curtisa

Yes and no. There's nothing that says green has to be ground as per Dimarzio's wiring colours. It's just conveniently drawn that way to make it somewhat standardised within the Dimarzio universe. You can also ground red, make green hot and the pickup would still work, just with reverse phase. Do it to both neck and bridge pickups and you'd never be able to tell the difference from wiring both pickups with Dimarzio's original red hot/green ground recommendations - they'd sound exactly the same. Going back to the original wiring diagram, the neck pickup will work as drawn, it's just that the two coils are 'stacked' upside down compared to the bridge pickup. It's still humbucking; I just have no idea why Fender would go to that length to wire the neck pickup that way. Maybe they're just trying to be historically accurate to Kurt's original Jaguar, and perhaps it was always wired that way whether by accident or design. Schematics and wiring diagrams serve different purposes. A schematic tells you how the circuit works. A wiring diagram tells you how to put it together. From a circuit analysis perspective, like you I also prefer a schematic so I can see what the controls and components actually do in the guitar. But a wiring diagram is more accessible to builders just wanting to get a new wiring layout up and running, and so remains the de facto norm in guitar building.

The 'ground lug to control cavity' attaches to a conductive section of the control cavity. This could be shielding paint or foil tape. It's used to allow the shielding of the guitar to be grounded to act as...well, a shield... to incoming radiated electrical noise (hums, buzzes, radio interference etc). The 'black wire to bridge' attaches to some metallic component of the guitar bridge itself, but it is primarily intended to ground the strings. So whatever part of the bridge you choose to connect it to, it needs to be conductive all the way through. I'm not familiar with the Jaguar, but I see references online that if you're using the original Jaguar tremolo the grounding point is actually one of the bridge 'thimbles'. The black pickup wire to the bracket on the rhythm circuit is providing a ground connection to the neck pickup, and does not act as a path for your signal as such. You'll notice there's a lug shown on the lower-right of the slide switch with a wire leaving it, going to the 3-way toggle, and from there to the back of the Volume 2 pot. That's part of your ground circuit. The white wire on the neck pickup going to the lower-middle lug of the slide switch is your signal output from that pickup. By and large ground can go any which way you like in a guitar, as long as every point in the circuit that needs to be grounded is grounded. The wiring path you choose to take is entirely up to you, but mostly limited by the practicality of executing the wiring. It's easier to attach one wire to the bridge as a grounding point than to attach half a dozen. However for ease of construction I'd advocate you follow the diagram as faithfully to the original as possible, especially if this is your first time doing it. It will make it easier to debug if something doesn't work after you finish wiring it all up. What pickups did you order? Maybe the manufacturer has a wiring colour code? No. The colour scheme chosen for pickup wiring is entirely arbitrary, and the colour-ness of the wire has no bearing on its function. It's only used to differentiate each of the wires to make it easier for people to identify each core for assembly. Historically (and probably still today) wiring anything on an assembly line was done by non-skilled labour who didn't need to know how the circuit worked to put it together. They just needed to follow the wiring diagram put in front of them to know that the red wire went to left lug of the 3-way switch. As pickup wiring has never been standardised we're left with the situation that manufacturer's can choose any colour they like for their pickups, hence the messy scenario where wiring diagrams available online specify particular wiring colours in certain locations using a particular branded pickup. The end user then has to translate this wiring code if they choose to install a different pickup. Related note - the neck pickup wiring shown in the original diagram at the top of this page seems unusual. Notice how the red/green are paired, black is ground and white is hot? This differs from the bridge pickup wiring which shows white/black paired, green as ground and red as hot, which also matches Dimarzio's wiring recommendations for their pickups. Maybe this is deliberate and was how Kurt had his Jaguar wired, but seems a little odd on first glance at the diagram.

Buy that colour wasn't then automatically applied to the remainder of their guitars, particularly their flagship models. It was only used on a small subset of their offerings, and even then only on their low/midrange offerings. Specifically choosing an unusual colour on the basis that looked good on a cathode ray tube on a budget model while ignoring the remainder of their more valuable/important models makes no sense. The TV yellow colour as a response to the look on B&W TV is a myth, nothing more.

