Gettin’ rid of that dang buzz pt 2 and other early January shop tidbits and a too-long title

Be sure to check us out at www.richboromusic.com. Whew. Always forget that part.

A while back we discussed shielding your guitar’s cavity to avoid the dreaded ground hum that’ll make you nuts playing under fluorescent lights or worse yet, that neon Stroh’s sign at the bar  you played at last Tuesday night.  Well, we had 5 shielding jobs already this week, so that warrants rehashing it in my book

Once it was explained to me that the best way to shield a cavity was to use conductive shielding paint in the pickup cavities and copper foil in the control cavity.  Just make sure the paint overlaps a tab of the foil to make sure it’s all connected.  And this certainly does the trick. However,  after some trial and error we figured nothing beats good ‘ol copper tape all the way through and on the back of the pickguard. Doing it this way seems to kill all of the hum (you can crank up your amp and tap the bridge with no noticeable difference), and even quiet down the 60 cycle hum of single coils about 50%. That’s a rough measurement because I have no idea how to actually measure things like that. I, like most people, tend to through out numbers and hope nobody questions me. You’ll also notice that we solder the seams all the way around. That’s a little overkill, you can just put a connection between each piece like a tack weld, just where each new piece overlaps.

Here’s another cavity, this time the much debated “swimming pool route”. They call that because you have to add chlorine to your Strat every week during the summer to…forget it. That’s not even funny.  You’ll also hear this called the universal route, because you can install any pickguard you want on top with any pickup configuration without worrying about routing for singles, humbuckers or P-90′s.  Some say the missing wood robs sustain, some say the open cavity adds jangle. I don’t think it make s bit of difference as I’ve heard great guitars with similar qualities with both routes. You’ll notice that the tape isn’t very smooth on this one. That’s not just a lazy repair guy. The pickup cavity of this guitar had lots of bumps and from not being smoothed before it was finished. The control cavity smoothed out nicely.  Not a big deal, we’re just sensitive. This also segues into the rest of this project…

Here’s the before shot of the Strat we just saw. It’s about to get a new set of Fender Custom Shop Texas Specials, new 5-way, grounds and wiring cleaned up and re-done, Roland GK kit installed and a basic setup to re-radius the saddles, fix the intonation and set the string height.  The following pictures will tell the story. I’ll stop talking while you look

This installation has the pickup screwed into the top of the pickguard. You can also route a channel into the guard to have the GK pickup mounted underneath. That’s a nice clean look, but for this one we needed all the height we could get otherwise we would have had to grind the bottoms of each saddle height screw to achieve the right balance of saddle height ( we like the screws to not slice your hand when palm muting) and GK tolerance. It has to be a maximum of 1mm from the strings when the last fretted note is depressed on each string.

Moving on. Here’s a cool conversion of an American Standard Tele that got some vintage vibe. We added Klusons and a Bigsby kit making this the coolest tele ever. Well that’s very subjective, but for today, it’s the coolest tele ever. You’ll notice that the Klusons have a smaller post hole size and needed these cool adapter bushings to fill the larger holes left by the modern tuners.

See this…

You don’t want to see this.  We were calling a customer to discuss some fretwork when we noticed that his neck was shifting. Badly. Turns out all of the glue in his dovetail had given way and the whole thing was being held together by tongue of the fretboard and the contact of the dovetail. You have to resist the temptation to just squirt some glue in there. You’ll be seeing it move again very soon. So off it comes.

Don’t know if you can see, but there’s not much glue to scrape off.  Must have been a Friday afernoon at the guitar plant and the glue was almost empty.  The fretboard extension didn’t put up too much of a fight with the iron and spatula, but at least was amply adhered.  The neck angle was great , so it wasn’t a technical re-set. More of  a “re-glue”.  Usually at this point we’d be shaving some wood in strategic spots to correct the neck pitch. This neck sighted up perfectly with the saddle/bridge line.

This guitar also had cracked & shrunken binding reglued, frets leveled and crowned and this repair done. Perhaps the culprit that helped the neck loosen? We may never know. This is the same neck but my photography skills are not too good. The center stripe on the first picture appears darker than in the second.  Something about the lighting and my poor composition skills. Whatever. The ding’s fixed. Next.

Here’s a saddle from a guitar that came in with uneven string response when plugged in. The E and A were quiet even after the bottom of the saddle was checked for straightness. Even though the impressions from the strings weren’t really deep, they did effect the response of the pickup. The moral of this story is simple. Next time you change your strings just smooth out any burrs with sandpaper and you’ll avoid this becoming a problem. Just good guitar hygiene.

Yes, we really took a before and after shot of a saddle that we sanded. Sad, isn’t it. Just need to document every waking hour just in case we wake up too early and start a blog post.

Thanks for reading and thanks to all of those who’ve frequented Coyle’s Richboro Music this year. We forgot to do an official “Thanks for your Support/Happy New Year” email.  All joking aside, we really do appreciate all the great people who’ve come to be part of our daily life at the shop.

Happy New Year! (there I said it.)

