An Update and A New Friend.

OK, first post of 2013, the first in about 7 months...!?!? NOT good, but I guess that's Life. 

But I am happy to say that the time has not been entirely unproductive. Took a trip up to Portland, Oregon last August to visit a friend, which was a nice getaway for a few days. On the music side of town, I discovered a new artist named Lianne La Havas (via these Youtube videos, here and here, not to mention here), who I think is an awesome, young talent. The first new artist I've been genuinely excited about in a LONG time. I got to see her perform twice here in L.A. since my discovery last September - a solo gig at the Hollywood Amoeba Records, then again with her band, at the Roxy in November. I was not disappointed at either show - she's already a pretty seasoned performer at such a young age. I can see why - she's been performing, touring and promoting the heck out of her debut album, and hasn't stopped yet. I just caught her on Jay Leno recently, not to mention she just released two more music videos.  Whew...

In between those two shows, I also got to see a rare performance by Chocolate Genius Incorporated, a band/project led by songwriter Mark Anthony Thompson. Been following his music since the first album in 1998, and was glad to be able to finally see him perform live.

Apparently, musical talent runs in his family... His youngest daughter Zsela (17 years old as of last year...?) has an EP of songs called "All of the Above", which I think is also great. He produced the tracks, BTW, pretty evident if you're familiar with his work. Anyway, the songs are available for free streaming on her Bandcamp page, with an option to purchase the songs for a $5.00 (or more) donation. Very cool - I certainly hope she does more music in the future.

But enough about them, this blog is supposed to be about ME, haha... Briefly, I haven't forgotten about or abandoned my intentions laid out in the last post - to produce 3 tracks using a different DAW program for each one. I really have no excuse why they are taking so long, other than that excuse called LIFE... Art all too often plays second fiddle to Life in my world, sad to say. The good news is that the first track is in the mixing stage right now. With any luck, fingers crossed, I should have a mix to post here very soon.

But in the meantime, Here are some pics of a new friend I've acquired as of last weekend. I've sort of been jonesing for a new acoustic guitar for well over a year now. I do have an acoustic that I purchased back in 1994 (19 years ago!), and it's actually still playable, in great shape and sounds pretty good, especially now that the wood has matured some. But I suppose I wanted to take a look at what else is out there, and explore other tonal options. More specifically, I'd been looking for an acoustic with a slightly smaller body, which usually makes for a guitar lower in overall volume, which would help me because my singing voice is naturally pretty low in volume in comparison to the guitar I've been playing; it drowns my voice out in many cases. A smaller scale guitar is also naturally easier to hold and handle. Standard acoustic guitar bodies can be thick and a little unwieldy. This one feels closer to an electric guitar, lightweight and comfortable to play.

At first I purchased a guitar online, made by a manufacturer called Wechter. I was really happy with it, except that it had improperly installed frets (the small metal pieces installed on top of the neck that determine what notes to play). Several frets were not flush to the neck, and looked like they might work themselves loose with time...! After I reported the problem to the store and shipped it back, they determined that it wouldn't be worth trying to repair, and wouldn't be getting more in stock anytime soon. To me that really meant that they were not willing to pay for that level of repair - I'm pretty sure the frets could be fixed, but it probably wouldn't have been cheap. So, in the end I got a refund. A real shame that guitar didn't work out.

A few weeks later, I came across the guitar I eventually settled on, the M-120, made by Guild. The body is about 7/8 the scale of a standard acoustic guitar's body, but the neck is standard scale, but thin, for easy playability. The body is solid mahogany, top, back and sides, reputed to be a "warm" sounding tonewood, as opposed to "bright". As you can hopefully tell from the pics, the wood is a nice warm reddish-brown color. The neck is made of mahogany as well, with a fingerboard made of rosewood. No fancy ornamentation like on other (more expensive) guitars, but it does the job it's made to do.

Front...

...and back.

A nice additional feature is the electric pickup system installed with volume and tone controls inside the soundhole, so I can plug it into an amplifier or recorder just like an electric guitar, if I so choose. I see that coming in handy if I want to quickly lay down a track for a rough idea, and I'm too lazy or impatient to set up a mic, haha.

Guitar cable connects to an amp or mixer right here. It simultaneously serves as the guitar's rear strap button.

