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...