Review: Rice Custom Guitars #73

[dharmafool]

Dharmafool's Ms.Daphne, built by Rice Custom Guitars, is a vintage-influenced Strat with a lot of sounds even Tele-philes can love.

Ms. Daphne

I received this beautiful S-style guitar Sept. 10, 2007, and have played it every day since. I love this instrument's tone and I'm having a complete blast coming to know it as a "playing tool." While she came to me brilliantly made by Rice Custom Guitars, Ms. Daphne's build-process was not without some small glitches, which I'll explain in the course of this ramble.

Neck. The .978" - 1.013" flatsawn maple neck from Musikraft has lovely straight grain and mineral-streak details. I am a newbie to the fat-neck club. In spec'ing this build, I figured the worst that could happen was that I'd have to re-contour the neck profile just slightly, between the seventh fret and the nut, to give my left hand a little more freedom. For now I have no plans to take this step, but I like knowing I can do so on this guitar without harming the stability or tone.


Fat neck, sleek peghead, Gotoh-Kluson tuners. This build is off to a good start.


I love being able to hide the string end inside the shaft of the vintage-style Gotoh-Kluson tuners. Superb design! I haven't had a guitar with that feature for 35 years. Yeah, the tuners look period-correct, and that's cool; if they weren't so well replicated by Gotoh, I'd have chosen a more modern tuner with a higher gear ratio.

Super nut work by Chris Rice.

Chris Rice cut the brass nut from a blank he purchased online -- no Tibetan singing-bowl mojo to it. Chris did a fantastic job. The man sets high standards and he is very painstaking. Lots of players and builders don't like brass for nuts, and I can appreciate that. It's defintely not conducive to all playing styles, but I've come to prefer it on my S guitars.

The neck pocket is of course good and tight all around. Not long ago I read a vigorous debate on TGP over the question of neck pocket tolerance, particularly along the two parallel walls of the pocket. Seems there are plenty of examples of weak coupling along those walls on highly prized (and priced) vintage guitars, tone machines to die for. So the assumption about tight neck coupling at the thin walls for many, is just dogma. However, tight (but not too tight)neck pocket coupling looks best, IMO. I like a thick neck plate of choice steel, something that would "pillow" or indent the wood without bending, if the screws were torqued down. I almost spec'd for stainless steel inserts and machine screws, instead of the traditional four wood screws. Ditto for a contoured heel. I can always do these later.

Frets/Board/Setup. Fretwire is the "nickel-silver" variety from Germany. It's the Jescar FW50078 (.078" wide x .050" high), a narrow-tall shaped wire. The guitar arrived with an expert setup overall; medium action, as befits the fret/neck shapes. I don't have tools to measure relief, radius, action, so I can't be too specific about the setup. However I can attest to Ms. Daphne's magnificent fretwork: rock-solid seating, gleaming crowns and absolutely no hint of protruding ends. It was such a joy to have a fat neck with tall and perfectly consistent frets that I played Ms. Daphne with extra machismo at first, because the resulting tone was awesome, and I proceeded to wear those crowns by digging in hard for blues vibratos.

Yes, the sound was fantastic, but after a few days of such zeal, my fingers were stumbling around the fretboard. Confused about this sequence of events, I launched a thread about it in the Guitar & Bass Technical Info. area of TGP: http://tinyurl.com/32fz9q. The feedback I got from Rich Rice, David Collins and others was extensive and very helpful. The exchange educated more than just me. The upshot is that if I want to play so hard on "nickel-silver" frets I'm going to experience premature wear problems, and that I really ought to switch to stainless steel frets for durability if I insist on playing with so much muscle. Fair enough. (Problem is, I like to play that way once in a while, not routinely.) Another upshot is that I intend to purchase a good crowning file and several measurement tools and use them to maintain the super setup created by Rich and Chris.

I rejected the original neck and board that came to Rich from Musickraft on two counts: the truss rod adjustment was the bullet-style, which I couldn't standing looking at. I had ordered the rod-adjust to be located inside the peghead (like my Fender American Deluxe), not sticking out of it, but Rich said Musickraft couldn't do that style for me. Rich gave me the option of ordering a new neck with a vintage-style heel-adjust location, for which I was grateful. Musickraft quickly did up the replacement neck, Rich bought the bullet neck for a spec guitar he was building, and everyone was happy.