Tone-wise, I must admit the Wechter sounded a little "sweeter", but it's not a brand that's sold all over the place like Fender or Gibson, so their guitars are unfortunately harder to find. But this Guild is no slouch either. After some preliminary miking tests, I believe I will get some pretty nice sounding tracks recorded with this guitar, with less volume to potentially disturb the neighbors with in my building. The neck shape feels really good in my hand, and the frets are just fine, haha. It also came with a hard shell case, a nice plus. This Youtube video was a major factor in my decision to check it out.

Close-up of the body's wood grain.

Inside the case...

So, that's my journey in finding the new addition to my instrument family. I've hardly put it down since bringing it home, so I'd say that's a good sign. Looking forward to many, many hours of enjoyment with my new pal. The only thing is I have yet to come up with a name for it...! Silly as it may sound to some, I've named pretty much all my guitars and basses. Any suggestions? If not, I guess I'll wait until a name comes to me.

All for now... I will do my darnedest next time to not take so long between posts, for those actually still coming here to visit.  If so, then thanks...!

Project #2 - Pickup Replacement, Hamer "XT"

For this post I'll be recounting my recent pickup replacement job for my 2-humbucker guitar, made by Hamer, a manufacturer that's been around for almost 40 years. Or, at least it was around - according to Wikipedia, they were recently bought out by Fender, and Hamer's U.S. production guitars have been discontinued. Not sure what this guitar model is actually called, but the headstock says "XT Series", which was their "budget" line of guitars, built in China. I bought it 3 or 4 years ago at Sam Ash sort of on a whim, because it was so inexpensive. I believe the price tag said $249, which itself was a great price, but lucky me, I'd caught it on sale, so I ended up paying what I recall was $179! I wasn't at the store to buy a guitar that day, but since it was so reasonably priced I figured, "why not?"

Hamer "XT" Series Guitar.

These pickups gotta go...

The first thing about this guitar that caught my attention was the translucent black "burst"-type finish, over what appears to be a flame maple top. For a "budget" guitar, this thing looks GREAT. To my eyes, hanging on the wall in the store, it looked like a fairly expensive guitar. After seeing the price tag, I had to at least plug it into an amp and check out how it played.

I remember being particularly impressed by the all-around construction for a guitar at this low price range. The neck feels different than a standard Fender neck; a bit thicker, but still very comfortable in my hand. The action was smooth, and the frets were surprisingly finished quite well. The tuning machines and other hardware were pretty solid, no loose parts at all, as you may occasionally find on the cheaper guitars.

This guitar was just right for me, because I'd been looking for an affordable "Gibson-style" guitar as an alternative to my Fender guitars that I usually play. While I'd love to have a genuine Les Paul or ES-335, they are awfully pricey, more so than even most of Fender's American-made guitars, due to Gibson's fancier designs, overall. I still wrestle with that dilemma; should I or should I not slap down that much money for a Gibson? In the meantime, I'll have fun with my Hamer...

I bought the guitar knowing that the weak link in cheaper electric guitars tends to be the electronics: the switches, the potentiometers, the pickups. When I tested it out in the store, it sounded OK, if not mind-blowing. Again, because of the price, the fact that it felt great to play, and the overall construction of the guitar was very good, I didn't have a huge problem with it not sounding so great. I figured if the pickups or other electronic parts need replacing later on, I can do that myself.

Once I got it home and played it through my amp for a week or so, away from all the racket that goes on in the music stores, I confirmed that better pickups were definitely in this guitar's future. Months after that, I noticed that the bridge pickup really didn't sound very good at all, and buzzed LOUDLY, especially when I touched the metal pickup cover with my fingers. Hard to avoid, because that's exactly what my strumming/picking hand does when it rests against the guitar while playing. That told me there was something funky going on with the wiring, or possibly the pickup itself. The neck, or "rhythm" pickup played with no problems, but the overall sound to my ears was basically "so-so". Not horrible, but not great either. I felt that this guitar could sound much better if I replaced the pickups. Admittedly, the time elapsed between my decision to replace the pickups and actually getting down to doing the job was pretty long! After the bridge pickup started acting up on me, the guitar basically sat in my closet for a long while, until I made time to work on it. Once I started working on my other guitars again, this was the perfect time to get this particular job done, too.

I'd been buying guitar repair supplies and tools from StewMac recently, and they happen to also sell an affordably priced pickup line called Golden Age. They make pickups for both Fender-style and Gibson-style guitars. Since my Hamer was a budget-priced guitar to begin with, I figured I'd give these pickups a try. Most of their pickups are priced at just over half of what one would pay for the more well-known pickup brands, such as Seymour Duncan and Dimarzio. Golden Age seems to focus on reproductions of traditional, classic pickup designs, and have a lot of positive reviews on the StewMac site. Many have opined that they sound excellent for the price, so I felt pretty confident going with them.

