The factory wiring jobs done on most guitars are horrible. With a little bit of solder, wire and a couple of respectable capacitors, practically any guitar can gain fresh life from a good wiring job. Here are some of the wiring schemes I have designed and/or use on my guitars.
This is the only brand-name amp I own. Even still, this amp came to me in heavily-modified form, mostly blackfaced with a multi-tap Bassman OT and a number of circuit changes including a solid-state rectifier and absurdly high B+ on the preamp. It hummed a lot. One speaker had a warped coil and the power tubes were microphonic. The reverb driver 12AT7 had run so hot it was misshapen! Goodness, it needed some help.
When it comes to the electric guitar, the Telecaster is the one that started it all. It’s so simple and rudimentary it’s almost insulting. I had been lusting after a ’52 blackguard Tele RI for a LONG time. The problem is that I didn’t want the little 7.25″ radius fretboard – I wanted a 9.5″ fretboard like the original Broadcasters, and Fender wasn’t helping me out in this quest. Also, thick, hot single coils were a must. The AV52RI was only available with the 7.25″ neck, but the Hot Rod ’52 had the right 9.5″ neck… unfortunately it also had...
There is no shortage of choices when it comes to humbucker-equipped solid-body electric guitars. The Les Paul defined the genre in the late 50s, and today the market is rife with thousands of options. Practically all of them are derivatives of the Gibson PAF design. Some history: In the early 1970′s Fender finally acknowledged that they were losing some serious market share to these humbuckered axes, so they decided to launch a few radically different Telecaster models with their own special humbucker, the Wide-Range designed by Seth Lover. It was more open and single-coil-sounding than GIbson PAFs thanks to a...