I think television played a role in bringing the electric guitar to a larger, younger audience than it had at any time in the past. TV was a cool thing. Les Paul was a cool thing. Combining the two into a marketing juggernaut would have been an easy thing for Gibson to do. The TV Model itself was a cut-down version of the flagship Les Paul that would have appealed to budget-conscious customers wanting to get as close to Les Paul and Mary Ford as practicable. The 'TV' suffix was also later attached to the SG as a stripped-back version of the same big brother, but again it was never specifically offered in a 'TV yellow'. But I don't think TV studios had any say in how Gibson chose to paint their guitars, thereby starting some kind of demand for a colour that looked good when beamed across the country. Gibson themselves marketed the finish as 'limed oak' and 'limed mahogany'. It's more likely that consumers themselves substituted the term 'TV yellow' over time as a kind of portmanteau of the 'TV Model' moniker and the shade of yellow it was mostly associated with.

It's one of several unconfirmed stories surrounding the origins of TV yellow. Another one is that the 'TV' stood for 'Telecaster Version', supposedly Gibson's response to the Telecaster butterscotch colour. Personally, I suspect both stories are just folklore. I highly doubt Gibson would go to the lengths of producing a colour for such a narrow application (ie, good looks on black and white TV), nor would they purposely try to jump on Fender's coattails and use the Telecaster name to ID a similar colour. What's more likely is that TV yellow is just a homage to the yellowed woodgrain finish applied to many pieces of furniture at the time, which would have included TV cabinets. Wikipedia suggests that the Les Paul TV Model, which the colour was first applied to, was ID'ed as 'TV' more because it was anticipated that it would act as a mascot for the Les Paul and Mary Ford TV show. The finish itself was actually described by Gibson as 'limed mahogany':

Googling 'Fender round laminated fretboard' turns up results. Early 60s to early 80s by the sound of it: Slab Rosewood vs Laminate Rosewood | Page 3 | TalkBass.com The History of the Fender Stratocaster: The 1960s | Fender Guitars Some of the quotes in that first link suggest that the curved fret slots (and hence curved nut slot, I guess?) predates the round laminated fretboard introduced in the 60s, so maybe the curved nut was just an intrinsic byproduct of Fender's construction methods employed when slotting. A lot of what made Fender a leader in the early years was to heavily mechanise and automate the process of making guitars, much like a car assembly line.

I believe the curved-bottom nut slot dates from a period in some manufacturer's histories (notably Fender, but maybe some others too) where the fretboard itself was a curved lamination glued to the neck which had the radius already applied to it, and then the fret slots and nut were cut in one operation using a special swinging jig and ganged circular saw blades. The frets themselves would be driven in from the side rather than hammered in from above. As the resulting fret slots would be curved from the ganged saw blades and swinging jig, the nut slot would also be curved so the nut needed to be curved to match. These days there's probably no real need to do such a complicated series of operations when making a neck except perhaps if you're somehow trying to remain historically accurate. To do this by hand without the aid of jigs is going to be challenging; for that reason alone most people would simply cut the nut slot (and fret slots) flat and use a flat-bottomed nut. As far as after-market nuts go, you'd probably only purchase a curved nut if the neck you were trying to fit it to already had the curved slot to begin with. This would largely only apply to replacing an existing nut in an old neck.

It might also be beneficial If you could provide some background as to what the issue you're having is.

If you watch the 'making of' video on the Lignum Youtube channel, they make their own truss rod from scratch. There's also no extra reinforcement being added to the neck, so it appears that the neck is probably OK with the long scale length. I'd be suspicious that it is pretty 'bendy' though, but maybe when you're dealing with such low pitches the amount of pitch variance when flexing the neck is generally undetectable.

