut from the fretboard.

I'd be curious to see what an actual saz player would think of it!

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by noisepunk » Fri Sep 17, 2021 9:07 am

oh, that's lovely–a very tastefully modern take, i think. if you can rope your brother into doing some recordings...

i haven't built a proper instrument in ages, but an electric bouzouki is on my wish list and there are some design choices on this i feel i'd probably want to borrow.

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by powerdroid » Fri Sep 17, 2021 1:52 pm

Beautiful , inspiring work! Love the story behind it, thanks for sharing!

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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by Shadoweclipse13 » Fri Sep 17, 2021 3:19 pm

That is amazing. I actually really like the burst too!!! Definitely interested in hearing how it sounds as well!!!
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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by antisymmetric » Sun Sep 19, 2021 2:11 am

8) That's come out awesome, and btw that table it's sitting on is pretty interesting too, did you have something to do with with that? Some sound samples would be great, if you could twist your brother's arm into doing some (metaphorically obviously, he needs to be physically able to play)...
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Re: Building an electric saz

Post by Veitchy » Sun Sep 19, 2021 3:05 am

One of the things I love about this forum is the surprisingly wide variety of stringed instruments that turn up. No other guitar forum I'm on/browse has this rich an array. Not even on the Tele forum and that's got it's fair share of bluegrass cats.

I dig the difference.

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