frank falbo

Actually guys, if you wanted to be able to remove the truss rod at some point, one of Stew Mac's selling points is that you can slip it out of the neck. The rod stays put for a few reasons. First, because it'll have good tension on the collar blocks if the slot is cut relatively tight. But also because there's never really any longitudinal pressure applied. All the wrench pressure is in the direction of the rotation. I don't plan to replace my rods, so I stop the channel at the end of the rod, often chiseling it for a perfect squared off fit. You could finish off with a mortising bit if you wanted to I guess. Anyway I'm not saying it's the right idea, but I've seen the "continuous slot" thing around. I don't know where exactly, but I know it was Stew Mac literature.

You know what I'm using more and more? Strips of that foam packing material that looks like a bunch of little tiny cells. It's actually really small bubbles. You can hear them pop if you squeeze it real hard. I wish I could describe it better but I can't. Anyway, it will never lose its compression because it's air filled. I mean if you pop the cells then the compression is gone forever. But because there are so many of them and they're so small, I've never heard any pop while I was installing a pickup, and it gives me quite a bit of range, all with good, solid, even pressure across the whole pickup. (single or humbucker) I've got some from a kit that someone gave us to pack dishes in for moving, but otherwise stuff comes packed in it sometimes. Most other foams either don't provide enough pressure, or if they do, then they get a memory.

If you were looking for the output to be really hot because of the combination of the coils, it's not really a direct correlation. I mean if the singles are wound to 6k, it's not like the output level would be the same as a humbucker wound to 18k. The magnet strength is different, and you're getting a lot of cancellation from the huge distance between the coils. I love the sound of the bridge and middle in series. That's like a fat, smooth humbucker tone but still with some of the clarity and attack of the standard #4 position. I've done that with G&L Asat pickups and it's stellar. And I'm doing it today to a 3 single Ibanez I have. Neck and bridge is good, too. Too many coils in series (like quad rails humbuckers) kind of takes you backwards a little. The sound almost gets more distant and dull, rather than sounding like a flamethrower.

In another day or two I'll have another one coming, and then I can decide which one I want to get rid of. I don't have enough necks to go around so I am considering selling one of the bodies off. If you want to e-mail me I can give you some details.

So long as you used shielded cable, it would be no more signal loss than the equivalent length of guitar cable. So if you had 10' before the vol/tone circuit and 10' after, you should have the same "tone" as with 20' of cable coming right from the guitar. The only difference, if any, would come from the inherant load the vol/tone circuit places on the signal. It would still place the same load, but now it would be doing it AFTER 10' of cable. So the slight treble loss from a vol/tone pot would be applied AFTER the signal was already slightly degraded from 10' of cable. But since the vol/tone load is a result of limiting, as in "no more than 500kohms will pass etc." I don't think it would be any different. Like even when fully up, the pots place a ceiling on the amount of signal that will pass unaltered. Whether that comes after 10' or not shouldn't matter at all. For a long time, I've wanted to do something like have a volume/blender pedal act as a blend between two humbuckers. Then you could sweep it like a wah pedal, but you would really be sweeping between the bridge and neck pickup, with all the delicious harmonic alterations in between. So I've thought about this a little. It's not like a standard guitar harness "conditions" the signal or somehow makes it "ready" for a cable run.

Um, forgive me if you've thought of this already, but did you know that the Hot Rod allen head is NOT the same size as your metric Floyd Rose allen wrenches? Its the US size, same as Fender rods. A metric Floyd wrench will strip out in there. If you're not using a 1/8" wrench then get one before you start clamping the neck or pulling the rod.

In the short term, can you switch the bottom three with the top three, so they have thicker strings in them? Or are they staggered post heights, and therefore "unswitchable?" You can take a Sperzel mostly apart, perhaps you could see in there then, although I realize the part you want to see is pretty much enclosed. The thumbwheel is designed not to come out all the way. Maybe try some lube in there to see if the pins are just stuck.

Also the Dimarzio Multi Bucker is a quad rail pickup, that's kind of what I made when I combined a Chandler rails with a Kramer rails.