As a player I am real partial to ebony fretboards. On closer inspection of photos of the bullet neck, I was underwhelmed by the quality of the ebony used for the board. I went back to my build sheet and saw that I forgot to specify the species and/or grade of ebony I wanted. The stuff in the photo was instrument grade, but too porous and dry. Fortunately I caught this within the same day or so that the bullet neck problem emerged. Rich graciously obliged my fingerboard fetish by asking Musickraft to break out some Gabon ebony for me, if they had any. Thankfully, they did. I was willing to pay an upcharge, but I don't think there was one. The second board is a quantum improvement over the first, just splendid. I spec'd it for a straight 12" radius.

Body/Finish. The body is one piece of swamp ash using Musickraft's '65 contours. It's not real light and it's definitely not heavy (BTW, Ms. Daphne weighs 7 pounds 7 ounces on my digital postal scale). Being a hardtail, the weight is more evenly distributed than a body with a tremelo intertia block. Picking up the guitar feels a lot like picking up a Telecaster.

Rich Rice has a well deserved reputation for his detail-sanding and nitro work. Like every guitar finisher I've ever met, he has definite preferences in his realm of expertise, along with trade secets, but he isn't averse to trying things out. As the Rice Custom Guitar gallery reveals, Rich has more experience shooting transparent finishes on guitars, so when I came along wanting a Daphne Blue ash Strat, we both knew I was presenting him with a kind of challenge. This is an opaque color with considerable variation depending on manufacturer (we happily agreed on Re-Ranch). I've never really discussed this with him, and perhaps he will elucidate for us in a reply: Rich had gotten well into spraying finish on the body when something went wrong and he decided he had to start the finish process over again.

Understandably, Rich seemed frustrated when he informed me of this setback. I felt bad for him. While it added two or three months to my wait for the guitar, I didn't much care about the delay. I had other guitars to play in the meantime, and I really wanted this Rice guitar to end up being a source of pleasure and pride for the builders and myself. To help insure this I made a point of leaving the Rice boys alone for as long as would take them to work their magic. I waited patiently until they were ready to show and tell.


--Part II of this review appears directly below.

[dharmafool]

After Ms. Daphne was assembled and strung up, new pics were sent and some quick verite videos were posted. I was real pleased with the results and Rich and Chris were too. Before they even shipped it I knew they'd made me the kind of tone monster I'd been building in my mind for several years.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Rich lays down ultra-thin, but surprisingly resilient finish -- a very tone-tastic approach. On Ms. Daphne, you can see the top's grain pattern when the light catches it just so. It's not a treatment like Fender's Mary Kaye see-through finishes, it's more subtle. Lower layers of pigmented nitro have shrunk into the open grain, while succeeding layers build up the overall depth and create a completely smooth surface. Sounds like a lot of paint, but it ain't, and that's the trick. It reminds me of the secondary patterns you see woven into some silk neckties, the jacquard weave, except the pattern here is the wood grain. I'd never seen this sort of effect before, and I will admit that at first I was a little dismayed by it. When I studied it closely I came to appreciate the technique quite a lot. (One side advantage of this finish is that even though it's opaque, one needn't pull the guitar apart to prove that the body is indeed ash and not alder or basswood or wtf.)

When I opened the case and saw Ms. Daphne for the first time in person, I couldn't just hold and admire her like a newborn, or play her unplugged for the first few minutes or hours -- the way I hear some folks do with their fresh off the truck custom instruments. I had to plug her in right away. I was in an auditory trance for at least an hour before I looked down and first noticed that both cutaways were not buffed out. Ugly! I e-mailed Rich about it and he explained that he left the area in question un-wetsanded and unbuffed out because at that point doing so would surely have burned through the finish on those tight curves. He said the solution was to wait at least six months for the finish to completely cure (harden); wet sand a little in the affected areas, then buff. So in spring the cutaways will get buffed out.

The neck finish is quite thin but hard and smooth. It's gloss, per my request, and looks swell with a little copal tint to warm up the maple.

Hardware/Pickups/Electronics. Not only am I a hardtailer from way back, the one piece of guitar anatomy I think about obessively is the bridge. (When Google Patents debuted recently, I began researching and collecting patent applications/drawings for strange and marvelous bridge designs.) Long before I contacted Rice Custom Guitars, I exhausted myself deliberating over which fixed bridge design (and manufacturer) to use on my next S-build. I chose the Callaham hardtail (and string ferrules) and never gave the decision another moment's thought. More important, I'm as happy as can be with them. All the same, I am not above tinkering with the bridge, changing out Callaham's excellent stainless steel saddles for titanium or brass ones. But this would be on a strictly chasin' tone basis. Who knows, maybe I'll get cojones and slap some Tele-type barrel saddles on that bridge plate.