Golden Age pickups - "Vintage vibe" at a decent price.

As I said, the Hamer has a 2-humbucker pickup configuration, with 2 volume potentiometers ("pots" for short, 1 per pickup), 1 master tone pot, and a 3-way switch. When I opened up the control panel on the back of the guitar, I found some wiring that was a bit different than what I've seen before. Instead of soldering the pickups' lead wires directly to the volume pots, they had these white plastic connectors, going to this extra wire that was then soldered to the pots. The picture below gives you a better idea of what I'm talking about, since I don't know exactly know what they're called...

Upon closer inspection, I saw that one of the wires from the plastic connectors was very loose, and the more I fiddled with it, it eventually just fell out altogether. There was some kind of small metal thing crimped to the end of the wire, which made the electrical contact with the other side of the connector. Tracing the wire path led me to the ground wire of the bridge pickup - the same one I was having trouble with. Aha! The ground wire's bad connection was the cause of the buzzing when I touched the pickup. I can only assume the factory used those things to wire the guitar to save time in swapping out those cheapo pickups in the event that one failed. So I decided to get rid of those plastic connector things, and just wire up everything the conventional way, which wasn't too much hassle, being that I was expecting to do that anyway. I could even use the same wire that was already there, so no parts or supplies were really needed to do this job, other than the new pickups, of course.

The control cavity. The white plastic connectors in the wiring are not normally used in guitar electronics...

...and here's the reason why - a bad connection.

The pickup replacement was pretty straightforward. Once I got the old pickups out of there, I installed the new pickups into the plastic cream-colored mounting rings using the height adjustment screws and springs. This is usually the tricky part, because it's all too easy to slip and lose hold of a spring as you try to compress it over the screw that mounts into the pickup, and then *BOING*, the spring goes flying and disappears into the Land of Lost Stuff...! I've struggled with non-"behaving" pickup height springs many times in the past. The folks at StewMac have a clever solution for that as well - the Humbucker Helpers. These are stainless steel clips that temporarily hold the whole assembly of the mounting ring, the pickup, 2 screws, and the springs all together until you have the screws securely mounted into the pickup, with springs attached. Then simply pull the clip away, and everything stays put as you need it to. Very cool! The page link shows pictures of them in use - I forgot to take one myself with them on.

Doing things the hard way - removing the old pickups with strings still on.

New Golden Age pickups ready to go. Mounting rings and height adjustment screws installed with the assistance of the "Humbucker Helpers".

Next was to get each assembly into their respective pickup cavities. Not too challenging, except that I went ahead with attempting this installation without removing the strings, as I didn't have a new set of strings to install at the time. It wasn't too difficult - I just had to take extra care not to scratch the guitar's finish while squeezing the pickups underneath the loose strings, and into the cavities. Happy to say that it worked out without incident.

On this guitar, there is a small channel routed into the body of the guitar where you thread the lead wires of the neck pickup (the top one) through, then into the control cavity in the back, where the wires would be soldered to the volume pots. Since the control cavity is fairly tight, I needed to undo the mounting nuts and lift the pots out of the guitar. To give the pots some stability while I'm soldering, I used a small piece of cardboard with holes poked into them, and inserted the shaft of the pots into the holes. That way, I had better access to the connections I needed to get at with my soldering iron. I also used a small cloth to prevent the pots from scratching the back of the guitar body while I'm working.

Removing the volume pots.

Threading the pickup leads thru the channel, to the control cavity.

Soldering the leads to the volume pots, with cardboard as support.

With everything soldered, I installed each pot back where they belonged, and used some masking tape to gather up the longer lengths of wire and make it somewhat neater inside the cavity. The tape replaced the plastic ties they had on the wires before I started. Fortunately I didn't have to make any solder connections to the pickup selector switch, so at that point the job was done, save for screwing the cover back onto the control cavity. Upon first testing, I did have a weird situation where the sound of one of the pickups was cutting out intermittently. After opening everything up again, I inspected the solder joints I just made, which looked fine to me; I didn't see a need to re-do them. I then shrugged, re-installed the pots in the cavity, closed it up, plugged in again, and this time there were no problems with the pickups. Perhaps a wire was shorting out against something inside? I'm still not sure what happened there, but all works fine now; I haven't had any problems with the sound cutting out after re-sitting everything into place.