A Martin’s bikini line and miscellaneous shop stuff…

So this week we had lots of upgrades and repairs but nothing too crazy, but we haven’t posted in awhile, so let’s look. That was a run on sentence.  Sorry about that.

This awesome sounding D-18 came in to have it’s original black pickguard replaced with a vintage style tortoise shell guard.  Acoustic guitar pickguards usually come off  easily with a hair drier and some patient peeling.  Just be sure to take your time. Not too hot, not too fast.  We’ve had guitars come in with splinters attached to the bottom of the old pickguard! For those who prefer the look of an acoustic sans guard, you can put your guitar in front of a window for a few days to let the UV color the  bikini line left by the old scratch plate. This one is more dramatic, but we were recently able to get a previously unexposed portion of a Breedlove to match the rest of the finish within two days. But we’re recovering this one anyway. If the replacement you’re looking for doesn’t cover the whole area, don’t worry too much. It’ll eventually match the rest of the finish’s aged hue.

After some final trimming, we matched the guard to the radius of the rosette. This guitar also got some shiny new Waverly tuners, some of the best you can buy.  These vintage style tuners are stainless steel with a bronze crown gear and have a 16:1 ratio. Super smooth and look great.

Next up is a really nice Gibson J-30 with a stress crack in the bridge. The design of this bridge didn’t give the saddle enough support. So after 20 or so years, it finally gave way…

So we removed the offending bridge and ordered a high quality replacement bridge. No problem. I saw this guy on YouTube use a 9 iron to remove a bridge in one hit. I used a pitching wedge, because we wanted sufficient lift. My swing coach keeps telling me we should use heat and a spatula. Next time.

Here we are after cleaning and prepping the area. You sould always replace your divots. It’s just good etiquette.

Here’s the replacment bridge. If you look closely, you’ll see the graft line where we spliced two bridges together. WHAT? Well, here’s the thing. The original bridge on this model is 2 1/4″ center to center from the E bridge pin holes.  The replacment bridges are the standard Gibson 2″ spacing. After some further digging, the Google told me that most Gibson bridges need to be fabricated. So in an effort to keep as original as possible and make sure the bridge plate and holes line up perfectly, we cut the broken bridge just below the pins and glued in the saddle half of the replacement bridge. The new style has LOTS of wood between the bridge and the edge, insuring that this baby won’t crack any time soon. Or ever. After lots of shaping, sanding and light finishing, this looks pretty original. The last couple pin holes haven’t been re-beveled yet after sanding.

Here’s the finished product with a new hand-shaped compensated saddle. The intonation came out nearly perfect and was fine-tuned with some saddle shaping. Now you can play an open E at the 12th fret and it all rings true. This guitar also got a new bone nut and fret level. It’s now ready for action and hopefully sounds better than ever.  Thanks to our buddy Fred for letting us work on this one.

Here’s a brief note about semi-hollow and hollow body guitars. Usually to replace a jack or repair a loose wire, the whole assembly has to come out.  If you’re going to go through that trouble, make sure you don’t have to do it again for a while. So we like to heat shrink the contacts on the jacks and make sure you put a lock washer to keep it from spinning again. Loose jacks tightened from the outside (without securing from the inside) account for 105% of repair guys having to fish electronics out of f-holes.

Here’s yet another pickup swap that needs some dressing up. The squared shoulders of the stock Duncan Blackouts leave lots of room on this 8-string. Yes, 8 (eight).  This was discussed in our last post, but we have a really nice shot of rings being glued together. It features our Craftsman clamp. I love this clamp.

Yay!

O.k. Here’s a killer Ibanez Musician that wants to have new pickups. Only problem here is that the original pickups, much like the ones above, are very wide and don’t utilize pickup rings. The height adjustment is within the body of the pickup, smiliar to a P-90 but closer to the edges. We’ll have to figure something out with this one. We don’t want to modify the guitar in any permanent way or add new screw holes.

Here’s the size difference.

Here’s the mounting plate for the Ibanez pickups. We want to retain them if possible. We drilled and tapped new holes that lined up with the replacments’ height adjustment screws (Seymour Duncan ’59′s with 4-conductor wiring to keep the original Parallel/Split/Series switches).

We ended up being able to use pickup adjustment screws to mount the pickup ring. They were just long enough to wedge between the pickup mounting plate and the cavity wall. This way we didn’t have any additional screw holes but anchored the rings quite well in the right spot. Awesome. But…

The mounting plate made the neck pickup sit too high. We didn’t want to risk damaging the pickup legs by re-bending them or shortening them in any way. And we couldn’t rout the cavity deeper without compromising the integrity of the neck joint.  So we cut this dowel into quarters and glued them into the corners to hold a pickup ring. Sometimes you just can’t tell how it’s going to work until you try it. We were able to mount the bridge pickup onto the existing mounting plate following what we just outlined.

Here’s a great project a customer brought in. It’s a violin that was in his family for generations and needed an overhaul. It has had lots of repairs over the years. Some different types of wood were spliced in to repair cracks, lots of open seams and a bad neck angle. We agreed to give it a dark burst similar to another violin we had in the shop at the time to cover up the old repairs.