Besides a Variax I think your best bet is to get one of those quad rails pickups, either from Kramer or Kent Armstrong. Then you have 4 coils total, but if you get the Kramer you'd have to install extra wires onto the coil jumpers because they're hardwired. There's another thread about that one right now. The outside coils in parallel could sound like the strat 4 position. You could also have a hot rails type of sound, and an "all 4 rails" sound. And I suspect the "all 4 rails" in parallel would sound a lot like the strat 4 position, too, but with more phase cancellation and a sharper high end. I'd also like to try three coils in series, and perhaps mix that with the fourth coil out of phase, so the three coils are overpowering the fourth, but there's still some out of phase sound going on there. That one wouldn't be hum cancelling, but it might sound like a screaming strat single coil bridge sound. Forget about duplicating neck pickup tones. A bridge pickup with filters is still a bridge pickup. There's no way to create the dynamics, swell, and attack of the neck pickup location, even if you get the frequency response close.

Oh boy do I ever have experience. Where do I begin? I tried it as-is in the bridge position, and I didn't like it. It wasn't very dynamic, and it didn't have a good "hot rails" sound when I "tapped" it. See, you can't get at the individual coils. You can only split it into two rails. I would've wanted to try things like the outer coils in parallel, etc. and those are things you can't do with the wiring as it is. There's a Kent Armstrong quad rails type pickup that has 4-conductor wiring from each set of rails. The quad rails is wound to about 3.15k per coil. That makes for a real glassy-clean sound if you're able to just use one coil by itself. So if they had all the wires available I would've wired it in strange ways, like 2 coils in parallel feeding the second rails in series, etc. But I couldn't so since I was already going to have to do surgery to it anyways, I came up with a new pickup entirely. I actually took the pickup apart, and removed one rails and replaced it with a Chandler rails that I have that's wound real hot, like a Duncan Hot Rails. So now I have like one vintage rails and one hot rails in the same chassis. I did some fun wiring with it so I could have one hot coil and one vintage coil, or all four at once for the monster sound (which is much better than the original quad rails sound) and it's kind of more like having 4 pickups in the same guitar. Then, I took the baseplate from the Chandler rails, and used it to make a single rails pickup out of the leftover Kramer coil. That pickup is in the middle position of another guitar and sounds great, especially because I installed 4 conductor cable on it. So it can be split to a single coil for a very glassy, vintage strat sound. If it had two 4-conductor cables on it, it would actually make a great neck pickup. Not necessarily for the "all 4 coils in series" sound, but because you could wire it for just the one neck side coil, to get a vintage stratty sound, the outside coils in parallel for a stratty in-between clucky sound, and other series combos for various humbucker imitations. You could also try all 4 coils in parallel. That'd be a pretty interesting neck pickup sound. If you're handy with an iron and you can tap into those coil joins without damaging the pickup, then I'd say try it. But as a full on bridge pickup I thought it sucked. Another mod I'd do if I was using it stock would be to remove the center magnet. When I did the surgery on mine I left out the center magnet. I wanted the Chandler rails to have whatever magnet strength they designed it for, and I think the sound of the Kramer coil was greatly improved. That center magnet adds too much power for those low wind coils IMO.

Sounds fun to me. You didn't mention this so forgive me if you've thought of this already. I would use a stereo jack, so you only have one cable leaving the instrument to eliminate tangles. You could use a stereo plug with a Y split at the end, or just use a Y adapter with a regular stereo cable. I have acoustics with a mic & piezo setup. I feed an outboard pedal I made with phantom power for the mic and preamp for the piezo. So I run a stereo cable to the box (old pedal chassis) and two monos out from there to whatever. Actually I have three monos on there, one is a blend, so it automatically blends them into a single source for when I'm not playing through my fancy rig. So you could make an outboard box that either keeps them seperate or combines them, so your bass would act traditionally. If you don't want an outboard box, then I'd still suggest using a stereo jack and cable, but install either a push/pull pot or a mini switch that toggles between normal mono operation and split stereo operation. That way if you just have one amp/one input you can run the bass normally. Or if you forget to bring your stereo cable for that matter. You could also wire two jacks, but still with a switch. So you could plug normal into one jack, or throw the switch and it would split one pickup to each jack.

It's like you're saying: "I want to design a car that is very fast. I've heard that by making a car lighter, it will go faster. So I was thinking that since the engine is an extremely heavy part of the car, I would design one without an engine." I agree that fretless guitar is already at a major disadvantage. But all you can do to combat that is to use the hardest fretboard, and the most rigid construction techniques and material and hope for the best. The truss rod is the least of your concerns. Erikbojerik is right when he says the slightest bit of "unlevel" in the playing surface will kill off anything you tried to accomplish with no truss rod. Hey while I was typing this I came up with an idea to improve fretless guitar. Let me think about it for awhile and then I'll post it when I've worked out the bugs.

