Tutorial: Customizing Your Guitar or Bass! PART 1

Ever wonder what a mahogany precision bass with a jazz neck and Musicman pickups would look like? While you're fantasizing about pairing Fergie's rump with Scarlet's lady lumps, the guys over at www.talkbass.com ponder over the thought almost constantly.

If you're fortunate enough to have a Photoshop savvy artist make your day by combining that Dan-electro longhorn with the Darkstar pickup you haven't installed yet, you're one of the lucky ones. For the rest, I've put together this tutorial for those who happen have found a copy of Photoshop somewhere out there in the unscrupulous world of torrents, and don't know how to get that pink Strat to look black.

To get the job done you'll mostly use layers, the lasso tool, and transparencies. These are all very basic tools that can create a comp that looks like a kid found scissors and a stack of paper, or like a Fender custom shop straight out of the proverbial box. We're shooting for the custom shop with this tutorial.

1. Source material

This part's simple. Make sure the angle of the shot is straight on, and that you get the highest resolution image you can find. Just google something like Geddy Lee Jazz, and limit your search results to "large" under google's image page. You'll find something like this:



But we want to pair that incredible neck with Precision body! For the body it's best to find a white finish (if your dream color is going to be solid, not transparent) or a natural finish (you'll see why later). My search came up with these:





Now to get that neck off the Geddy...

2. Lasso

Open the Geddy file with Photoshop. Double click the "background" layer and select OK. I also like to hit the "F" key so that I'm working in full screen mode. It allows me to use the spacebar to "grab" the image and move it around the screen.

Select the Polygonal lasso tool. You can use the magnetic lasso tool, but it takes some getting used to because it almost literally has a mind of its own.



Before you start clicking away, the idea here is to isolate the neck, basically digitally removing it from the body as you would in real life. The difference here is that the strings should come with it. This makes it easier to align the neck to the body later, and it's much more realistic looking than adding strings later.

Make your selections in sections rather than all at once. Double clicking "closes" the selection. You'll find that turning corners like where the neck curves for the pocket you'll be clicking rather quickly. Try to do it all at once and you'll be starting over quite a bit.

It should look something like this:



The headstock presents some tight corners. You can use the Polygonal lasso tool if you're patient, but I mix the magnetic lasso tool and the magic wand and eraser.

Once you've got your neck isolated to transparency, select around it and copy. (cntrl or apple + C)

Now open once of the P bass files and paste (cntrl or apple + V).

Photoshop creates a new layer, which I recommend you name "Geddy neck". Double click the layer to rename it in the new popup window, or simply click the "Layer X" text twice.

Now you've got an isolated Geddy Lee signature Jazz neck! Without spending $450 on the bay and wondering if the UPS guy likes to soak his boxes in water and leave them in the sun so they warp...

Drop the neck into a file with the Pbass of your choice. I turned the angle to be straight (cntrl or apple T) and used the same method as before to isolate the body.

Place the neck also using the transform tool, you can use the strings as a guide. Be sure to zoom in and clean things up around the pocket, mildly resizing either the neck or the body to fit.



Here's my result:



I think there's too much red in the neck, so I used Image/Adjustments/Levels and Image/Adjustments/Hue to fix that by pulling back on the saturation of the color red...



Next (part 2) we'll tackle the pickguard. It's complicated, but the body should be a breeze if we do the guard first.