The neck had this really big shim glued in at one point, but the angle was still way off making this violin unplayable.  We removed the shim and cut the neck heel to fit properly.

Here’s a shot of the back in progress. You’ll notice two screws at the endblock that were put in a long time ago to reinforce a crack repair.  We left the brass screws there. The neck had the same treatment. Although we removed them in the neck when we fixed the neck angle, we left the screw heads in place. Our job here was to keep the history, but make it playable.

Here it is after getting a new bridge, strings, 1 new tuning peg and all of the structural repairs and finish completed. Sounds really nice. Check out that cool fingerboard complete with inlay.  Hope this lasts in the family for a few more generations.

Here’s a shot of our new “guitar room”.  I call it that because it’s from a collection of old 1940′s Brazilian Rosewood D-28′s and I think a few 41′s. We took them all apart and used the back and sides for the floor boards. I know it’s wasteful, but man that floor sounds good.

Thanks for watching.

Adventures in fretting and other odds and ends

Before going any further, don’t let me forget to ask you politely to check us out at www.richboromusic.com

O.k, now we can proceed.

Hey, who put this half eaten pickup ring on my good china?  Alright, it goes like this. We were installing a new set of Dimarzio’s into a 7-string with factory EMG’s and came accross a couple of issues. First, the squared-off EMG-sized routes didn’t have any space for the Dimarzio’s conventional height adjustment screws.  This is simple enough, a little dremmel-ing, a little touch up stain to conceal the bare wood and you’re golden. Right? No. The factory neck pickup rout was 1.5mm longer on the treble side than the bass side, so when you try to center the pole pieces under the strings, you’re off-center in the rout.  We weighed the option of keeping the cuts symetrical compared to the tightest possible fit (uneven rout) and went with the former.

The cuts are nice and clean and it looks right, but our customer asked us to make some pickup rings that would fit the guitar. He wasn’t comfortable with the extra visible space since the EMG’s were larger. We offered to stain some custom sized maple rings to blend in with the existing dark cherry satin finish.  So 4 rings were cut and glued into 2 and we started some painting.  A blend of Dark Mahogany and Cherry Mahogany tinted lacquer fit the bill.

These are shown in their pre-sanded incarnation. Next is the finished product…

You’ll also notice that we had to trim the neck ring to go around the fingerboard.  Another note for anyone converting from active to passive pickups is that you’ll have to switch your pot values to 500k instead of the 25k mini pots. Not a deal breaker, but you’ll have an additional charge for parts and labor. All in all,  we thought it looked nice and made our customer happy, which should always be the goal.  Alright. NEXT

This is what happens when you find out that there are no $29 tortoise shell pickguards any more. The price of anything tortoise shell skyrocketed in the last few months. And yes, we’re still talking about the fake stuff.  Something about new regulations and the hollow earth theory. I stopped listening after hearing that it would be upwards of $65.  Luckily we still had some old blank sheets in stock for such an emergency (emergency because I already quoted our buddy Ed and didn’t want to have to tell him that his simple pickguard replacement was going to be $70. I don’t care about market values, that seemed a little nuts.) Under that gorgeous blue painter’s tape is the roughed-out tortoise shell P-bass guard. Hand beveled and boned so it won’t chip. No wait, that was Robert Redford’s bat in The Natural.  Just hand beveled. As per usual, no finished picture. This is a disturbing trend in our blogging.  Very amateur. NEXT.

This guitar is property of one A.J. Slick, a killer guitarist and heck of a nice guy. AJ plays with a VERY low action and wanted a setup that would allow him to bend without dragging his fingertips against the fretboard too much.  Then we figured that perhaps a partial scallop that left the bass side alone would be a best of both worlds setup. Nice feel for bluesy double stops on the lower strings AND happy bending. Sounded good.  So here’s what we did…

A nice tapered scallop that transitioned to a regular board around the d string. Awesome, right? But you know what? When you bend the b or g string up a full step, you slam uphill into the fingerboard. Ugh. I guess that’s why we don’t hear of too many tapered scalloped boards.  So we scalloped the rest of it, leveled the frets to a compound 9.5″ to 14″ and now it’s happy again. If  you’ve never played a scalloped fingerboard, picture it like having super tall fret wire so you don’t feel the fingerboard. It’s great for bending and vibrato, giving you a tremendous amount of control. Takes some getting used to, but feels great. The downside is that if you have a heavy fretting hand, you risk squeezing the notes sharp. Surprised it’s not more popular. I should have typed “I’m” before that last sentence. Don’t forget to check out AJ’s playing. He shreds.

What else…

Oh yeah. Where to put a battery in a Les Paul w/ EMG’s when you don’t want to keep removing the plate but don’t want to rout a hole in the body?  This was the idea of our good buddy Walt.  This only works with the small dime-sized  pots due to the spacing with the battery box.  Looks clean, no permanent mod to the guitar and works like a charm.  I’m sure you can buy one of these pre-fab from somebody, but it’s an easy install with a roto-zip and some super glue. Just remember to measure the depth and choose the right box. And it won’t work on Gibsons with the little hub tab for the lead and ground in the middle of the cavity without a little rewiring.

