Gitbox Culture

Musings on guitars, guitarists, guitar styles and approaches, technical matters and guitar design by a professional guitarist with a Ph.D in ethnomusicology. Also covering electric bass, lap and pedal steel guitar. And what the hell, banjo.

Monday, August 2, 2010

I am a solder monkey.

We did it! Greg Wyard and I rewired my Strat the other day, returning to its original three single coil pickups. There was a surprising amount of unsoldering and soldering between the pickups, switch, pots and ground, but success was achieved. We shared the soldering duties. We even did a little modification, changing the circuit to a master volume and master tone, rather than the usual configuration which provides tone controls to the neck and middle pickups but not the bridge pickup. As I'm still unable to read a schematic, we relied on the very clear wiring diagrams on the Seymour Duncan site, which nonetheless omitted the ground wiring.

 We did the job without understanding much about why a given wire went to a given terminal and so on, so I'm on a mission to clear away my ignorance by reading Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians, which explains the theory behind basic electronics and provides directions for a number of projects, mostly of the stompbox variety. One item on the agenda for me is learning how to read schematics. Then, if all goes well, I'm gonna build something! I admit that I'm proud to have achieved this little rewiring project, and excited to build on this humble success.

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