Pots back in the guitar, with wires taped up neatly.

Everything re-assembled. Success!

I definitely hear a much improved sound on this guitar with the new pickups. They have a smooth, clean sound. I can also coax out warmer, jazzy/bluesy tones as well, especially if I roll down the tone knob a bit. All my testing is done through a small Fender solid-state "Bronco" practice amp, on mostly clean settings - the "distorted" sounds for this little amp are fairly useless (meaning bad). I still need to check it out playing through my somewhat larger Fender "Blues Jr." amp, trying some dirtier, more "authentic" tube tones. That said, I'm happy with how it sounds now, finally.

All the problems with buzzing and noise are gone. This is one quiet guitar - hands down the quietest one I own now, even with all the sheilding work I've done on my Fenders. After all the "wrestling" I've done over the years with the buzzing and humming of my single-coil guitars, this is like a breath of fresh air! I'm looking forward to recording with this guitar in the future.

As I mentioned in the last post, since I'm quite satisfied with these Golden Age pickups, I plan on also getting a single-coil set to install in my Fender Strat. When that happens, I'll definitely write up a post about installing those pickups as well.  Until next time...

Project #1 - Reviving My Fender Stratocaster

I'm back once again... Looking at the blog, it's been quite a while since I've posted. My last post was in January, and here we are, already in May! Weird, how time flies... I should have more stuff to post in the coming weeks or months. I'm on a sort of hiatus from recording at the moment, so I decided to work on my guitar projects in the meantime. I currently have 3 electric guitars and 2 bass guitars, and they all need work of some sort or another. Generally speaking, the older the instrument is, the more work is needed to be done on them.

I didn't plan to start working on them now, but after doing the work on my brother's bass guitar recently (basically re-wiring the whole thing), I suppose I got the bug to work on my own instruments again. The wiring job on my brother's bass was pretty challenging for my current level of expertise. However, I did gain some good practical knowledge and experience from the job, and will now have a much better idea of what I'm doing when I work on my own guitars. Unfortunately, I didn't think to take pictures of the bass job...

1994 Fender Stratocaster

The first guitar I decided to work on was the one that's been neglected the longest, my black Fender Stratocaster. This is a "made-in-Mexico" model (which Fender calls the "Standard" Stratocaster) that I bought back in 1994; the first brand-new guitar I ever purchased. In fact, it was the only electric guitar that I owned for many years. Once I got my "American Standard" Fender Telecaster in 2007, the Strat was more or less put on retirement status. But I've been missing my old Strat lately, so I felt it was time to start getting it back into playing shape again. Looking at it now, I see all the years of playing and general knocking around through the various nicks, dents and scratches. The frets are especially worn; practically ground down to nubs, with deep vertical grooves in them from the friction against the strings; they're supposed to be smooth from end to end. I definitely played the heck out of this guitar! Eventually I plan to take it to a professional to get new frets installed. In its current shape, it's never going to be 100% playable. With the worn-out frets, it's too difficult to play certain chords without fret buzzing.

These frets are shot.

For now, the focus will be on what jobs I can do myself, which is install copper foil shielding tape in the pickup cavity of the guitar body to help reduce hum and noise, which I learned all about last year with the Tele. I also re-installed the original single-coil pickup in the bridge position. It was replaced with a Seymour Duncan JB humbucker many years ago. I changed out the pickup to have access to more of a "Rock" sound, while keeping the brighter, cleaner-sounding single-coils in the middle and neck positions, since I only had one electric guitar at the time. That was the only real modification done on this guitar - everything else is basically stock as I purchased it.

My pickup installation "hack" job, done years ago.

This time around, the shielding work on the Strat went way smoother than with the Tele. It's still time-consuming work, but I at least had more of a clue on how to go about it. The best part was that I didn't slice open any of my fingers with the copper foil tape like last time...

Pickup and control cavity, before copper foil tape application...

...and after.

Once the shielding was done, it was on to de-soldering the humbucker pickup and re-installing the single-coil, as well as wiring up a new volume potentiometer (tech name for the "knob"). The old one still works, but it's worn, with audible static-y sounds coming through the amp when you turn the volume knob. They have electronics contact cleaners available that would fix that, but I've never purchased any as of yet. Besides, new pots are fairly cheap. I've found they cost no more than between $5 and $8 a piece. In many cases, less than that, depending on the brand and where you purchase. Plus, I like to practice to improve my soldering technique. I first learned how to solder way back in junior high school, but apparently my technique had been sorely lacking! Thanks to DVDs and YouTube videos, I've recently learned how to correctly solder guitar electronics just in the past few weeks. I'm not sure I'd call my techniques "correct" just yet, but they have definitely improved.