Frets! Lots of refretting done this week. Two particular guitars of interest were an old Guild Madera with what looks like a finished fingerboard (with lots of aged goodness and finish build-up around the frets) and a Taylor 714. In both cases we had to pre-cut the frets to length and nip the tang edge to fit inside the bindings. You have to be very careful to pre-radius the fret wire otherwise you risk the ends sprouting up when you press or hammer them in. Since you don’t have the barb to grap the wood on the ends, they want to spring up leaving an unsightly gap if not done properly.

 Don’t adjust the color of your monitor, there is a little green around those fret slots. There’s lots of bunched up material around those slots.  This board must have been stained and lacquered at some point, as you can see the base color or the wood in the worn spots. We REALLY wanted to scrape and level, but the goal is always to leave a fingerboard like you were never there on an older guitar unless instructed by the customer to the contrary.

Here’s one of the original frets juxtaposed against the backdrop of  an amazingly similar and completely untouched fingerboard. Gotcha! It’s the same guitar. Genius!  (That was my inner Jon Lovitz coming out. Sorry.)

This Taylor has rosewood binding, so you need to shape the fret ends prior to pressing them in and shave the tangs so that there’s a little extra fret to hang over the binding at the end of the fret slot.  We like to bevel the edges too before popping them in.  It’s  a little extra work, but nothing’s worse than a bad fret job. With delicate bindings (or in this case, lightly finished bindings), the less time they’re touching a file, the better. Just take your time and test fit a few times before final pressing or hammering.

Here’s an “in progress” shot of our Custom Neck Carve on a Danelectro. After the shaping and re-radiusing of the fingerboard, we refinished the neck in gloss black to look factory original. And yes, no final pics. Sorry. This guitar also got a modern top-loading WD hardtail strat bridge.  Those pencil marks are the guide lines that we use to carve the back of the neck into an offset V. We call it the Transitional Taper.  See more details here…

A few cases of Peter Green-itis this week, but on opposite ends of the spectrum. One came in to do, one to un-do. This involves taking apart a PAF-style bucker and flipping the magnet to reverse the polarity, thus making the two pickups out-of-phase with both on. Gives you a nice thinner, lower output tone without switches or push-pull pots. Close to a single coil in response without the  noise. Slightly more nasal, but still a very cool tone. Made popular by the legendary Peter Green of The Blues Breakers and Fleetwood Mac fame.  Only effects the pickups with both on at the same time, so it’s a great way to add versatility to a Les Paul (or a Reverse Flying V, as we did this week) with traditional braided leads.

Here’s a side view of another guitar getting our new neck carve. That’s a steep 6.5″ radius off the edge of the fingerboard.  Like falling off a cliff into thumb-over-the-neck heaven. The radius transitions to a flat 14″ so you can bend all the way up with no fretting-out even with a low action.

Thanks for watching.

Adjusting a 50 year old ES and another cool Strat overhaul

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Here’s a beauty. 1961 Gibson ES-335 dot neck.  An all time classic. Makes you smile just lookin’ at it. Only problem is…

After a couple of  previous refrets and some aggressive beveling (the angle at which the fret ends taper up to the crown of the fret wire), the high E string wants to slip right off of the edge of the fingerboard.  We discussed a few options to correct the issue with its owner, Barry.  We could A) refret it again, providing more level fret material at the edge of the fingerboard, B)  fill the high ‘E’ slot in the existing nut and recut it further away from the edge, or  C) do what we ended up doing. Tthe third  option was to replace the nut and cut it for a slightly narrower spacing of 1  5/8″ instead of 1  11/16″ .  We felt this was the least intrusive and most effective way to correct it, especially since the guitar’s owner Barry loved the way the neck felt with the low profile well-played in frets.

So I borrowed Becky’s rolling pin and knocked out the old nut. This was good, not only to correct the edge spacing, but also because this old nut had  been cut and filled a few too many times.  Heck, filling and recutting once is usually too many times. Perhaps I’m becoming a purist. Or just a snob. That’s fine. It suits me because I’m wearing a brand new shirt from the clothiers at Old Navy. The stitching is superb.

Here’s a shot of the bone nut blank, trimmed and shaped but not cut. The corners are still sharp, but we do that last. Next you’ll see the curious look of a compensated Earvana nut placed over top to double check the side spacing. They’re pre-cut to a variety of spacings and make great templates to test string spacing…

The slightly tighter spacing looks good, though not from this vantage point. This picture makes me a little squeamish. It’s just a test, that is not a graphite nut on a ’61 335.  Let’s move on. Since there’s some wear in the first 5 frets, we’ll crown and polish out those dents without removing any more height from the worn frets. I like to thing of ourselves as fret artists. No one else will call us that, but I’m hoping it catches on.

Here’s the finished bone nut all polished up and ready for final setup…

And here we are . You shouldn’t notice the spacing difference, and you really couldn’t feel it. We’re not crazy. Usually you would feel the 1 11/16ths shift to 1 5/8″ spacing. But becuase of the naturally rolled edges of the well played-in neck,  you really don’t on this guitar. The high E  just stopped slipping off the fret edge. And since the new nut slots are the proper size, the open strings have more definition.

