Chapter 399 If every instrument can reach this level, that's good enough.

At 7:00 a.m. on July 20, the taxi that Liang Liang had booked the day before arrived at Liang Liang's doorstep on time.

Liang Liang's parents, sister, and Ban Ya got into a taxi.

Liang Liang paid 150 yuan for the bus fare and then wished her parents a pleasant trip to Lianwan City.

After the taxi left, Liang Liang and Liang Feng went into the East Wing to continue making electric guitars.

Today, Liang Liang seriously taught his younger brother how to make a guitar.

"The first thing to determine in a guitar is the string length. String length is a fundamental step in the manufacturing process that determines the final sound. It is the distance between the frets, distributed from the tuning pegs down the fretboard. This length determines the total length of the guitar. The length of a guitar will never be less than its string length..."

Liang Liang started by explaining the basics of making electric guitars.

Liang Feng listened carefully and remembered everything he said. He wrote down every word his elder brother said neatly in his notebook.

Having theory without connecting it to practice is just being irresponsible.

Based on his memory, Liang Liang drew a three-view design of a guitar on a large piece of kraft paper.

These blueprints were simply unavailable in 1994. Even if Xinhua Bookstore had books on the subject, they wouldn't provide you with a complete design of an electric guitar.

Liang Liang's design drawings are not very valuable; they are all designs that could be found online in his previous life.

In his previous life, he started making guitars after he turned thirty. He started with acoustic guitars, but later felt that acoustic guitars were not challenging enough, so he started making electric guitars.

The blueprints he used at the time were found online.

"You can't make a guitar without blueprints, but even if you have blueprints, you still need to know how to read them. If you can't understand them, you can't make it. This morning, we won't start making anything, we'll just look at the blueprints."

Liang Liang spent the entire morning explaining the blueprints for an electric guitar to Liang Feng in detail, step by step.

"While I'm at home these days, your goal is to learn to read and understand these blueprints. Once you've mastered them and are using them in conjunction with the guitars you've made, you'll discover various shortcomings in the blueprints. As you gradually make corrections, you might just create an amazing guitar."

In the afternoon, Liang Feng didn't watch Liang Liang make the guitar; instead, he focused entirely on dealing with the blueprints.

Before CNC lathes were available, most of the manufacturing process relied on manual labor and the use of tools.

Fortunately, Liang Liang knew what those tools looked like and how they worked in his previous life.

If the product is not available on the market, he can modify a manual oscillating drill and achieve certain processes by changing the drill bit, such as grooving and shaping.

While making guitars, he was thinking about how to use the existing tools to create molds for guitar making.

After working all afternoon, I made a violin neck.

Xu Mei kept her word and went to Liang Liang's house three times a day—morning, noon, and evening—to help him feed the pigs. After feeding the pigs, she would watch Liang Liang and his brother make guitars.

She just didn't dare to look at Liang Liang's face; her heart would race whenever she did.

When Xu Mei rode Liang Liang's motorcycle to Gao Xing's house for training that evening, she behaved herself properly, placing the electric guitar between Liang Liang and herself, without any physical contact whatsoever.

"Uncle Gao! It's going to drizzle tomorrow, and our track gets sticky when it rains. I can't ride my motorcycle all the way here. How about we practice at my house tomorrow? I have plenty of space." Liang Liang said his idea after the rehearsal ended that evening.

The weather forecast says there will be light to moderate rain tomorrow.

The roads here are all dirt roads, and they turn into mud pits as soon as it rains, making it impossible to ride a motorcycle.

“Alright, if it rains I’ll use a horse-drawn carriage to bring the stuff over.” Gao Xing agreed with Liang Liang’s suggestion.

Liang Liang dropped Xu Mei off at her doorstep, then rode his motorcycle back to his own home. As soon as he entered the courtyard, he saw the east wing brightly lit.

No need to ask, Liang Feng has gone mad inside again.

Liang Liang pushed the motorcycle into the west annex and then went to the east annex.

The door was open, and Liang Liang witnessed a miraculous moment.

The body and neck of the instrument he originally made were separate pieces, but now they have been joined together.

His younger brother, who was so engrossed in his studies, was installing pickups on the guitar—no, wait! He'd already finished installing the pickups and was now installing the strings.

This is one of the final steps in making an electronic keyboard.

Liang Liang was a little stunned. He didn't think he had taught him to this extent. How did he learn it?

Are we following the blueprints?

That's impossible!

It would be good enough if Liang Feng could understand those blueprints in just one day.

Although the blueprints for a regular electric guitar aren't exactly high-tech, they're not something you can understand and master in a day.

Even a genius couldn't do that.

Is his brother a genius?

He doesn't look like a genius from any angle.

Liang Liang walked quietly to the opposite side of Liang Feng, who had just finished installing the last string.

"Brother, you're back just in time. I just finished setting up this phone. Why don't you test the sound and see how it is?"

Liang Feng can't play the guitar, so naturally he can't tune it.

It sounds incredibly incongruous that someone who can't play guitar made one.

Liang Liang picked up the guitar and began tuning it.

Level the frets, adjust the string spacing by an octave...

The guitar is passable in appearance. The connection between the fingerboard and the neck is not excellent but it is acceptable.

This was Liang Liang's first time gluing the fingerboard and neck of the violin together, and the extent to which he had managed to do it almost made Liang Liang's jaw drop.

In his previous life, he made zithers for a long time, but he only reached this level.

The idea that some people are born to do a certain career has been proven once again in Liang Feng's case.

The feel of an electric guitar is a very important aspect, and for some musicians it may even be the most important thing.

Liang Liang felt that this zither was passable in this respect, barely passing.

There is a slight flaw in this violin regarding fret buzz; when pressing down on the ninth fret and playing, you will encounter a buzzing sound at the tenth fret.

Liang Liang tuned and played the guitar, and after more than ten minutes, the electric guitar was finished.

Liang Liang's assessment of it then came out.

Because he sourced genuine parts from the south, even though they were domestically produced, they were still more up-to-date than the parts used in his previous instrument. This resulted in an overall improvement in the quality of the instrument compared to his previous one.

If the previous violin was in the same price range as imported violins, which were priced below 1,000 yuan, then this violin is at least in the price range of similar foreign violins, which are priced between 1,000 and 1,500 yuan.

Even so, it is still a low-end product.

However, foreign companies didn't have any products in this price range; their low-end pianos were still over 1,500 yuan in the 1990s.

The cost of this instrument is higher than the previous one, but it doesn't exceed 150 yuan. It should be more than enough to sell for 500 yuan in a music store, but it's not impossible to sell it for 200 or 300 yuan.

"Just make sure you can achieve this level with every instrument from now on."

Liang Liang doesn't have high expectations for Liang Feng.