Pickguard turned over to show pickup & control wiring

To insure I wouldn't screw something up, I downloaded a wiring diagram from Seymour Duncan's website. Their free wiring diagram page has PDF files of just about every conceivable pickup configuration - a great resource! There are other free sources of wiring diagrams online, but I find Seymour Duncan's the easiest to read and understand. With my diagram and my trusty tools in hand, this procedure also went pretty smoothly. Oh, and because the pickguard has a large hole cut out to allow the larger humbucker pickup to fit, installing the original pickups and controls into a new pickguard was also part of this job.  When I was installing the humbucker way back then, I wonder why I didn't just buy a new pickguard, instead of "hacking" a larger hole into the original? Youthful impatience? Didn't want to spend the extra money? Who knows? That was nearly 20 years ago...!

Electronics transferred to the new pickguard (note aluminum shielding foil).

The end result, back to its original look (and sound).

Once the job was finished, I installed new strings on the guitar, and everything worked fine. My only gripe is that I'm not getting the amount of reduction in hum and noise that I thought I would with the shielding tape job done; pretty much the same result as when I did the same job on the Tele. Is there something I'm missing? I recently read some articles online about other ways to shield your guitar from electrical interference, including wiring shielded single conductor wire on the output jack, which I did on my brother's bass, and it seemed to help reduce noise quite a bit (in addition to shielding the pickup cavity on his bass as well). So perhaps that's the "missing link". I didn't re-wire the output jack on the Strat, but I plan to as soon as I buy more of that type of wire, and see if that helps reduce more of the hum.

Another shielding technique I read about is to wrap a length of copper foil tape around the actual pickup coils, then solder a ground wire from the tape to the bottom bobbin of the pickup (where the main pickup coil wire is attached). I'm not sure I want to get into that level of soldering, because I read that it's delicate work where you can easily ruin the pickup if you mess up. What I'm thinking of doing instead is buying a new set of Golden Age Strat pickups I've been reading about, from StewMac. They are modestly priced compared to other brands, and they come pre-installed with the shielding I just mentioned. I recently bought a pair of Golden Age humbucker pickups for another guitar of mine, and plan to install those very soon. That will be the subject of my next post. If those pickups are to my liking, I'll most likely go ahead and buy the Strat pickups too. More stuff coming soon...

FYI, it is not at all my intention for this post to be one big ad for StewMac. I certainly don't work for them (haha), but I personally believe them to be a good source for useful (and free) information, as well as buying parts and supplies you need. I figure if you can find everything you need in one place, why not take advantage? But that certainly doesn't mean you can't shop around, which I do as well. Just thought I'd put that out there.

Some helpful articles on guitar electronics:

http://www.stewmac.com/tradesecrets/promo/ts0052_shielding

http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/menu.php (Good info on this site, but it seems to be an older-type site, loaded with annoying pop-up windows when you click page links. You have been warned...)

The Joy (and PAIN) of Shielding Your Electric Guitar

Greetings, folks... Here's my first post on electric guitar repairs and/or modifications. There will most likely be more in the future, because ALL of my guitars need some kind of work done on them!

I'm a big fan of Fender electric guitars. The Fender company pioneered a sound for their instruments that has been imitated by countless guitar manufacturers for over 60 years. The major ingredient to this original sound is in their single-coil pickups. For those not familiar with how electric guitars work, a pickup basically serves as a microphone for the strings, to amplify the sound. The single-coil pickup itself has been around long before Fender (since the 1920's!), but Fender's own patented design definitely has a sound unlike any other.

But as any Fender guitar player knows, the major drawback in that pickup's design is that it can be noisy, especially with your amp set at higher volumes. The most common technical term for this noise is "60-cycle hum". It can be best described verbally as a constant buzzing sound. Without going into more technical details (because I can't, haha), basically the pickup acts as an antenna, picking up interference from other electrical appliances or equipment in the general area of where the guitar is located. This interference is passed though the guitar's wiring, out to the amplifier's speaker as noise, or "hum". A combination of those contributing factors can increase the amount of hum, to the point that the guitar may be considered unusable, especially when performing live on stage. And since so many things around us are "electrified", it makes this problem all the harder to avoid!

