Suppose you buy or build a custom guitar body shape, well now you need a pickguard! From an aesthetic point of view this is the most important item when it comes to accentuating or complimenting the shape of your guitar. So lets take a look at a few of the things to consider and how to get it right the first time.
Design first
Do you want the pickguard to be as small as possible because you want to see the guitar body? Do you want to accentuate the lines of the guitar or smooth out some of the more extreme angles? A pickguard can provide balance to the overall aesthetic of most guitar shapes. For example, if you have a cutaway design guitar with very sharp lines, they can be softened by applying a pickguard that roughly follows the shape of the guitar but with smoother edges. Conversely if you want to further accentuate the lines of the guitar body, applying a pickguard that follows an exact parallel line to the edge of the guitar works wonders.
Also to give the pickguard a more 'integrated' appearance you could consider cutting the pickguard to fit around hardware you plan on installing, such as a bridge or control plate,
this is simpler to achieve than it may sound.
So lets talk about materials and colour
As a general rule I have found that if you have binding on the guitar, matching the pickguard material and colour to the binding provides the cleanest and most elegant solution. If you don't have a binding then ensuring the colour has sufficient contrast to the colour of the guitar body is a good place to start. For example a black pickguard on a very dark blue guitar can start to blur the lines between the body and the pickguard and provide something of an optical illusion, making it difficult to appreciate the colour of the guitar. Ever seen a blue Tele with white double binding and a white pickguard? It looks phenomenal!
And finally its important to decide what you want the focus to be on, meaning that if you
have a beautiful metallic sparkle finish on the guitar, a very bling pickguard may actually distract from the aesthetic rather than add to it. For the purposes of this post I'll discuss plastic pickguards because that almost exclusively what I use, and what the vast majority of self builders will also use.
So where do you start?
Well, I always start with paper and cardboard, a naked guitar body and all the hardware I plan on installing. The simplest way to get it right first time is the cut out (lots of variations of) your favourite design in paper and lay it out on the guitar with the hardware all placed where it will eventually live. you can trim and restart again and again and this is a fool proof method of getting the perfect shape; by tracing cavities and drawing round your hardware. Once you have the perfect shape, transfer it to cardboard, now you're ready to make you plywood template.
A jigsaw, router (with a template bit), double sided tape, a razor blade and some 180 grit sandpaper are all that's required for a perfect pickguard. My top tip for cutting pickguards using everyday tools is that generally speaking, pickguard material is fairly brittle and routers are a little agricultural for such a precision job, which means, chipping and breaking off sharp edges and angles from your new pickguard is very easily done.
However, (assuming you don't have a router table) there s a very simple way to eliminate this risk entirely. (See picture above) You'll need to make two plywood templates and sandwich the pickguard material in the middle of them when you come to cut and trim the plastic.
So here's the process I use.
I trace the cardboard on to a piece of plywood and cut and sand the plywood template until its perfect. This is the template your router bit is going to follow. I then stick the pickguard material to a second piece of plywood and rough cut the pickguard shape using a jigsaw. Next, I stick the perfect template on top of the rough cut pickguard and you have a sandwich with a perfect template on top and a plastic rough cut with a plywood rough cut underneath. From this point its simply a case of running the router (with a template bit around the perfect template and it will trim both the plastic pickguard and plywood underneath perfectly with no chipping or breakage.
So what about bevelling or rolling the edges of the pickguard?
Well, I wouldn't recommend using a router for the same reasons as above. I've found that the simplest (and most fool proof) way is to use a razorblade to run along the edge to shave the desired angle. Its quick and looks perfect meaning that only very light sanding is required, just to smooth out any sharp edges. Now you just need a quick test fitting to make sure all is well and you're done!
So there's few pearls of wisdom learned through failure and much swearing! That being said, as always, do whatever you want if that's what you like and don't let anyone tell you
any different. After all its your guitar!