The scoop on the rarest of Fender solidbodies.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will have a look at the most weird and elusive Fender guitar ever: the Marauder. We will not only cover some really interesting technical details, but also its history.
I think it’s fair to say that the Fender Marauder, like Gibson’s Moderne, was ahead of its time, and neither guitar made it beyond the prototype stage—at least not as originally designed.
The Marauder’s ’60s production model came with three pickups in a Jaguar-style body, many rocker switches, German carve headstock, and some even with slanted frets. It was later offered as part of the Modern Player series as well as through the custom shop. But the original design and concept of the Marauder was quite different.
In order to see what Leo Fender cooked up in the mid ’60s, we will have to take a short journey back in time, firing up the flux capacitor in our DeLorean with 1.21 gigawatts of energy. Our destination is the Fender factory in California, somewhere between 1963 and 1964—the early beginnings of the space age. The United States worked on the Apollo program at the same time the former Soviet Union worked on the Luna program on the other end of the world. Europe was busy developing and building the Concorde, and Leo Fender, sitting on the porch of his home in Orange County, was ready for his next stroke of genius.
Today, “less is more” is a common approach, not only in the guitar industry. But back then, it was “more is more” and “the more, the merrier.” Leo Fender offered the Esquire with one bridge pickup, and the two-pickup Esquire/Telecaster followed soon after. The next step was the Stratocaster with three pickups, which was mostly influenced by Bill Carson, one of Leo’s favorite guitarist guinea pigs in the ’50s. The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups, and that was exactly the idea behind the Marauder project. There are other guitars with four pickups, like the Japanese-made Teisco/Kawai EG-4T (nicknamed the “Hertiecaster”), or the Italian-made Welson Kinton, Galanti Grand Prix V4, and Eko 500/4V. But Leo Fender went the extra mile with his Marauder concept and installed the pickups underneath the pickguard for a very sleek aesthetic.
“The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups.”
Let’s have a look under the hood: The patent for the Marauder was filed March 6, 1964, and granted December 6, 1966—US patent #3290424—so we can say that developing and prototyping probably started somewhere in 1963. In addition to the four pickups under the pickguard, the original Marauder had a 3-way switch for each of the pickups, plus a Telecaster-style master volume/master tone configuration. On the patent, you can clearly see that the guitar was planned as an offset-type like the Jazzmaster or Jaguar using the same hardware.
There was, however, a one-off prototype built around a Stratocaster that has a dedicated 3-way lever pickup selector switch from the Telecaster and Stratocaster (the 5-way switch was not yet invented then) for each pickup, which looks really weird.
The Pickups
The pickups in the Marauder were designed by a man named Quilla “Porky” Freeman, a Western-swing musician and tinkerer based in Missouri. These large, slightly offset experimental pickups featured a dozen pole pieces and deep armatures, which helped give it a percussive tone. To compensate for the distance from the strings, the pickups were overwound. The patent document clearly states that all four pickups had the same winding direction (phase), but different magnetic polarity. The first (bridge) and the third pickup had south polarity, while the second and fourth (neck) pickup had north polarity, which was a clever move. This was the start of what is known as a “stealth pickup” today, often used as the hidden neck pickup on an Esquire. For such a construction, it’s important that the pickguard material is non-magnetic.
The Switching Matrix
Each of the pickups is connected to its own 3-way on-off-on switch, allowing the corresponding pickup to be on, off, or on with reversed phase, resulting in a total of 48 different sounds between the four. If the idea of these 3-way pickup selector switches sounds familiar, that’s because this is the basic design of Brian May’s “Red Special” guitar that he built with his father Harold in 1963. While that’s the same time frame, it’s close to impossible that Leo Fender knew what Brian May was doing in the U.K., so two geniuses simply had the same idea at the same time.