I did my due dilligence on choosing the pickups right after Rich started on Ms. Daphne. I knew what I wanted, tonally, I just didn't know who was making what these days. It had been about eight years since I last paid attention to pickups. At the end of my search of dozens of Web sites and sound clips from pickup designers/winders and Web stores I went with Harmonic Design '54 Specials, a low-output Strat pickup set known for being clear and smooth. To make extra certain, I first loaded the HDs in my beater ash Strat and loved the sound. While we are certainly in another golden age of lutherie, I think we're also in another golden age of pickups. The handwound pickup offerings are truly amazing in quality and variety. It wasn't easy to narrow the selection down to one set. One reason I opted for a traditional top-routed body with pickup and Strat pickguard on this build was because I may want to wire up a couple more 'guards with some of the other terrific pickups I found.

A few years ago I doinked around with an Alembic Blaster, an onboard preamp-booster with a trimpot that adds from 3db to 14db gain. For me, even at the lowest setting the sound was too hot with the Vintage Noiseless pickups I had going. But I definitely liked the effect of an onboard preamp converting my signal to a much lower impedance. Hunting around some manufacturer's sites one day I found that the CAE Sound Unity Gain Buffered preamp and onboard effects loop was now commercially available. I was long aware of its esteemed provenance, but until a year or two ago, getting one was like a dope deal: you had to know someone who knows someone who knows someone (and I knew no one). After consulting with a longtime user of the UGB, I asked Rich and Chris to plan on putting one in Ms. Daphne, since the build-specs were not yet locked down. Chris was game, Rich maybe a little less so (until he heard it).

I won't go into how the preamp works. Read more about it here: http://www.caesound.com/http://www.caesound.com/
I will say that the preamp enables me to get a gorgeous tone, a clarity, roundness and presence that I could never get from a passive, high-impedance signal. Being unity-gain, there is no op-amp glare to "contaminate" the signal. Or so one would assume from the name of the circuit. I don't hear any glare, but there are others, with relevant knowledge and experience, who have tested the product and stated that the UGB-2 (the model I have) is not unity-gain. All I know for sure is that the UGB preamp is a fantastic way to make your signal low-impedance so you can hear considerably more of the sound of your instrument, and that the HD '54 Special pickups go beautifully with the UGB.

The on-board effects loop is a brilliant facet of the UGB. Chris Rice created the effects loop segment on his own, as no instructions for it were included with the CAE circuit. He did a fine job on it, even including some additional functionality. Chris also reflowed some dubious-looking solder joints of mine in the harness. Indeed, another change was that I would need a rear-routed cavity to access to the preamp and its 9-volt battery.


The Stratocaster jack set into backplate looks better than it works for connecting the on-board effects loop. An easy fix, however.


To me and many others, it's a nusisance to deal with a second cable plugged into the guitar, but that's the trade-off for having an on-board effects loop. The aggravation begins with planning the placement of the second jack. For a time, I searched far and wide for a spare dual jackplate used on a lot of Rickenbacker models. I found some really obscure Ric stuff, but never ran across the dual jackplate for a spare-parts price. I could have had something fabricated, and almost did, but, feeling sorta cheap, I decided it was a nutty solution, so I talked with Rich about fitting two Electrosocket side-mounted jacks close together. I was averse to spacing them too far apart, for aesthetic reasons. Rich could not promise they would fit together closely without having to flatten the radius of the edge contour in their vicinity. I was okay with a subtle loss of edge-radius, but not a radical flat-slice. Numerous e-mails back and forth on the second-jack dilemma. We were making progress as we thought through the issue, but it still took what seemed like a long time to reach the answer. All the way, Rich was truly engaged with this, very patiently and professionally citing drawbacks or pitfalls to various ideas of mine. Our communication was exacting and objective. If he was feeling frustration toward me during this, there was absolutely no sign of it.

