1963 SG Special

One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the number of wonderful old guitars hidden up in these mountains. One such gem is this '63 SG. It had been fitted with a Bigsby vibrola unit sometime back and needed the usual handful of repairs along with a new nut. The most interesting of these was a little wiring problem that started when the bridge was swapped for this Bigsby.

Originally this guitar would have been fitted with a wraparound bridge, fixed on two large screw posts not unlike the modern "stop-bar" tailpiece. This bridge grounded to the post on the treble side, where a wire was run to the anchor hole. When the new tun-o-matic bridge went on for the Bigsby, the ground was lost. After confirming this, the treble anchor was heated and removed to reveal no wire, sure enough.

So, why do we ground the strings at the bridge? The reason is noise. Our bodies act like giant antennae for electrical signal. We pick up and project a small amount of radio interference that can be easily amplified by a guitar's pickups. Simply touching our hand to any ground on the instrument kills this potential and the buzzing disappears! So, long ago clever engineers sought to ground the bridges of electric instruments, making them all but impossible to play without grounding oneself.

Curiously, when this bridge was swapped the ground-wire was not run to the post, but rather to a screw driven into the side of the pickup cavity. This sort of thing is sometimes seen, generally when a cavity is shielded, and never as a replacement for a bridge ground.

With the screw now removed, and the original hole cleared from the pickup side, we can now use a long drill bit to connect to this hole from the post side.

Success! The wire can now be seated firmly against the post in the hole.

And it can be soldered to the ground on the bridge pickup wire where it was originally 60 years ago. After getting it all put back together, I can honestly say it's one of my favorites ever.

Jerry Garcia SG 

A few weeks back I was commissioned to take a pretty standard SG and fit it with the kind of circuitry that Jerry Garcia made famous in his Wolf and Tiger guitars. The main yank here, aside from the signature pickup configuration, is the addition of an onboard effects loop. This allows you to adjust the volume on your guitar after the last effect in your chain. It uses a buffer circuit known as OBEL to convert the guitar's signal to low impedance. The result is that every effect sees the full output of your instrument, and the volume can be adjusted without affecting the sound otherwise. This job will require substantial modification to the guitar, here it is with a few fresh holes.

Jerry's main axes are known to feature a single coil in the neck, and two humbucker pickups in the middle and bridge. A new pickguard was made to the exact specs of the old, save for the pickups and 5-way selector switch that we shoe-horned in. Wires are run for the output, ground, and coil splitting for the humbuckers, all of which will be connected in the control cavity.

Next we begin to mock up the controls. The task is to use the existing holes, and drill a few extras in just the right places. We have to keep in mind how close together controls will be, as they need to be adjusted easily on the fly. In the end we will have a master volume, two tones, effects loop in/out, output, two coil splits, and an effects loop on/off, so spacing these correctly is a big deal.

Here's what all that looks like from behind. Notice the OBEL circuit and its 9-volt battery are sandwiched between all the controls.

Here is the finished product! The workingman's Tiger.