Here we go with the wiring: The four toggle switches are double-pole on-off-on types, volume and tone are 250k audio, and the tone cap is a 0.05 uF type. To keep the diagram clean, I substituted all ground connections with the international symbol for ground.
Illustration courtesy of Singlecoil
That’s it! Next month, we will talk about a very cool and clever way to integrate a variable dummy-coil into a guitar, so stay tuned.
Until then… keep on modding!
Fig. 1
Founded in 1947, Danelectro is an innovative company with a long history of creating unique and funky guitars and basses. Let’s go under the hood.
Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll take a closer look into the wacky world of Danelectro and their typical wirings.
Danelectro is a very old and authentic American guitar company, founded in 1947 by the genius Nathan “Nat” Daniel (a NYC native, born in 1912 as the son of Lithuanian immigrants) in Red Bank, New Jersey. Daniel had his own approach and was always thinking outside the box. This was the main key for his unique designs and his success, influencing the guitar world even today.
Throughout the late 1940s, the company produced amplifiers for Sears and Montgomery Ward, under the Silvertone and Airline branding. Later, Danelectro added hollowbody guitars, constructed of Masonite and poplar to cut production costs, and increase production speed. The main goal was to produce plain, budget guitars but with the best possible electrified tone. These instruments came in two sales lines and were branded either as Danelectro or Silvertone for Sears. The famous lipstick pickups were used exclusively for these guitars, and Danelectro started to use fancy colors and knobs to establish their own design trademarks. Throughout his career, Daniel filed several patents, but he missed the chance to patent a lot of his innovations, such as the 6-string bass or the first hybrid tube/solid-state amplifier.
Interestingly, Danelectro introduced the 6-string bass guitar in 1956, which was tuned like a standard guitar but one octave lower. Fender introduced their Bass VI model five years later in 1961, so this was another Danelectro first. Six-string basses/baritone guitars weren’t popular then, but they found an enduring niche in the ’60s studio world for “tic-tac” or “click” bass lines, which are a doubled bass line one octave higher. A famous Danelectro 6-string bass player is Carol Kaye, the “First Lady of Bass Guitar.” The Danelectro 6-string bass is still used in studios today, and studio legends like Brent Mason and Reggie Young have had one in their arsenal.
Danelectro was sold in 1966 and closed in 1969, before the brand was reanimated in the late ’90s for China-made reissue guitar models, amps, and stompboxes. Daniel died on Christmas Eve 1994, at age 82.
Now that we know the history, let’s go inside these guitars. When looking at Danelectro wirings, we mostly perceive these noticeable features:
- Lipstick pickups
- Stacked pots (aka “tandem pots”)
- Series, instead of parallel, wiring when combining two pickups
- Weird pot resistances like 100k for volume and 1M for tone
- Different tone caps for bridge and neck pickups
So, let’s break it down piece by piece.
The lipstick pickups are single-coil pickups with a very special construction, with the guts totally encased in a chrome-plated metal tube. The early lipstick pickups were, in fact, manufactured using real lipstick tubes, hence the name. The coil was wrapped around an alnico 6 bar magnet, and then wrapped in tape before being inserted into the tube. This bobbin-less pickup type is called “air coil,” and is a pain to repair. The pickups had a 3-conductor wiring, which is the beginning and end of the coil, plus a separate ground.
Using stacked pots was another Danelectro first. The Fender Jazz Bass also used stacked pots from 1960–1962, but Daniel did this some years earlier. This configuration uses less space, offering two independent controls in the space of one pot. We still find a lot of stacked pots today in the bass world.
Most Danelectro guitars combine the pickups in series rather than in parallel, which is part of their unique sound that can be described as fat, loud, and beefy in the middle position. This was decades before other companies started to offer such a feature, too.
"The early lipstick-tube pickups were, in fact, manufactured using real lipstick tubes, hence the name."
