It’s been another busy week here at Aylesbury Guitar Repair, with an interesting mixture of jobs required to be done.
The first was a rather sorry, 30yr old Tangelwood acoustic, whose frets were in appalling condition littered with dents from strings, bizarre diagonal ‘grazing’ and one or two frets with flattened edges under the high E string. Furthermore, the bridge saddle was so low that the guitar was more or less completely choking out around the 5th fret up, and as such was more or less unplayable!
The owner just wanted a basic setup, so the guitar could be played along the length of the neck – not the most demanding of requests on the face of it, although the work to get it there was fairly substantial!
I started by levelling the neck and fret-stoning and re-crowning the frets, then polished to a high shine.
Next, I set about cutting a new bridge saddle from a bone blank, only this one was about an extra third deeper than the original to get sufficient clearance, but with a friendly action to aid playing.
Once the new strings were added I checked the string spacing, action, the intonation, and once satisfied I polished the guitar to finish the job.
This is a completely different guitar from when it arrived, and was very fun to do. Delivering a like-new instrument is always a buzz for me, and I know there will be many hours of enjoyment as a result of the work that was carried out here.
The next guitar was an Ibanez whose pickup selector switch was malfunctioning – there was a spot between positions 1 & 2 where the guitar cut-out completely, and would often get stuck there mid-performance. This was clearly unideal, so a replacement was required.
The switching for this guitar is quite complex, utilising an OTAX VLX91 switch that has double the number of contacts available to create many interesting pickup combinations when using 4-conductor cable.
A a H-H equipped guitar, the sonic options for this guitar are very varied with the following…
1. Neck wired series
2. Neck wired parallel
3. Neck and bridge together
4. Inner coils
5. Bridge wired series
With this you can get some lovely warm tones, powerful ones (courtesy of the DiMarzio Evolution pickups) and single coil out-of-phase-type scooped ones.
The wiring was a little bit tricky in places – quite precise and fiddly – but the job was done first time and the owner is super happy with a more taut switch, minus the unwanted killswitch bonus!
Another job that took place today was a setup on an incredible Overwater bass. This is a custom-made instrument that needed thicker strings to accommodate the new owner’s preferences in feel. The action needed to go too, and this was helped by the increased gauge, and then the intonation needed some adjustment.
I typically find that 5-string basses are quite challenging to get perfect on the Low B, but the Hipshot bridge on this bass was fantastic and settled really well! Highly recommended.
What was interesting on this instrument was that the fretboard was so flat – there was minimal radius in the fretboard, but it was wonderfully playable!! An all-round beautiful instrument!