Because this hum is inherent in the design of the pickup, it unfortunately can't be eliminated completely. Many have worked for years on methods to reduce the offending noise. In fact, elimination of the hum is the main function the design of the double-coiled "humbucker" pickup serves, and it does a very good job for that purpose. You typically don't get any of the described hum from a well-built humbucker pickup, as the two coils work together to cancel out, or "buck", the hum. However, the humbucker pickup sounds somewhat different than a single-coil, which is why many players who love and prefer the "Fender sound" suffer through that drawback of extra hum and noise, doing what they can to work around it.

Through much online research, I've found many articles reporting that electrical shielding can significantly reduce unwanted noise, including the single-coil pickup's forever-present hum. Many sites have documented instructions on how to do this. It's a fairly involved process. You may wonder, "if it helps reduce the hum, why don't the manufacturers do the shielding at the factory during the building process"? Actually many factories do, to a degree, but the shielding I've seen inside my own guitars seems to be minimal at best. If they did better, more thorough jobs in their shielding, I'm sure due to the amount of labor involved, it would drive up the prices of the guitars considerably.

I'd been wanting to give the shielding jobs a go on my own guitars for a while now, and last weekend I finally got down to business. I have a few electric guitars, but my current "main" guitar is a Fender Telecaster. I've had it since 2007, and I decided that it would be the one to start with. After removing the pickguard and control panel, I could see that it would probably benefit from a shielding job since I'm always struggling with the hum problem, especially when recording with it.

It's "business time"

I purchased what I needed for the job from an online store I recently discovered called Stewart-MacDonald, or "StewMac", a supply store for luthiers (makers of stringed instruments). They seem to have *literally* everything a do-it-yourselfer would want in tools and supplies. Some of the stuff they sell can be difficult or impossible to find at a Guitar Center, or similar music store. I was on the site for hours, finding things I could use, stuff I don't necessarily need, but want anyway... I had to get off that site quick, before I gave them ALL my money... They also had a great article with included pictures on how to perform the shielding job.

Shielding Kit from Stew-Mac

The main supply needed for this job consisted of copper shielding tape. Copper is reputed to be best for electrical shielding. The tape is applied to the cavities that are routed into the guitar's body. It is also applied to the underside of the pickguard (that also holds the front pickup), which is screwed into the body. Basically, if all the shielded parts are connected (touching) physically, it creates a ground connection when your guitar is plugged into your amp, thus creating your shield. The article also explained that if you put a small amount of the tape on the outer edge of the cavities, it will come in contact with the tape on the pickguard. Sounds easy enough to do, right? Well I suppose so, if you've done it before... But since this was my first attempt, it took pretty much ALL day! Mainly, because I didn't want to screw anything up - this guitar was NOT cheap...

Opening up the Tele

Copper tape applied to the cavities

Copper tape applied to pickguard

Anyway, the "pain" part of this job came during the application of the copper tape to the pickguard. In my reading, I was warned that the edges of copper tape can be VERY sharp, and to be careful. And I *was* pretty careful, until I ran my thumb along the edge of the pickguard which, itself, is fairly dull plastic. But I forgot that the edge of the tape was also running along that very same edge of the pickguard, when I proceeded to slice a nice clean cut into the meat of my thumb... OUCH!!! And nearly a week to the day after putting a nice slice into my other thumb, in the kitchen... Not a good week for thumbs, I suppose. OK, lesson learned...  I cleaned myself up, and continued with the job.

Flesh vs. Copper Tape - Guess who wins? (photo taken 1 week later)

Well, after putting the guitar all back together, plugging it in and testing it out, I wish I could now describe to you the "joy" part of the process. However, it's really hard for me to tell if there's much of an improvement. I think there may be *some* reduction in hum, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped. If I turn around to a certain position while holding the guitar, it eliminates almost ALL the hum, but that was pretty much always my method of dealing with the hum problem, before the shielding job. To my ears, it does seem a bit quieter in that certain position than before, but that may be wishful thinking, after all that work... Perhaps the copper tape is not connecting somewhere, who knows? All I know is that I'm now burned out on it, so I'm not gonna be taking that guitar apart again any time in the near future, haha...

I will say though, that it was definitely a learning experience for me. As I mentioned, I have other guitars, all of which could probably benefit from these shielding jobs, so perhaps I'll have better success with them, now that I have a better idea of what I'm doing. Until next time...