Using 100k pots for volume and 1M for tone in a passive guitar is, for sure, strange. A 100k audio volume pot will give you very good control over its whole rotation but will dampen some high end in a passive wiring. On the other hand, a 1M pot will give you close to zero control over its rotation, but there is a lot of high end present. The lipstick pickups have a very jangly tone, full of high end, so I think Daniel chose 100k to benefit from the perfect control range and wanted to compensate for the high end by using 1M pots for the tone control. Not a bad move. The tone of the pickups could handle the 100k, and still had enough high end. But using 1M for the tone control was not a good idea at all.
To enhance such a typical Danelectro wiring, I would personally use 250k audio pots for volume and 500k audio pots for tone control. Regarding high-end chime, it’s always better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. It’s easy to tame with the tone control, but impossible to add in a passive wiring when the high end is not already there.
Using different tone caps for the bridge and neck pickup is a very clever move, and other guitar companies needed decades to realize this. But Daniel wouldn’t be Daniel if he hadn’t done it his own way. Instead of using the “smaller” cap for the neck pickup to keep some high-end chime intact when rolling back the tone, he did it exactly the other way around. You can often find 0.01 uF caps for the bridge and 0.047 uF for the neck pickup, resulting in a super-dark and woolly tone when closing the tone pot for the neck pickup. If you don’t need this lifeless bass-y tone, it’s a cool upgrade to change the tone cap for the neck pickup.
So, let’s now have a look at a typical Danelectro wiring using two lipstick pickups, two concentric pots, and a series wiring for the middle position of the pickup switch. There is one 100k/1M stacked pot for each pickup, sporting volume (100k) and tone (1M). The tone cap for the neck pickup is 0.047 uF, and the bridge pickup tone cap is 0.01 uF. We talked about possible upgrades above. The pickup-selector toggle switch is a single pole on-off-on switch, offering the following sounds:
- Bridge pickup alone
- Bridge + neck pickup in series
- Neck pickup alone
The wiring is typical Daniel and really outside the box. With the bridge pickup engaged, the neck pickup is shorted out with its hot and ground connected, and the bridge pickup is directly connected to the output. With the neck pickup engaged, the output of the bridge volume pot is connected to ground. In the middle position, both pickups are connected in series.
So, here is the wiring, as seen in Fig. 1. I’m showing the wiring with the original concentric pots, but if you want to use four individual pots, it’s the same identical wiring. Please note that both casings of a concentric pot must be connected to ground and that there is no connection between the two casings by stock. The best practice is to solder a short jumper wire from the lower to the upper casing, so you have a connection between both casings. You can test this with your digital multimeter (DMM) set to continuity and afterwards connect only the upper casing to ground which will make things much easier.
Because of this speciality, I decided to show all ground connections in Fig. 1 as a wire, not using the ground symbol as usual, to keep the diagram as clean as possible.
That’s it, for now. Next month, we’ll honor and remember the great Jeff Beck by taking a deeper look into his guitar setup and analyzing how you can come close ... at least electrically. Until then ... keep on modding!
Fig. 1
In my guitar shop, players often ask about how to improve the tone in a Tele neck pickup. Here are several ways to address it, including a pickup wiring that removes the tone load in the neck pickup’s switching phase, resulting in a slight high-end boost.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll continue our “no tone control” journey from last month [“Mod Garage: The Scott Henderson S-Style Wiring”] with a cool mod for your Telecaster. Something I hear a lot in the shop is that people aren’t happy with the tone of the neck pickup in their Telecaster. It’s often described as muffled, colorless, lifeless, or similar. Why is this? It’s usually a mixture of three things:
1. The physical location of the neck pickup. You have the same issue on every electric guitar, no matter if it’s a Telecaster, a Stratocaster, a Les Paul, or whatever else. The neck pickup has the warmest tone of them, which is the physical nature of the beast.
2. A standard Telecaster neck pickup has a closed metal cover that’s attached to the pickup’s ground to add some shielding. Because the cover is closed, a good portion of high end will be drained to ground because of eddy currents, even with a thin German silver metal cover.