And now, more pickups…

What you see here is…

Dimarzio Area 67 neck,  Gibson Firebird middle ‘bucker, Gibson Classic ’57 plus bridge pickup.  Push/pull volume pot to activate the bridge pickup in any position, mini toggle for out-of phase tones with middle and bridge pickups (more on this in a second), G&L’s PTB system with passive treble and bass cut circuit.

“Wait a minute. This sounds a lot like the last post. What gives buddy?”

Well, after further consideration, the pickups on this guitar were rearranged to suit it’s owner Mike.  We also added  a few other options.

To add versatility to the double hum combination, we installed a mini switch to reverse the phase of the middle pickup. Since it’s a traditional braided wire, you can’t just make the braid the black and the center the white. It’ll make the pickup cover hum when you touch it.  So…you take off the cover, remove the black wire from the braid, splice on a new lead and you’ve got yourself a workable 2-conductor pickup for the circuit.

This is pre-mod. Forgot the next picture. What else is new. Now picture a nice braided wire paired with a cloth black wire coming from the back of this Gibson Firebird pickup.  That’s it. And there’s just a gentle breeze and the smell of pumpkin bread. And it sounds great out of phase with the bridge pickup. Now open your eyes.

This guitar also got a Hipshot Drop D tuner, GraphTech nut, Hipshot Trem Setter, GraphTech saddles and absolutely nothing else.

So now Mike can choose between the noiseless single coil tone of the DiMarzio Area 67 for great Strat tones, the Firebird middle ‘bucker, the Classic ’57 plus or any of the 3 together, including all at once. On top of that, he can put the neck and middle or neck and bridge out of phase with each other for killer funk tones. You can just hear those 9th chords now.

Click here to hear me play that whistling part of  new Britney Spears song on a dobro in open F#Maj. At about 13:35 it really gets magical.

Thanks.

Lost pics, a headstock make over and pickup installs

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Well, it’s been a while since we updated anything here, so let’s jump in.  But first I’d like to point out that the reason we haven’t updated anything is that we’ve been busy and keep forgetting the “before” picture. And to be honest, the before is usually as or more important than the after for this kind of stuff. Anyway, here’s some pictures to look at.       

What you’re not seeing is that the top of the treble side of this Ovation’s headstock was missing when it came into the  shop. Seems it had an unfortunate accident that split the top very badly in two places, each about 6″ long. It was also separating it from it’s composite back in a few places.

First we glued and cleated the seams of the crack. The acrylic finish on these ovations is very hard but also brittle when hit hard enough. That meant that a lot of black finish was missing around these cracks. Since we were on a budget for this job, we sharpied the top wood and did a super glue drop fill.  We used enough Super Glue at one time that the fill-pool of glue started to smoke. Nasty stuff.  So we used our accelorator spray to instantly harden it, scraped it level and wet sanded.  We then sharpied with a fresh broad tip marker over the offending crack.  Since it was a big area to touch up, we used painter’s tape to make sure the touch up lines were clean and matched the grain lines.  The clean lines make the slight color mismatch a little more forgivable. It just wasn’t in the cards to have the top refinished, and this looked a heck of a lot better than it sounds.

Now for the headstock.  Our customer said the headstock was the least of his concerns, but he brought it to the wrong place if he didn’t want it handled with at least a little effort.  Wait, that didn’t come out right. Anyway, I don’t know how to backspace with this voice recongnition software. Um, so here we are gluing a piece of pale mystery wood to his headstock to start the reconstruction process. I had a piece of a 1″x3″ from another project that did the trick. We glued it on at the best angle we could, shaped it and used some wood filler for the rest. Now the back of this USA-made ovation’s headstock shows the 5-piece neck construction with the missing part being mahogany. Next we use some mahogany veneer from the tip of the headstock down to the tuner. We can’t sand the veneer flush as it loses it’s grain after a few passes of 600 grit paper. So we conceal the edge witht the tuner. It still looks a heck of a lot better than staining and faux graining. Next we shape the rest of the headstock and overspray that little ledge at the end of Ovation’s headstock. We’re hiding the 5-ply edge as it was before, instead concealing the repair with Golden Oak lacquer.

After staining the edges to blend it with the veneer, it looked pretty good.

 

Here we are after polishing it all up.  From 300 feet away, you can’t tell the difference.

What next. Oh I know. While doing a pickup install and electronics overhaul in a customer’s Strat, he mentioned that we never put one of his all-timers in our blog.

 This is Mike S’s heavily moddified Jazz Bass.  And I mean heavy. Probably 12-13 lbs.  It features Fender Custom 60′s Jazz pickups, series/parallel switching, a blend pot, master volume and tone controls. The series/parallel was a little tricky with the blend pot, but that’s what the internet’s for. I ended up finding a guy’s napkin drawing on a discussion board.  Thanks Google!

This is an older production Kahler bass trem that Mike got on ebay. We’re a Kahler dealer, but this was before they were back in the trem business. Transitioned to golf clubs for a while if my memory is right (I’m not kidding).  I remember them being very helpful even when they weren’t producing trems for a while. Nice guys, sent us some parts a long time ago for a repair. Maybe even the router template. Anyway, I guess that means this job was done years ago. But still, it deserves the attention only modern blogging can provide.

