A New Engine for the Hollowbody

A while back I found a really cool Ibanez Artcore hollowbody guitar on clearance at my local guitar warehouse of super proportions. It only cost two hundred bucks so I bought it on the spot and have regretted the descision exactly never. It is a fine looking, great playing and decent sounding guitar. The only problem was the stock pickups were about as flat as your back. Of course, I will not let such things stand in my house so I set about changing them. Ultimately, I chose to use some GFS Retrotrons I had laying about. I originally had them in the SGeezus but found them a bit to chimey for the inherantly dark sound of that guitar but they seemed a perfect fit for the hollowbody. At the very least, I figured, they wouldn't be so dull sounding. I also wanted to try out a super fancy RS Guitarworks wiring harness so I figured I'd give that a go too. Let me tell you, replacing the pickups in a hollowbody is as harrowing an adventure as you could imagine.

First, I took the thing apart:
And already my first surprise! The bridge isn't attached to the body in anyway aside from the pressure from the strings. OK. I guess I will just have to put it back on. These are the original electronics:


As you can see, the pickup selecter switch is weird and cheap looking and the pots are teeny tiny. They weren't problematical but I felt there was a very high chance of failure. I will give Ibanez this: they were at least the correct values. A lot of times in cheap guitars they'll just use whatever's cheap. No 100K volume pots here.

The next step was wiring up the harness. I had a bit of frustration w/ this and didn't end up taking any pictures. Sorry. It turns out my trouble was the tip of my soldering iron was just old so I replaced it. No big deal. It also helped to use a little extra flux. I got some that was safe for electronics work in a little tin from a giant electronics chain.

Next was the hard part: getting the harness in there. Lord. This experience was so harrowing I don't even want to think about it. You gotta work through the pickup slots and the F-holes the whole time. I have big lardo mega fingers so this was not easy. You pull the pots and other components through w/ string (I used thread, doubled up) and it is even more difficult than you'd expect. The whole thing was a mess:



Eventually, I got 'em in though and it was honestly thrilling to finally be done w/ it. It took me over a week whereas it takes me maybe two hours to wire up a regular electric guitar. I must say the new pickups are really sharp:


As mentioned, they are GFS Retrotrons. Specifically, the bridge is a Hot Liverpool and the neck is a regular Liverpool. They are modeled after the old FilterTron pickups like you might see in a Gretsch. It's at least a distinctive look where people can tell it's customized right away. The sound of them is exactly as hoped--very clear, bright but still smooth. It's brought new life to the guitar. The RS Guitarworks harness works well too. The volume knobs especially are much more usefull. The guitar doesn't get all kinds of dull sounding when you turn them down.

And here she is in her entirety, not bad for $200 and some pickups I had lying around:

Harnessing Up - Part Two

The multimeter is more powerful than the very hand of God when it comes to trying to figure out what in the hell is wrong w/ the wiring harness for your baritone guitar. In all other things, the very hand of God is more powerful but in this one isolated case, the multimeter wins out. Here is mine in action (or right before or right after action, I forget):


Basically, all I use it for is a continuity tester to figure out what circuits are being formed when the switches are in various places and for this it works quite well (I also use it to double check that I haven't burned out any pots or switches by overheating them w/ the soldering iron). It turns out the mistakes I made were pretty minor and one mistake was actually the right thing to do in disguise. I temporarily soldered some the pickups on there so I could plug it into an amp and test it. Actually plugging the thing into an amp can be a big help. Sometimes, the multimeter will just pick it up as a break in the circuit but when you have it plugged in, you will hear the sound cutting in an out so you know it's just a cold solder joint or an otherwise weak connection. I ended up fixing some of the grounding and moving some stuff around to avoid short circuits and crossed wires. It is not the prettiest wiring job I've ever done but it works and it should be small enough to fit right in:


I think this is the first time I've ever wired up a guitar w/o getting at least one burn that blisters, which is pretty amazing as absent minded as I can be when I'm frustrated. The only thing that I'm not pleased w/ is that I couldn't get the solder to stick well to the back of the pot I'm grounding everything to so I ended up just grounding all the wires together and then grounding the back of the pot to that. The rest of the stuff will hopefully be grounded by the foil shielding in the control cavity. If not, I've got some more work to do later but I will worry about that when the time comes.

Harnessing Up - Part One

The wait in between coats gets me a good chance to wire up the harness for all the electronics in there. I'm not sure what everything does but I can tell you I've figured out one or two effective ways of directing small electrical pulses from the guitar pickup, through some controls and into a cable which I've hopefully managed to connect to an amplifier (not always the case though). Of course, this time I decided to do something strange to ensure I'd have a host of problems w/ this simple task. For starters, I'm making this a stereo guitar, which means that you can send each pickup to a separate amp. Some people do this using a stereo jack but I, being a crazy fellow, decided to put to go w/ two mono-jacks so I wouldn't have to worry about having stereo cables and a way to split the signal from them. Stereo mode is switchable so I can run it like a normal guitar and flip a switch to split the pickups between the two outputs. Also, instead of having an ordinary pickup selector, I'm making this so I can turn either pickup on or off w/ a switch. Each pickup has it's own volume and tone control and the switching is all done by push/pull pots, keeping the control layout clean and simple despite the advanced and amazing technology behind it all.

The first step of wiring all this stuff up is labeling all the pieces and laying it out in something like the order it's gonna be in when I'm done:


This is one of those things that people tell you to do and but you don't at first because you think it's a load of crap but it really does make things go a bit smoother. I label all the pots w/ a marker so I know what does what and put a little piece of tape on the back of the control cavity cover that tells me what color of wire is for what so I can remember if I ever have to open the guitar up to fix it or change the pickups (and I will). I also try to strip enough pieces of wire so I don't have to stop soldering every four seconds to strip another piece of wire. Of course, even if I spent several hours beforehand stripping wires, I'd still be about ten pieces short as the need for more wires tends to increase as you strip more of them. (This is actually explained by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but I don't have time to be getting into Schroedinger's Cat and so forth and it doesn't make any sense anyway.) It's also a good idea to clean all contacts w/ some steel wool even though steel wool feels really weird on the fingers and you hate it.

While I was doing all this, I found time to make some pizza, which I then ate:


Fully delicious. There's nothing that gets me more in the soldering mindset than pizza so I got ready and had at it. Remember folks, hot solder can splatter and cause severe bodily harm, especially to the eyeballs so, as always, safety first!


W/o eye protection it would have been really stupid to be waving the soldering iron like this and there's no way I would have lost less than one eyeball. Instead, I survived to solder for a half hour or so before I realized I messed up my design big time. And I think the reason why is obvious from this picture:



OK. Well--I doubt you can tell a single thing from that mess. Basically, I wired it in such a way that if I had both pickups turned off, the amp would hum as if the cable's not plugged into anything, which is no good in high-volume situations. Anyway, I've had enough for now. I'm gonna have at this son of a bitch w/ a multi-meter and a keen sense of logic in the next couple days. Until then, I will just have to be satisfied w/ nothing since it doesn't work.