3. Interestingly, the neck pickup of a Telecaster is often adjusted way too low from the strings for whatever reason. Some players told me that they hit the metal cover with their plectrum, so they adjusted it deeper to get it physically out of the way.
So, let’s see what can be done to address the above problems regarding a Telecaster neck pickup.
Physical location: We can’t outsmart physics and we can’t change the location of the neck pickup inside a Telecaster, so there is nothing we can do here.
Metal cover: We have several possibilities to enhance the tone of the neck pickup. One option is to simply replace the metal cover, which will change the tone noticeably, similar to how moving a carpet or rug away from your amp changes the sound. On the other hand, you lose the shielding abilities of the metal cover. A good compromise is an open-frame pickup cover in the shape of a rectangle with an open top, to break eddy currents. This will enhance the tone while still providing some shielding.
Another solution would be to swap the pickup with a Stratocaster pickup or whatever pickup you like best. But this is not as easy as it sounds. Other pickups have other dimensions, and you will need to reroute the pickup cavity in the body as well as the opening in the pickguard to make them fit. There are a lot of replacement pickguards available that already have such routings for a Strat pickup, so this is not really a problem. A good compromise is a replacement pickup in a Telecaster neck pickup size that offers a different construction under the hood, like the Lollar Royal T Neck that is a Stratocaster-style neck pickup in a Telecaster shape. These are 1:1 ratio replacement pickups, so you don’t have to struggle with new pickguards and routing the Telecaster’s body.
"One option is to simply replace the metal cover, which will change the tone noticeably, similar to how moving a carpet or rug away from your amp changes the sound."
Pickup height: This is super easy to solve: Simply adjust the pickup closer to the strings. The closer the pickup is to the strings, the more high end and volume it will have. We measure the pickup height from the top of the pickup magnet to the bottom of the string while the string is pressed in the last fret with the guitar in playing position. A good starting point for a Telecaster neck pickup is 3.5 mm (9/64") on the low E string and 3.0 mm (1/8") on the high E string. Start with this and listen to what happens when you change the pickup-height adjustment until you find the tone you like best.
I recommend adjusting pickup height first and hear if this does the trick for you. If not, continue with swapping pickup covers or pickups.
As you can see, there are many ways to address the muffled tone of a Telecaster neck pickup if you don’t like it. Here’s another weapon of choice you could try that lies somewhere between the aforementioned strategies. Maybe you adjusted your standard Telecaster neck pickup correctly and now you’re close to being happy with the sound, but it’s still a tad too warm and round for your taste.
Chances are good that this can be solved inside the wiring. Usually, Telecaster players are happy to have a tone control for the bridge pickup that can sound very shrill and ice-picky without one, depending on your playing style and type of bridge pickup. But only a few players really use the tone control for the neck pickup. So how about a wiring with the tone control only affecting the bridge pickup? This way you will get rid of the load of the tone pot (usually 250k) plus the tone cap. Maybe this will give you the tad more high end you’re looking for, so give it a try.
The good news is that you don’t need to change the standard 3-way pickup selector switch like we did on the Stratocaster last month. This is mostly because a regular Tele only has a single master tone control, so we’re happy with the two switching stages of the standard switch you already have in there.
With this wiring, illustrated in Fig. 1, you will end up with these three settings:
1. Bridge pickup with volume and tone control
2. Bridge + neck pickup in parallel with volume for both pickups and tone control only for the bridge pickup
3. Neck pickup with only volume control
To further enhance this wiring, you can use a no-load pot for the tone control. This way you’ll also be able to engage the bridge pickup without tone control if this is an option you want.
That’s it for this round! Next month, we’ll continue with some Danelectro wirings, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!Fig. 1
This guitar wiring is special in that the two tone controls are freely assigned, and the tone control is bypassed in the two in-between positions. Let’s go under the hood.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll have a look at the Scott Henderson Strat-style wiring and what it means to bypass the tone control for certain pickup-switching positions.