Wenge is great. I think it's underused but that's just me. Besides its physical properties it's quite a looker. But you should consider what type of finish you're going to use. If you're going with a high gloss lacquer, then Wenge will soak up finish awkwardly. But then again, you'd be grain filling anyway because of the Limba. So a real hard filler would be fine. If you're going to oil it, then you can use whatever. Mahogany and Walnut would be excellent choices, but you'd really just be alternating colors. The grain patterns will look really similar. Whereas Rosewood, Cocobolo, or Wenge will be easily distinguishable. I guess what I'm saying is that depending on the Walnut or Mahogany, it could end up just looking like "multi-colored" rather than laminated. Does that make sense? Like you taped it off and sprayed stain on strips or something. I know that sounds silly, but I'm just pointing it out because of the Limba. If it were Alder or Ash, or Maple then Walnut/Mahogany would contrast more. Sometimes we don't "see" things when we're designing a guitar until it's too late, like after it's buffed out and assembled. Or like, when you look at it you'll see the laminates because you remember making them, while others will just see alternating colors. It obviously depends on the pieces, too. If your Limba is really chalky and grey, with blackish grains, but then your Walnut is a smooth, uniform chocolate brown, it would look pretty great. BTW you realize your topic title looks like a gay personal ad, right?

Staplegun.

That's okay because I think he posted the same thread at Jemsite and already decided to fix up the guitar when he has the time. They stayed on topic over there.

BTW, here's the Floyd route pattern from the website just for kicks: http://floydrose.com/pdf/Floyd%20Rose%20Or...top%20view).pdf

Okay,so it seems that you're agreeing that it shouldn't be that way. I mean they're not who I'd look to for proper Floyd installation, because Gibson, by your words "very rarely uses Floyds." And if they angled the bridge just to line the strings up with pole pieces, that sure seems like a poorly made decision. But also a decision to accomodate what they thought was a special situation, putting a Floyd on a guitar that didn't normally come with one. I'm saying that any guitar designed for a Floyd will be straight across. I'm still having a hard time with the logic, though, because you don't get any real string space narrowing with just a 2-4 degree pitch. In order to angle it enough to narrow the string spacing, each string would then rub against the string groove in the saddle. So it's either an example of total design failure, or poor stud placement by the factory workers. Which is kind of implied by your statement that some wound up straight anyway. But at least you'd agree that mounting it straight would've been the "right" way to do it. Right?

For me, I don't see any reason to build a neck without a truss rod. Most of the finest sounding and playing instruments have adjustable rods. So there's no "holy grail" tone that needs to be achieved without the use of an adjustable truss rod IMO. Without jumping into the whole issue I'll say that I use double rods with an ebony board, or a multi-laminate neck that will probably be stiff enough on it's own without a rod. That's why you need a double rod. I have ebony boarded necks that need very slight forward bow for part of the year, and very slight backbow the other times. I could take the rod out and the neck would still play very well regardless, but to try to get a wooden item of any laminate/species to remain the same throughout seasonal changes is difficult to say the least. If you're making a 5-string bass or a "weak" style neck, like traditional Fender styles then a single action rod has always been fine. I hope that sheds a little light on a portion of your thread.

So what you're kind of saying is that the Ibanez had the same wiring as the Duncan inside the chassis of the pickup (under the tape) before it was soldered to the 2 conductor cable. Whereas the Duncan takes all 4 wires out of the pickup with the 4 conductor. So what I'm saying is that the standard way to wire the Duncan is red and white together, then green and black to hot/ground. So by switching those around, you reversed the phase of each coil of the humbucker, but then reversed phase again of the humbucker as a whole when you put the red and white one on the switch. Actually now that I think of it, you might be operating in single coil mode or something because either the red or white needs to go to ground, and the black/green junction is what goes to the switch on the coil tap side, to do the automatic coil tap. A pic of your wiring would be great. If it were me, I would reverse the wires, so the red and white were together. That's the way the pickup was meant to be junctioned. Your way also works, though, because phase is like an even/odd equation. If you reverse phase twice, you're back to normal again. Does that make sense? So I would connect red and white, then bring that to the switch on the side that cuts the coil. Then take black to hot and green to ground. If that's out of phase with the other pickup, then reverse green and black. But yes, I agree that 2- and 3-conductor cable is not as "standard" as 4-conductor and I think every double coil pickup (side by side or stacked) should have 4-conductor so I can decide what I want to do with it.