We had to put a support under the lip of this 24 fret fingerboard to support Mike’s tapping style.

I think the neck is a Warmouth and it has a super flat radius.

Of course it has a Hipshot Drop D tuner.  It has to. Mike’s a heck of a good player and really gets the most out of all of the features on here with his aggressive style.  Now onto a guitar that’ll get similar treatment from him…

Alright, now were back to undocumented work. No pics, but here’s what we’ve got. That’s a Gibson Firebird pickup, DiMarzio Area 67 middle and a Gibson Classic ’57 Plus bridge bucker.  He’s also sporting the G&L PTB system with passive bass cut to go along with the traditional tone pot. This way he can tame either humbucker without losing too much volume or adding noise.  Also, his volume control is push/pull to activate the neck/bridge combo. Some folks call that 7-way switching when added to a conventional 5-way.  He’s also all -graphited up with saddles, nut and string trees for tuning stability. Also, yes there’s more, he has a Hipshot TremSetter installed for even more reliable trem use.  And it all works like a charm. It stays in tune even under the worst conditions, like Castrol motor oil.

Hey man, that Tele has too many knobs. I heard you say that. Don’t worry, it’s just an active gain boost. WHAT!!! in a tele? That’s ludicrous.  No man, it’s great! This American Tele was upgraded with Duncan’s Classic Stack for Tele (STK-T3B for bridge and STK-T-1N) set.  Jim wanted a noiseless set of pickups that would give him a little more output but still deliver the Tele sound he as after. He’s a Strat guy and has all of his guitars outfitted with Vintage Noiseless or Samerium Cobalt Noiseless pickups and, most importantly for him, the EMG Afterburner active gain boost. It lets him overdrive his clean tone at whim and is completely variable from totally transparent to a roar.  Great for blues jams when dynamics is key.  Anyway, that’s what the 3rd knob is.  But the Afterburner requires a 9-volt and he didn’t want a battery compartment cut into the back. So, as we do with his strats, we hide it. For a Strat style with a trem, you can do like Fender does with the Eric Clapton and hide it next to the springs in the back.  But for a tele, we figured under the guard worked best.

So we cut a big enough cavity to fit the 9-volt. But we realized that his neck pickup is mounted to the guard which would make quick changes a hassle. So we decided to mount the pickup direct to the body like a 50′s Tele. Note the screw holes in the neck cavity. We just put the pickguard back and drilled through the adjustment screw holes to line up. Simple.

Now he can remove a few screws and slide the guard away to change the batter every 6 months or so. Battery changes are very infrequent as this unit has a really low draw. Everyone should have an Afterburner.

Here’s the Afterburner in the ‘engaged’ position. It’s a push/pull pot and only works when pulled up. You can leave it pulled up and just dial in the amount of boost you want. Even when engaged, if the knob is all the way off, it’s completely transparent. There’s no kick when you just pull it up. Awesome preamp that adds humbucker beef and beyond to any singlecoil guitar. Definitely recommended with some sort of noiseless pickup like the Duncan Stacks or the DiMarzio Area series. We’ve gotten amazing results with these.

We had so many cool jobs lately, but always forget to take pictures. Maybe next week.

Thanks for watching.  Oh, and I know all of those Ovation pictures are missing. They’re on the hard drive at the shop. I’ll update this on Monday. Sorry. At least I had some pics on my phone.

Anyway, remember to be kind to one another. And buy a G&L guitar. I think that’s it. Click here to see our great selection of G&L guitars.  And don’t forget to run it through a Tech 21 amp.  And you know, for acoustics, these new Washburns are tough to beat. We LOVE them. And be kind to one another.

sticker removal and ANOTHER aged tele

Here’s when adhesive and lacquer just don’t play well together.  After a valiant effort to remove an old sticker, a customer walks in with his beloved LP Studio in need of fix’n up.

Here’s a close-up, showing the finish rubbed to the bare wood in spots…

Now the plan of attack for this guy could have gone a few ways. The main issue was matching the color of this aged Gibson finish. There were about 3 distinct shades of white going on with this guy, so a spot repair wasn’t going to look good. Also the back and sides were really dinged up, so we had to figure out what was worth doing and what to leave alone.  We decided on just overspraying the top. The offending area was sanded smooth, filled and sprayed with arctic white lacquer. After buffing the heck out of the edges, the blend was as good as we could have hoped for.  Since this was budgeted as a sub $200 job including a setup, I think it turned out better than expected.

This IS arctic white, just looks ivory due to my poor photography skills.  I should use the services of Rebecca Coyle Photography, as should all of you.   Don’t worry, the color match was solid.

What else, what else? Oh yeah. We had an old, honest to goodness beat up Tele body. Now we like to build custom guitars with the coolest parts that are within arm’s reach. So we ended up with a ’72 Tele Custom-style pearl pickguard, a Fender Vintage Noiseless Tele bridge pickup, an Allparts hardtail bridge, a creme Bill Lawrence neck pickup and some tuners. The only drag was that we had to rout the body to fit the pickguard. Oh well, here goes…

I didnt’ have a template, or patience, so we did it freehand. The routes are cleaner than they look, but the black stain skewed the edges a little. Not perfect  are they, but we’re a sensitive group here.