Bypassing the tone control in a guitar circuit has become popular in recent years, so let’s explore how to do it. We’ve discussed this before in the context of using no-load pots for the tone control. A no-load pot will be electrically out of the circuit when it’s fully opened, so the pot is no longer part of the wiring, and will add no load to the circuit. This way you will have no high-end dampening and the tone is a tad louder, which can be a good thing or not, depending on your personal preferences.
This works great but requires that you open the tone pot(s) if you want this very direct sound. Some players like to have a kind of preset without tone control so there is no additional action they have to take. So, the basic idea of bypassing the tone controls is to transfer it to the pickup-selector switch rather than using no-load pots. There’s no law against combining this mod with no-load pots for the tone control, so you still have the opportunity to use it for sounds where the tone control is engaged.
The credits for this wiring are given to John Suhr, but it’s unknown if he came up with this special wiring during his time as a Senior Master Builder in the Fender Custom Shop, or later, after he started his own business in 1997.
The preset idea is not a new one. Fender has used it since the early ’50s, and the basic idea behind it is still the same. Imagine the following scenario: You’re playing the bridge pickup on your guitar with the corresponding tone pot set to 7 to add some warmth to your tone. In the middle of a song, you need to switch to another pickup that is connected to the same tone pot, but you need the tone pot fully opened to cut through the mix with this pickup setting. Two steps are required now: You need to switch to the desired pickup position, and you need to open the tone pot. Wouldn’t it be nice to have this happen by only dialing in the other pickup position? This is exactly the idea behind bypassing the tone control.
To illustrate, I chose the personal S-style wiring of the award-winning fusion, jazz, and blues guitarist Scott Henderson. The credits for this wiring are given to John Suhr, but it’s unknown if he came up with this special wiring during his time as a senior master builder in the Fender Custom Shop, or later, after he started his own business in 1997.
Henderson is best known for his solo work but also for his band Tribal Tech, as well as for playing with Chick Corea and the Zawinul Syndicate. Henderson released his first solo album, Dog Party, in 1994 and has six solo albums to date. He’s also a teacher at the Guitar Institute of Technology, now known as the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, California. His signature S-style guitar is built by the Suhr company. Henderson and John Suhr got to know each other while Suhr was still working at the Fender Custom Shop, and Henderson became one of the first endorsers for Suhr Guitars.
Henderson wanted an exclusive tone control for the bridge pickup and full clarity in the two in-between pickup positions, so this wiring is exactly what he was looking for.
Henderson’s personal wiring is basically a standard Stratocaster wiring you all know:
- bridge pickup alone
- bridge and middle pickup together in parallel
- middle pickup alone
- middle and neck pickup together in parallel
- neck pickup alone
What makes this wiring special is that the two tone controls are freely assigned, and the tone control is bypassed in the two in-between positions. So, the switching matrix for the Henderson wiring goes like this:
- bridge pickup alone with tone control #1
- bridge and middle pickup together in parallel with no tone control
- middle pickup alone with tone control #2
- middle and neck pickup together in parallel with no tone control
- neck pickup alone with tone control #2
Henderson wanted an exclusive tone control for the bridge pickup and full clarity in the two in-between pickup positions, so this wiring is exactly what he was looking for. Another benefit is that the bypass of the tone controls for the in-between positions is slightly compensating for the little volume loss, which is the nature of the (passive) beast when you combine two pickups in parallel.
In a Strat with two tone controls, changing the standard 5-way pickup selector switch for a 5-way super-switch is mandatory because you can’t do all this with only two switching stages. We don’t need all four switching stages of the 5-way super-switch, so one stage will stay unconnected.
Technically, these are 4P5T wafer switches, and they’re available as open frame as well as PCB-based versions. These switches are physically a lot larger than the standard ones, so depending on what guitar you have, you can run into massive problems to make them fit without rerouting your electronic compartment. Always check this before you buy such a switch to avoid any unpleasant surprises. To make the open version from Fender fit, you need at least 21 mm of space for the switch, but it’s better to have 25 mm to avoid any problems with the soldering terminals.
So here it is, the Henderson wiring as seen in Fig. 1. This wiring uses three 250k pots, a 0.047 µF tone cap, and no treble-bleed network on the volume pot.
That’s it for now. Next month, we’ll continue the tone-pot-bypass journey by looking at a Telecaster wiring, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!Courtesy of SINGLECOIL (www.singlecoil.com)
Let’s go under the hood of these legendary rockabilly machines and explore different ways to enhance a passive guitar system.
Welcome back to Mod Garage. Before we start, some good news! After finishing the relic’ing series, I was able to raise $650 from our Harley Benton guinea-pig guitar in an auction. The money went to our local animal shelter for cats and dogs, to help pay some vet bills.
This month, we’ll take a closer look at the typical wiring you can find in almost every Gretsch guitar. Since 2002, the Gretsch guitar company has been a division of Fender Musical Instruments Corp. But the company has a long history. It all started in 1883 in Brooklyn, New York, when a German immigrant from the town of Mannheim named Friedrich Gretsch started his own shop to make banjos and drums. Sadly, Gretsch died in 1895 at the untimely age of 39 during a visit in Hamburg, Germany. His 15-year-old son Fred (the Americanized version of “Friedrich”) had to run the company. In the 1930s, Gretsch started making guitars and the company had their first heyday. Like many companies during WWII, Gretsch had to stop production of instruments to help in the armament industry. After the war, the two sons of Fred Gretsch (Fred Jr. and William) took their father’s place and started making instruments again. In 1948, the Gretsch Broadkaster drum set was their best-selling item, and the start of another story with a certain Leo Fender offering an electric guitar with the same name, only spelled slightly different.
With the emergence of rockabilly and rock ’n’ roll in the ’50s, Gretsch guitars became popular in the hands of players like Chet Atkins, Eddie Cochran, Cliff Gallup, Duane Eddy, and even Elvis Presley. Later in the game, George Harrison, Brian Setzer, Malcolm Young, and many more became popular Gretsch players.
Sidenote: In 1999, Gretsch took over the Bigsby company, which was their exclusive hardware supplier since 1951. Instruments featuring a Bigsby tailpiece, like the White Falcon, Country Gentleman, Nashville, Duo Jet, etc. are real guitar icons today.
The wiring concept of Gretsch guitars is unique and noticeably different from that of most other companies, offering a volume control for each pickup along with a master volume control. This wiring is combined with a pickup-selector switch and a tone control in basically three versions:
“The interesting part is the arrangement of the volume controls—it’s been said that this was a suggestion from Chet Atkins.”
1. Master tone control (with or without no-load pot)
This is what we know from a lot of other guitars sporting a master tone control for all pickups: Sometimes a no-load pot is used to get rid of the pot’s load when it’s fully opened. Gretsch typically uses 500k audio pots and .022 µF tone caps.
2. Two-way tone switch
There is no tone pot, but there’s a switch that activates two different tone caps as a kind of pre-set tone. Gretsch typically uses 500k audio pots, as well as a .012 μF and .0039 μF (3900 pF) tone cap on the tone switch.
3. No tone control at all
It is what it says: There is no tone control at all with 500k audio pots for the volume controls.
Use whatever tone cap you like best. The 500k choice for the tone pot is a good working solution in a passive guitar circuit. On my own Gretsch 6120, I decided to use 3300 pF and 6800 pF caps on the tone switch, and it works fine for me.