I was ready to tell Rich to simply do his best with placing of the electrosockets, when he said he had a crazy alternative that I might like: mounting a jack onto the guitar's backplate, and using a slim-profile right angle plug. That way, if I wanted to re-locate that jack, I would need only to replace the backplate with a stock Les Paul part. As the photo shows, there is a Stratocaster jackplate installed. That was my contribution to Rich's idea. It's more of a perversion of Rich's idea, because when the guitar is strapped on it's quite awkward trying to aim the straight plug into the jack by feel alone. Rich must have seen ahead to this result, as he had tried to dissuade me from the Strat jackplate right off the bat.

I haven't used the loop very much so far because I don't use my pedals a lot. It's so cool to switch in the loop and not have to twirl my volume. My pedals sound real good through the preamped signal -- more transparency and less noise, compared with a passive signal through even just one or two effects. But I will get a new LP backplate soon and attach the existing jack the way Rich originally envisioned it. The loop features its own bypass mini-switch which Chris located at my request on the pickguard near the tone pots.

The 5-way selector switch is an Oak-Grisby. It seems a little better made than the standard Switchcraft model. It's wired in the most typical way, for now. Generally, I only occasionally play in positions 2 and 4, because I like positions 1, 3 and 5 so very much better. What I've yet to do is re-wire for a neck-bridge pickup sound, which I'm sure I'll dig. I'll get to it one of these days.

The volume pot is a long-shaft 25K CTS audio taper, modded by HAS Sound to a short shaft. The tone pots are 250K and have an Orange Drop .47uf cap. The bridge pickup has a tone pot assigned when it's switched in. In cahoots with the UGB, that HD bridge pickup is so sweet it doesn't need a tone pot in order to be truly usable. But when rolling off the treble, some unique shadings are possible. That is why I declined Chris's suggestion of making the second tone pot a neck pickup blend pot, a modified version of the G&L Expander circuit. I simply wasn't going to give up that second tone control. I would much sooner give up the neck-middle combo, or middle-bridge combo, on the 5-way selector switch, as a way to work the neck-bridge combo into the mix. Of course, I could drop in another mini-switch to add the neck pickup at will, or opt for push-pull pots, or concentric pots, but I've been there and done that. It's bad enough I needed the effects loop bypass switch. Hmm, maybe I'll relocate it to the backplate . . . .

I hope this epic post and accompanying photos will prove useful to TGPers. Rich and Chris put substantial extra time into tweaking the final setup on Ms. Daphne and it shows. I consider myself real fortunate to have such a powerful, playable, touch-sensitve instrument. If fortune smiles, Ms. Daphne will help me become a better guitar player.

I love my Rice guitar. Rich and Chris are fun and real easy to work with. Would I commission another Rice guitar? Oh yes, in a heartbeat!

[XKnight]

Great review and nice looking guitar. I'm the proud owner of Rice Custom #42 and love mine too.

[Old Tele man]

...both are beautiful examples of excellent craftsmanship!

[johnnyqb]

wow, what a well-written review. I don't understand half of it, but I felt like I did while reading it. That's a sign of good writing! If you are half as good a player as you are a writer, that guitar must really be singing. Enjoy!

[jeremym19]

Rich and Chris are currently in the process of making me a guitar from some old barnwood and they have been nothing but helpful and a joy to talk with throughout the whole process.

I love that daphne blue and the electronics seem like really cool options to have. That is a gorgeous guitar!

+1 to Rice Custom Guitars

[leftyaxeslinger]

Cool, funky guitar!

Proud owner of Rice # 66!!

http://ricecustomguitars.20m.com/ins...xeslinger.html

[mojocaster.com]

Wow, some Rice Beauties in this thread!

[mad dog]

Every time Zombywoof shows the pic of his Rice Custom I get the cold sweats.

[Chris Rice]

Originally Posted by mad dog

Every time Zombywoof shows the pic of his Rice Custom I get the cold sweats.

Zombywoof hasn't posted in this thread, are you referring to leftyaxeslinger's guitar?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul,

Thank you for your thorough and honest review. We truly love these guitars and it is such a thrill for me when I hear about how someone connects with them.

Chris Rice

[OldSchool]

Originally Posted by XKnight

Great review and nice looking guitar. I'm the proud owner of Rice Custom #42 and love mine too.

Whoa......that is sweet!

[Rich Rice]

Man.. every time I see one of these I miss it..

It does warm my heart to see they are loved, though.

[drod2045]

bleeding edge

what can i say...wow! more info please! what color/finish? specs? wow. i mean wow

[Glowing Tubes]

Wow, sounds like quite a project. Chris must have the patience of an angel to put that sucker together. Nice work.