So we stained the back a satin ebony and sprayed the top in a satin amber laquer, wore it out, aged it and buffed it to a really thin coating. The edges were scraped and softened.  We’re not going for an authentic vintage look, more of a played-out frankenstein Tele.  The neck got the same treatment.

The headstock logo was embossed and we’re gunning for a hand-painted sign look.  I can feel you judging us. It’s o.k. I was warned.

We copied the finish wear pattern on the neck from a customer’s 50′s Strat. It doesn’t look real, but you get the idea. We’re having fun with this guitar and try to make a head-turning piece of guitar goodness to wow your friends and impress your neighbors.  And it feels great with some major league tones to boot. Yay Richboro Music!

Here’s a gig bag with a Dragon on it. Have a great day.

Rare Les Paul gets a de-yellowing…

Look away if you’re squeamish…
This poor Les Paul Pro Lite had it rough. First off, it was finished in the rare and desireable Nuclear Yellow finish (it is from ’88) then treated to a few coats of black Krylon spray paint.  We’re picking up where the stripper started getting that evil combination off of this mahogany wonder.

Here’s another in-process shot showing more of that Yellowy goodness.  Note the bevels around the edge. This guitar is almost Ibanez Saber thickness and is remarkably thin for anything that came from Gibson. It also boasts a single P-90 size pickup with EMG-style cover and a Steinberger KB Trem.

And here we are 5 minutes later after dipping it in a tub of brown paint. Amazing how that works.  We kept the yellow edge on the original pickguard, although we were dying to Sharpie it out. I think it’s a nice nod to its history without being too obvious about it.

Here’s the headstock after some mild aging and a new logo. The old logo was silk screened over the previously mentioned Nuclear Yellow.  We put some impressions around the drawn logo to simulate an aged inlay. It sort of works. I think. No, I know it does.  Low self esteem cannot be changed with Oreos. It just can’t.As you can see from this angle, there were a good number of little nicks and dings that led us in the aging direction from the jump. We didn’t want to fill the honest wear and make it look too shiny and new. I’m hoping the owner (Big J) gets lots of excited guitar guys asking him what the heck that guitar is.

And there you have it. Another week in the life at the music store, solving the world’s complex problems by ingnoring them.

A big thanks to Jason for letting us do this job for him.

And now for some advertising…

We have Tech 21 amps in stock. There I said it. And they’re awesome. Come buy one and make your life better one righteous tone at a time.

www.richboromusic.com will tell you how to find us and come by and buy one or have us ship it to you.  You deserve it, after all of the wonderful things that you do.

Relic strat gets glossed over

In this age of distressed finishes, here’s a fresh take on a  relic’d strat we’ve never seen before…

This started out as a raw ash body and given an artificial aged finish. Our customer brought the body and a reference pic of a 60′s sunburst strat with lots of wear to a local air-brush artist. The cool thing here is that even the worn sections feature a gloss finish. It’s a real head-turner.  Our job was to take his trusty Fender Deluxe Powerhouse Strat and convert it into this body.

As you can see, this guitar was upgraded with Seymour Duncan’s Everything Axe pickup set. This popular configuration has (2) single-coil sized ‘buckers (Lil ’59 & JB jr.) and a noiseless middle pickup with lots of vintage quack (Duck’bucker, get it?).

Our first mission was to make the neck fit the smaller pocket of the new body…

We set our Dremmel in a template and used the sanding drum to take off just enough to ensure a snug fit. Nothing worse than a loose neck joint with unsightly gaps.

Next we have to find a spot for the 9-volt battery. Oh yeah, forgot to say that the Powerhouse Strat has a circuit board and a 9-volt compartment in the back. We don’t want to route out a battery compartment, so we’ll hide it in the spring cavity on the back like on a Clapton model. Luckily, the board was able to fit under the 5-way with a little foam to avoid shorting out.

I like before and after pictures. It makes it seem like we actually do something around here.

Here’s a shot of the new assembly next to the original body.

This shows the original placement of the preamp’s circuit board.

Here’s a closeup of a wear spot.  This ended up being an incredibly cool strat that made everyone who passed by the bench yesterday stop in their tracks.  Maybe he’ll give it to me for my birthday. It’s worth a shot.

Here’s a Gold Tone Banjitar that came in yesterday. Can’t stop thinking about it. Now I have to learn some banjo licks on a guitar. If you play it normally, it just sounds like a bad 6-string. I heard someone fingerpicking some rolls though, and it sounded awwwwwesome.

And  like Bruce Dickinson says somewhere in the middle of Live After Death, “Scream for me Hammersmith!”

Thanks for looking.