The interesting part is the arrangement of the volume controls—it’s been said that this was a suggestion from Chet Atkins. Having a volume control for each pickup is common on other guitars, like on a typical Les Paul. But the combination with a master volume control is rare … and the source of some unwanted effects. Let’s have a look at the typical Gretsch volume wiring scheme (Fig. 1). I decided to use the one without tone control because this is the basic wiring and can be found on the 6122 Country Gentleman. The wirings with a tone control are identical regarding the volume controls.
This arrangement in a passive guitar system will result in a loss of tone because of two reasons:
1. The three volume pots will drain a good portion of high-end to ground when rolling back the volume, which is the nature of the passive beast.
2. Long shielded wire runs are used inside the hollowbody Gretsch guitars, adding capacitance to the system, resulting in even more high-end loss.
Even with the pickup height adjusted correctly, the loss in high-end is clearly noticeable, so let’s see what can be done. For some players, this is no problem at all and part of the tone. If you’re happy with the way your guitar sounds, there’s no reason to change the system. If you want a clearer tone with more high-end definition, you have the following options.
If you don’t want to convert your Gretsch guitar into an active system to get rid of the high-end loss, you’ll need to compromise by adding a treble-bleed network to the volume pots. We talked about this sometime ago in detail [“Mod Garage: Deep Diving into Treble-Bleed Networks”].
Selecting the right treble-bleed network is a matter of choice. What works for me might not work for you. Maybe you like some more high-end when rolling back the volume than others or vice versa. With the typical Gretsch Filter’Tron pickups, I like a 470 pF cap with a 150k resistor in parallel. Try this as a starting point and see if you like it. In theory, you’ll need a treble-bleed network on all three volume controls, which gives you a wide control regarding sound. In my own 6120, I use different treble-bleed networks because I want more high end from the neck pickup compared to the bridge pickup. I’ve also seen configurations with a treble-bleed network on the two volume controls for the pickups and without one on the master volume control. Personally, I don’t like this configuration. Using one on the master volume and not on the two controls for the pickups will have a better result.
You see, it’s a wide field of experimentation, but it’s worth the effort. While you’re in there, I recommend changing the 500k audio volume pots for 250k audio pots to benefit from the much better taper in a passive system. The difference in high end is minimal (if audible at all), and you can compensate easily with the treble-bleed network by choosing slightly higher values. I did this in my 6120 and the difference was huge.
“Don’t underestimate the time you’ll need to get the electronics of a hollowbody guitar out and back in. Even on a good and clear day, you can’t do this within 30 minutes, so don’t hurry.”
Don’t underestimate the time you’ll need to get the electronics of a hollowbody guitar out and back in. Even on a good and clear day, you can’t do this within 30 minutes, so don’t hurry. If you’ve ever changed the electronics inside such a guitar, you know what I mean.
Gretsch uses shielded wires inside, but sadly, the quality is only average. The wire has a high capacitance, and, especially inside big hollowbodies, you can find up to 2.5 meters (about 8.2 feet) of it, which is a real sound killer on its own. The shorter the wire, the less capacitance it will add to the circuit, so you should optimize the length of the wire wherever possible. If you want to stick with shielded wire, you should use a high-quality one with a low capacitance. I like to use the .155-diameter George L’s high-end wire for this. It’s very thin, with a capacitance of only 19 pF per foot, which is unbeatable ... but still affordable.
In comparison, I measured 46 pF per foot with the original wire from the factory. The before/after effect will be like lifting a blanket from the amp. But you can also use non-shielded wire if you’re not concerned about shielding. I replaced all wires in my 6120 with the George L’s .155-diameter cable and was able to reduce the original length of the wires to 50 percent, which means reducing additional capacitance to the circuit noticeably.
As you can see, tone is not set in stone, and there are ways to enhance your Gretsch wiring. Next month, we’ll dissect the Scott Henderson Stratocaster wiring, so stay tuned.
As you can see, tone is not set in stone, and there are ways to enhance your Gretsch wiring. Next month, we’ll dissect the Scott Henderson Stratocaster wiring, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!