It's because of inharmonicty. From the wiki page: You could have a plain steel 0.042" for a low E on a guitar if you really wanted, but it would be extremely stiff and hence sound pretty awful when played. Using a small core, but wrapping it in an outer helical winding allows the string to be more elastic while simultaneously boosting its unit weight, both perfect criteria for a string that can be tuned to a low pitch while still sounding good. Getting back to @PsP's original query, as we're definitely straying well off the mark now, I'd personally get my hands on a few super-long scale strings of different gauges, a pickup and make a simple one-string test bed on a plank of wood. Install a bridge and a tuner at each end, fit the pickup, try out the strings over various long scale lengths tuned to E'' and test empirically to find out what works best, and where the compromises need to be made. The trouble with building such a left-of-field instrument is that there are few examples out there to base your own work off. You're probably better off experimenting with the physics of the strings, tuning and scale lengths before building the instrument, instead of building something and hoping it will work out in the end.

Yes. And the formula provided by D'Addario bears this out: If frequency goes up, tension goes up. If scale length goes up, tension goes up. If unit weight (gauge) goes up, tension goes up. Conversely, if your aim is to reduce the scale length but you want to maintain the pitch and tension, then yes, the string gauge needs to be thicker. There are practical limits though. You can't have a 0.5 inch gauge string tuned to E' over a 1 foot scale length. Mathematically it might work according to the formula, but it will sound like crap. Likewise, expecting a 0.010" plain steel string to sound good tuned down to E' over a 3 metre scale length is unrealistic. Guitar strings tend to have a window where tuning, scale length and tension all work nicely to give harmonic results, but either side the inharmonicity of the string becomes an issue. Case in point - I used to have an Ibanez 7-string guitar with a 25.5" scale length, essentially based on Steve Vai's Universe model. Using a 0.052" string for the low B I had to routinely tune it slightly flat, as the low-ish tension of the B when used within chords made it appear ever so slightly sharp due to the inharmonicty causing the string's natural overtones to 'bunch up'. Switching to a .056" or a .058" made the tuning issue more manageable, at the expense of a slightly stiffer string compared to the rest of the set. Piano tuners come up against a similar situation and have to implement 'stretch tuning' to account for the overtones of the bass strings clashing with the fundamental tones of the treble strings. The bass strings tend to be tuned slightly flat and treble slightly sharp to compensate.

The article is misleading, as it implies that the thicker strings used in extreme drop-tuning exert more tension on the neck than standard strings tuned normally and may result in permanent damage to the bass if not set up correctly. It fails to mention what scale length or the degree of detuning is being used to make that claim. I can't find data on the .200" bass string mentioned in the article, but the relationship between D'Addario's quoted Unit Weight change relative to string gauge change in their PDF appears to be fairly linear. If you extrapolate the Unit Weight up to a theoretical .200" string gauge, on a scale length of 34" a drop-tuned E'' exerts a tension of about 31lb. That's 16% less tension than a .100" tuned to E on a standard 4-string bass set over the same scale length.

D'Addario provide tension data on all their strings, plus also provide the basic tension math behind the data. If you assume you go for the .135" string for the lowest pitch, D'Addario indicate that at 34" scale length a B'' (aka, low-B) will have a tension of 36.1lb (see page 10 of the PDF): But you want to tune down to E'' which isn't provided by the charts. So, say you stick with the .135" string and keep tension the same at 36.1lb, you can rearrange the formula provided on page 4 of the PDF in terms of scale length: Becomes (rather messily): So with the known values of tension = 36.1lb, unit weight (for a string gauge of 0.135") = 0.00315944 and your required tuning pitch = E'' = 20.6Hz, you get a suggested scale length of 51" (yikes!). So you'll probably have to either increase your string gauge and/or reduce your expected tension to get scale length back down to something more reasonable. If you use D'Addario's 0.145" string and reduce tension to 29lb the scale length becomes 42.6". That's getting similar to the specs for that sub bass in the video that @henrim posted. Note that the above calculations become a lot easier if you set up a spreadsheet to do the math for you, so you only have to feed in frequency, unit weight, scale length and tension. The other thing to weigh up is whether strings at such long lengths are easily obtainable. Don't forget that many large gauge bass strings are made taperwound to make it easier to wrap around the tuning post. They're typically sold under the assumption that they fit certain scale lengths, and that the taperwound portion falls behind the nut. If you make a bass with a super long scale length the taperwound section of these strings may sit within the fretted area of the neck. At the very least this will feel odd to play at the lower frets; I don't know how it might affect the sound. Consider whether or not the strings are only available as some kind of custom wound item or from a boutique manufacturer for your project. There are other factors to consider when making an extended range instrument of this size beyond the choice of scale length and string gauge. The video also touched on these - things like frequency response of the electronics, the ergonomics of a long neck and how to work around it etc