B, G and D on a V

So there I was giving my bank account number to a Kenyan General so that he could disperse his great uncle’s wealth from out of the hands of a corrupt government (he did choose to email me for help, so what’s a guy gonna do), when in walks our pal Mike. He was looking to install a Hipshot B-bender with a G palm lever and drop D toggle. Man, what a cool device that helps to do pedal steel licks on a 6-string. Only problem was that he wanted it on his prized 1972 Ibanez Flying V!

Drawing from Lonnie Mack’s signature Flying V for inspiration, we wanted to go a step further, lacquering the steel bar to match the finish and adding an accent piece of matching pickguard material…

This combination of levers allows for bending the B string up to C#, Bend the G up to A and toggle between Low E and drop D. The B bender has a long bar so you can manipulate it by leaning the bar against your hip, while the G has a palm lever with adjustable height.  It’s pretty awesome. No wonder we were able to put a man on the moon.

The only additional modification we made to the plate was to countersink an additional screw at the front. Since we’re mounting the Hipshot behind a stop tail, we wanted to have the cleanest string pull. This involved slightly raising the stop tail (we still need adequate break angle after the saddles) and putting a spacer under the Hipshot base plate.

These subtle adjustments, along with the help of the supplied teflon tubing for inside the stop tail, allowed for super smooth string movement and tuning stability.

So there you go. Lots of cool bending licks are awaiting the proud owner of the cool V. Mike also has the original case which we had to modify to fit the new hardware. There aren’t any pictures of this, so close your eyes and picture an aged gold interior with a V-shaped compartment at the end of the case, sawed down to be a trapezoid. Take a deep breath. See the case open and feel the happiness.

On another note, we just bought these cool MTV promotional picks from someone…

They smell just like it did in 1983. What a wonderful time for tortoise shell picks and New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) albums.

Artist gets whammied and other gems of the week

No, this isn’t a post about my high school art teacher on Press Your Luck in 1987. This is about a beautiful Ibanez Artist from the early 80′s that came in for a trem installation.  The only request the owner had was that no permanent modification be done to the guitar.  Well, that limited our offerings to our new favorite piece of hardware, the Stetsbar.

This ingenious trem bar secures to the top of any Gibson-style guitar via your existing stop tail posts. It requires no routing and moves laterally instead of up and down. The bridge glides over bearings that are recessed into the base plate. This particular guitar required a custom plate due to the non-standard distance between the tune-o-matic and the stop tail. The folks at Stetsbar were amazing and even answered a call at 7:30am (thought I’d get an answering machine, instead I got a quick solution to our issue). Now, please don’t call these poor guys at midnight just to see if you’ll get an answer, but it was impressive service.

Here’s a side view of the operation. You can’t really see it well, but there are two screws that can be adjusted to stop the trem from going up, stabilizing tuning and limiting the bar to downward movement.  The feel of the bar was very Kahler-ish and allowed more range than a Bigsby. Very useable and stayed in tune like a dream. There are also models available for hard-tail strats and teles.

This job also featured the installation of an Earvana compensated nut…

This nut features individual steps for each string to sweeten up open chords, solving age-old intonation issues. It’s also graphite, so it’s the perfect mate with the Stetsbar for tuning stability.

We also installed a fresh set of pickups. His choice was a Seymour Duncan ’59 4-conductor and a JB bridge with push/pull coil taps on the tone pots (shown in the “up” position)…

The frets were leveled and crowned, and we removed some deep dents in the rosewood in the open position , bringing it back to showroom new condition. This is an awwwwesome guitar.  Thanks to Mike for letting us work on it for him.

What else, what else…

We don’t have any pics of this in progress, but here’s a cool old Banjo Mandolin, or banjolin, or manjo depending on your preference. This one got a complete overhaul, including a new tailpiece. While we go to great lengths to keep original parts in place, this one just couldn’t hold up to the tension.

A modern replacement was brought in after we tried unsuccessfully to reinforce the thin bent metal.  We also replaced the torn original head, shimmed the neck angle and repaired the bridge.

Here’s a follow-up to our last post, Mike M’s green lefty with strings and post-setup…

Here’s a shot of the headstock with a graphite string tree.

Here’s another common request, illustrated just so I can keep typing. This is a Squier Vista Venus 12 string, a way-cool Japanese made Squier sereies from the late 90′s designed with Courtney Love. We’re going to take out the existing lower-end components and put in good ‘ol USA-made pots, switch and jack.

In case you’re checking the details, you’ll notice that our customer requested to rewire for (2) volumes instead of a tone control.  His logic, and I can’t help but agree, was “who uses a tone control on a 12 string anyway?”. Now he can blend his two split-coil singles at whim and achieve true Byrds nirvana.

And now more shameless promotion…

We just got a big shipment of G&L’s and are proud to boast the area’s largest selection of G&L Tributes. Wanna compare an ASAT Special to a Bluesboy Semi-Hollow? It’s here. Wanna see how cool the Commanche is with it’s killer Z-coils and Gun Oil tint neck? Cantrell Rampage with Kahler? You get the idea.  Over 30 models in stock with more on the way.

But what about G&L’s wonderful USA custom models? They’re coming too. About 15 just ordered and on the way, but not for a little while. Most models are a 8-10 week build, so they’ll start arriving late June.

Thanks again to whoever keeps reading this.