Yeah I wondered if that post would come off like a flame or not, and I don't mean it to be. For some reason I just became fixated on this one issue and it was driving me nuts.

You're both right (well actually you're both a little bit wrong, too) There are PRS Koreans, but ony the SE's. The CE's are US made. But lets forget about that and deal with strictly the US models. Of all the bolt ons I've played, most of them (yes, the majority) have creaks in the necks. I appologize if that's different from other people's experiences, but I was never happy with their neck joint. This goes all the way back to when they first came out with them. So while the design is probably partly to blame, you could probably blame tolerances too, but I do have to admit that the stability of the neck joint seems to have gotten better since they moved to the CNC factory. So maybe Crafty has only tried CNC made ones and they've all been rock solid. As long as you're going to ditch the standard heel anyway, you could strengthen the neck around the pickup area by having it widen as it comes into the body, like an extra 3/4" on each side. Take a look at the Ibanez Maxxas neck joint too. It's similar to the PRS but there's a little more wood there.

The pics don't reinforce anything to me. Look at a Tom Anderson, or any Ibanez. Heck any quality instrument. The only time the studs aren't perfectly across on a guitar is when they're poorly installed. There's enough travel on any FR style bridge, but there's not enough travel on some TOM's and wrap-arounds. It's just an idea you're going to have to mature out of. A two fulcrum unit operates properly when installed perpendicularly, and that's about it. Especially an OFR that has the identical knife edge cutouts on each side. Some bridges have a round cutout and a flat one. But that's just so the factory stud spacing doesn't have to be perfect. The distance into the baseplate is the same. I'm always happy to be wrong but I'm not wrong on this one. If anyone can show me something "real" instead of homemade templates, etc. then fine. I used to do R&D for the Cort guitar factory, and they make all the Korean Ibanez/Fender/etc. I've seen a lot of blueprints. Your insistance befuddles me.

Fretwire isn't perfect. The same batch will have inconsistencies throughout. So it's not necessarily bragging rights that you didn't have to level the frets because they were so flawlessly installed. I mean to a great extent the amount of levelling needed passes judgement on the quality of the fret job. But no matter what, I'm levelling, usually with worn out 600 grit for every fret job as part of the buff. So while I'm not really taking anything off, I might catch a couple inconsistencies in the wire. But more importantly I don't want to play on the factory extruded surface of the wire. I want to buff that surface out. Especially with Dunlop wire. I've seen some Dunlop wire that's practically textured when you look at it closely. So I will "level" the frets regardless, as part of the final buff if nothing else. Sometimes I'll level a slight fall away or compound radius into the upper frets too. So while they don't need leveling per se, I'm actually changing the radius surface slightly. Satriani's tech does that to all his guitars. It's sort of like "compensated radiusing" You can do it to the board directly, but if you have a 9.5" or smaller radius board I feel like its best to just hit the problem areas of the fret surface if the wire is tall anyway.

"Common knowledge?" Please tell me where you heard this common knowledge, because I must have been hanging around with all the wrong people, reading all the wrong books, and looking at all the wrong guitars for my entire life as a luthier. Where is this subculture that would take a pivoting device and place it on a slight angle when there is more than enough room in the saddles to intonate any situation? I don't even know where to begin on that Kramer import photo. For one, the bridge closeup is at an angle, so if the treble side is a little higher than the bass side, it's going to appear closer to the pickup cavity from the angle the photo was taken. Second, if that trem is offset, it is a testimony to the lack of quality control at the asian factory where that guitar is built. You can also see that the pickup isn't centered in its own cavity-that's not on purpose either. So yes, you are still insane

I thought I remembered resting a Floyd style trem in my friend's guitar back in the day when it was in for a refret. I thought it lined up with the post spacing, but that was all the way back in '92 so I could be wrong! Not that you should replace it with a Floyd, just that I think its a possibility with no mods. So then that might mean you could also replace it with the Mighty Mite trem with the fat lip around it. That has Floyd stud spacing too. Anyway as for the pickguard, you can get a Strat guard that's cut for a Floyd Rose and it should fit. BTW My friend also blocked it and removed his lock nut too. Those guitars sound great that way.