A guitar’s headstock is very much part of the brand identity. Most of the shapes you will see below are instantly recognisable and discernible by the average guitar nut.

Fender headstock designs

The above Fender designs have been with us since the 50′s, except of course the 70′s style strat headstock above, which is a slight derivative of the original shape, now back in use again for most standard  models. With all the above designs the tuning pegs are on the same side of the headstock and the strings have a straight path from the ‘nut’ to the tuning peg. This causes less stress on the nut and less tuning problems than designs where the string path is altered.

The other electric guitar pioneer, and still in business today is Gibson. The most famous Gibson guitar is named after it’s inventor ‘Les Paul’, first produced in 1954. It is still manufactured today and is more of a traditional instrument in it’s construction than the Fender alternatives developed in much the same era of the mid 50s. Traditional in the sense of it’s side by side open book headstock shape and the construction of jointed and glued in necks. Also the shape was very much like a standard acoustic guitar with a cutout for high note access.

Gibson headstock designs

Gibson introduced some very futuristic guitars with equally space age headstocks in 1958; the Flying V and the Explorer. As you can see above they are quite a leap from the traditional guitar headstock shape.

These two companies have pioneered guitar design and people are still buying the same designs today. Vintage ‘re-issue’ models are extremely popular from both companies, where the guitars produced are made using the same processes and techniques and to the same spec as 50 years ago. This is an unusual industry that seems to wish to stand still in many ways.

Since the rock n roll era when Fender and Gibson introduced their designs there have of course been many attempts to make new styles and designs of guitar shapes and headstock shapes. The all seem to be stuck within two extremes; highly derivative or just outlandishly shaped without thought for function. Also there are some completely ugly designs that are different too; such as ‘Dean’ guitars.

Bigsby, Ibanez & Jackson designs

Above you can see three more examples of popular headstock designs. The Bigsby is heavily influenced by Fender and Batman I would say. Jackson style headstocks follow the Gibson Explorer style bit add sharp edges. Ibanez have a very strong following and are probably the third big player in the manufacturing industry. Their signature shape is a little bit pointed but not too much so non-heavy rock enthusiasts might sometimes pick up their well made guitars.

There are some other notable styles such as those of Parker, PRS and Steinberger which you can Google if you are interested. In my opinion Parker headstocks are a bit silly, PRS ones are nice but the guitars are boring, Steinberger introduced the guitar without a headstock at all, which is very clever but not obviously something desirable or you would see people playing them other than Kajagoogoo in old videos.

In the next installment of this article I will introduce and illustrate some new headstock designs that hopefully will be picked up and made into new classics! Stay tuned…

'Melody' branded gold Lightscribe disc

There you can see the result of the test. As it says, these are 96dpi images that should be on your screen at approximately life size for most people, except perhaps netbook users. If you are very interested in the quality and want a close up look of the print source file (300dpi TIF) and a scan of the disc done at 300dpi, then click the obvious links in this sentence!

What does it all mean? Looking at the picture above gives you a thousand words of meaning! But I must tell you how I created the source image and Lightscribed it so you know that it is a valid and useful test. I created the lines and shades test in Adobe Illustrator, obviously as vector/postscript data. The lines weights are measured in ‘points’ rather than something more commonplace like millimetres, just out of tradition, just as many programs use ‘points’ for type size nearly everyone is familiar with. The file set up as a 12cm square and I exported a greyscale TIF at 300dpi. This TIF was placed in the Lightscribe labelling program with no scaling/stretching applied, set to just crop off any bits that went over the edges. The disc image was burned using ‘Best’ mode.

The greyscale (or grayscale) test is very useful for getting images ready for print to Lightscribe. It maps the colours you see on screen, and would expect on paper if you printed to a decent postscript printer using the source greyscale or CMYK file in Illustrator, to what you get on the disc. I’d say the dynamic range from 0% to 100% in your graphics program is compressed to approximately 25% to 75%. The 0.5pt lines are printed very well but the 0.25pt lines show a bit of break up so I would use a minimum line width of 0.4pt on future Lightscribe disc projects. Also I’m quite pleased that although the tonal range is quite compressed the shades are quite distinct between every 10%, especially at the lighter end of the scale.

What do you think? Be my guest and post a comment.

Cheers, Mark

Disc labeling is useful, so most people will keep a CD marker pen next to their disc box for the scrawling of disc name (if you’re organized enough to use a disc cataloging software program) or a contents list of sorts, onto the surface of the disc. For a graphic designer, rather than a calligrapher, this isn’t very satisfactory. So ever since the average computer user has been able to make their own CDs there have been ways to make more professional/designed on CD labels.

I remember using something called ‘PressIt’ about 15 years ago, an awful contraption that was just a plastic spindle with a disc to transfer a printed sticky paper label onto the disc surface. The disc labels came two up on an A4 sheet. I found the paper a bit too thin and poorly surfaced to make a good job. Also the plunger contraption didn’t facilitate perfectly centred and ripple free labeling, so that kit got used about 3 times.

I’ve skipped a generation perhaps, because I’ve never had an inkjet printer that was capable of printing onto the surface of a CD/DVD. But now I have a brand new LG Lightscribe DVD writer and a pack of HP Colour Lightscribe DVD+R.

The first thing I noticed, I knew nothing of the technology before buying this drive, was that colour is just monochrome shades. The 10 pack has 5 shades, you can see in the picture below on the HP top sheet from the pack. Also you can see two of the discs I’ve used. I was in Taiwan using a new computer so I only had a few photos on the computer I could use for a label. I quickly made up these labels in Photoshop as 300dpi images at a size of 12cm x 12cm. On screen I used a circular masking layer so I could see what bits would be cut off during the printing onto disc.

HP Colour Lightscribe discs printed with 300dpi images

The discs look pretty nice on the main picture, but you might have an impression of the slight soft focus on the discs by looking at them and the HP label in comparison.

Scan of disc 1

Let’s look at the quality closer up. This is from my scanner. You can definitely see the softness here, especially in contrast to the plastic/foil markings on the inner ring. It’s a bit like a motion blur or mis-registration from multiple laser passes. Below you can see the original photo section at approximately the same size and rotation. It’s quite a lot sharper.

Original photo detail

For another comparison I’ve changed the pic to similar tones to the green of the disc. Compared to the scan, the colours and tonal range have been matched but it’s not so blurry, the text is much more legible.

Original photo detail colourised

I’ll be using and trying these discs some more, I used the ‘best’ setting in the Cyberlink imaging software and the media is ‘version 1.2‘. The DVDs both took about 19 minutes to etch the images upon.

One thing I might test is to incorporate lines of various weights in an illustrator drawing and print it onto a light scribe disc to test the resolution of the process. The Lightscribe website suggests “When using images from your digital camera or scanner, use the highest resolution possible to yield the best label quality.” From my results I’m guessing that 150dpi would be the most efficient res, my 300dpi image was not necessary – it didn’t benefit with extra sharpness.

Now I might have sounded a bit negative in the review but weighing everything up I think it’s worth having a Lightscribe drive. The discs look nice, the drives are not expensive, the media isn’t much more expensive if you shop around. If you want to add an extra drive or replace an old slow one I’d definitely go for a Lightscribe or Labelflash capable drive.

Cheers, Mark