FretFind2D is pretty good at automatically calculating fret positions based on some basic raw parameters for scale length, plus string spacing at the nut and bridge, and the amount of overhang you want either side of the strings as they pass along the fretboard. Is there a reason why you wouldn't just take some known parameters from a commercially-made bass and just adapt them to your design? For example, if you essentially play 4-string down-tuned to B, why not just take the specs from an existing 5-string bass and omit the high-G string? The gauge of strings used would then just be a standard 5-string set minus the highest string. Scale length also need not change unless you have a pressing need to do so.

Be wary, also, that the selling of "vintage" components in a market that often relies on the "heart over head" nature of a purchase (guitar building and high-end audio are prime examples) can sometimes lead to less-than honest practices by sellers. There was a thread over at the Gear Page forums a few weeks ago where a reasonably well-known purveyor of guitar electronic components was busted for selling premium quality paper-in-oil capacitors at $27 each, which turned out to be nothing more than a $1 film capacitor with a special heatshrink wrap applied. Caveat emptor

You wouldn't be tempted to just use something like FretFind2D, print a 1:1 scale layout of the fret positions, attach it directly to the fretboard, use it as a cutting guide and skip the whole measurement bit?

The fret position calculator in the Tundra Man website might be more up your alley. You specify inches or millimetres for the base scale length and then it spits out both measurement units in the resulting table: Fretboard Calculator - The Tundra Man Workshop

One of the 'innovations' of the Parker Fly was to glue the frets directly to the surface of the fretboard. The frets didn't have tangs and were effectively just stainless steel bars with a flat back. Frets dropping off the fretboard over time as the glue failed became an issue for some users though. The fret radius also had to be an exact match to the fretboard, as there's no tang/slot for the fret to hang on to. The frets on a Chapman Stick are stainless steel square rods turned 45 degrees and one triangular edge embedded into the fretboard.

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Well, I'll be a blue-nosed gopher. Turns out 'Slipperman' was Tim Gilles who engineered albums for Taking Back Sunday, Biohazard and Anthrax. He later emigrated to Tasmania and died only this year, a mere couple of hours drive from where I live. Small world.

It's a quote from a series of posts made by a somewhat eccentric audio engineer who used to frequent the prosoundweb forums with the screen handle Slipperman. His extended diatribe on recording high gain guitars became somewhat of an internet legend amongst the recording community. You can read the whole thing here if you've really got a lot of time to kill: Full text of "Slipperman's Recording Distorted Guitars From Hell (readable Version)" (archive.org) Note however that his essay is specifically related to the recording and mixing of distorted guitars. He actually makes no mention of what the guitar is made of, or the relative importance of it in the overall sound.

Pretty sure it's the width of the bobbin. Can't be anything else. The calc specifies length, height, flange and width. The names are a bit weird, but given the default sizes shown I take 'width' to be the innermost width of the bobbin where it wraps around the poles and 'flange' to be the outermost width of the bobbin where it cannot exceed because the pickup case has to slide over the completed coil. The four dimensions quoted are the minimum required when specifying the dimensions of any coil.

No, too thick. It's also not a useful specification for the coil itself. The calculator needs to know what the maximum dimensions of the coil window you have to work with to give a meaningful result. The thickness of the flatwork is irrelevant (other than giving you an idea of how physically big the completed pickup will be).

I think it's meant to be the width of the bobbin flatwork.

Making the bobbin bigger makes it possible. If you can make the bobbin 0.5" tall the calculator suggests it can be done with a loose scatter wind: