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8 min read
What a headless guitar actually is, what the design gets you and what it costs you, whether a headless kit is harder to build, our seven headless guitar and bass kits, and the full 23-video build series.
A headless guitar removes the headstock entirely and moves the tuning machines down to the bridge. It is a genuinely different instrument to build and to live with, and it divides opinion more than almost any other electric guitar design. This guide covers what a headless guitar actually is, what the design gets you, what is different about building one from a kit, and which headless kits we currently stock.
If you already know you want one and just want to get building, jump straight to the Headless Guitar Kit Assembly Manual, which has the full written build with 23 videos.
Ned Steinberger is the name most associated with the headless guitar. He did not play guitar, and in 1979 he built the first headless bass that made the idea stick. He was not strictly first: concept instruments existed before, including a prototype from Fender, and the headless lute predates all of it by several centuries. What Steinberger did was standardise the idea and build a company around it.
Other makers picked it up and adapted it through the 1980s and beyond, and headless designs have been played by Mark Knopfler, Sting, David Gilmour, Johnny Winter and, most famously, Allan Holdsworth, who played one almost exclusively from 1987 onward. The design has had a real resurgence in the last decade among progressive and modern metal players.
A headstock with six tuners on it is a surprising amount of mass hanging off the end of a long lever. Remove it and the guitar gets lighter, and the centre of gravity moves back toward your body. The practical result is no neck dive on a strap, which takes real strain off your neck, back and fretting shoulder over a long set.
The weight saving is only half of it. Headless bodies are usually designed around comfort from the start rather than inheriting a shape from the 1950s. Opening the box on our mahogany kit, the first thing Marty points out is the body: a one-piece mahogany blank with generous comfort cuts, contoured where your forearm and ribs actually sit. You feel that before you notice anything about the headstock being missing.
A headless guitar is shorter overall than a conventional electric of the same scale length, because the whole peg head is gone while the scale length is unchanged. Our headless kits are 25.5 inch scale, the same as a great many conventional electrics, so the neck under your hand feels normal and the instrument is simply shorter end to end. If you travel with a guitar, that difference is often the difference between fitting in an overhead locker and not.
Headless guitars have a reputation for holding tune and it is earned, though not for the reason people usually give. Both ends of every string are clamped solid. The ball end sits in gripping jaws at the bridge, and the neck end is held by a string-locking nut, a small metal block tightened with grub screws. There is no wound post to settle and no nut slot for the string to drag in when you bend or use the tremolo.
On our kits, though, the stability comes down to one thing during the build, and Marty is blunt about it in the build series: the bridge has to sit hard down on the two nuts underneath it. If it is sitting proud of them it will shift under string tension and the guitar will never hold tune. Seated correctly you can feel it, firm and fixed with no play at all.
Two more habits from his build that keep it there:
Tuning itself happens at the bridge with an allen key, one fine-tuner per string, down by your picking hand.
Honest trade-offs, because they are real.
Mostly no. The finishing, the neck joint, the pickups and the wiring are the same work as any solid-body kit, and none of it is headless-specific. Three things are genuinely different, and they cluster in the same part of the build.
This is the part that surprises first-time builders. The HL bridge separates: pull the spring out from under the large screw and the top lifts off the base. The base is what you mount to the body, and the top assembles onto it afterwards. Before the base goes down you thread the ground wire up through a small hole in the body so it sits against the metal, because once the base is screwed down you cannot reach it. Pilot holes for the self-tapping screws go to about half depth.
Once installed, the bridge should sit hard against the two nuts underneath it. Sitting proud of them, it moves under string tension and the guitar will not hold tune. Correctly seated it feels firm and fixed with no play. This is a ten second check and it decides whether the finished instrument works.
Anchor the ball end at the bridge, run the string up to the neck-end clamp, pull it to near playing tension by hand, lock the clamp, then bring it to exact pitch with the bridge fine-tuner. Our kits take ordinary single ball-end strings, because the neck end clamps rather than hooking, so you do not need the double ball-end strings that some other headless systems require.
Intonation is worth one note as well. Before you set the saddles, back off the little grub screw on the side of each one, or it locks the saddle so tight that it will not move. Start with the saddles stepped back progressively for the heavier strings, roughly where they would sit on a conventional electric, then fine-tune from there.
We stock seven headless kits, four six-strings and two basses plus a Custom Shop build. See the full range on the headless guitar kits collection page.
| Kit | Type | What is different about it |
|---|---|---|
| Mahogany body, rosewood fretboard, abalone dots | 6-string | 1 humbucker and 2 single coils, headless tremolo bridge, bolt-on neck. This is the kit in our build series. |
| Mahogany body, set neck, dual humbuckers | 6-string | A glued-in neck rather than bolted, which is the harder joint to get right and the one that most affects intonation. |
| Basswood body, bolt-on neck, dot inlays | 6-string | Basswood is closed-grain, so you can skip grain filling. The simplest of our headless builds to finish. |
| Quilted maple veneer, mahogany body, ebony fretboard | 6-string | A veneer top, which looks superb under a stain but is thin and easy to sand through at the edges. |
| Mahogany body, maple neck, rosewood fretboard | 4-string bass | 34 inch scale, two soapbar pickups, fixed bridge. |
| Ash body, quilted maple veneer, ebony fretboard | 5-string bass | 34 inch scale, individual single-string bridge units. |
| Custom Shop headless | 6-string | Choose your own tonewood, inlay material, binding and hardware finish. |
We filmed a complete headless build. Marty takes the mahogany body HSS kit from the box to the first chord in 23 short videos, covering sanding and staining, the wipe-on poly finish, the bolt-on neck, the headless bridge, all three pickups, every solder joint, stringing and the final setup and intonation.
Ours do not. The neck-end clamp grips an ordinary string, so a normal set of single ball-end strings works. Some other headless systems use double ball-end strings that hook at both ends, so check before you buy replacements for any headless instrument.
Yes, with the caveat that the bridge and stringing steps reward reading ahead. Everything else is a standard solid-body build. Watch the bridge and stringing videos before you start those steps rather than during.
Roughly 15 to 40 hours of hands-on work, spread over one to three weeks. Most of the calendar time is finish curing rather than labour.
Any tonal difference is small and heavily debated, and it is not the reason to buy one. Buy a headless guitar for the balance, the weight and the compactness. Those differences you will feel within a minute of putting it on.
Thinking about building one?
Browse the headless guitar kits, read the assembly manual, or come and ask the builders in our community before you commit.
Christoph and his son Fionn wanted a deep even black on an open-grained mahogany body with the figure still showing through, and the pores kept drying lighter than the surface. Follow the build from the bare kit to the finished bass, and see how they diagnosed it and what you can copy from their approach.
