Guitar Gear

Not sure, but for whatever reason, I’ve always been deathly afraid of working on my guitars beyond changing strings or straightening the neck; in other words, doing stuff on the outside. 

But when it comes to electronics, I’ve always been a total chicken shit. Maybe it’s a healthy fear in that I know my limitations: I really don’t know much about electronics. Oh, I can look at connections and determine where stuff goes, but when it comes down to the intricate stuff like soldering, I’ve always deferred to the experts. 

But a few years ago, I thought I’d give it a whirl by trying out a drop-in replacement to my CV Tele’s control panel which promised to offer a wider range of tones than the standard three-way switch could offer by adding a couple of other switches. My thinking at the time was that since my CV Tele only cost me a couple of hundred bucks, I could mess up and not take too big of a loss.

So I installed the new control panel with little fuss or problem, but after playing with it for a few gigs, I just didn’t like what it did to the sound of my guitar. So I decided to go back to my original control panel. 

And though I marked the connections with colored tape, in the process of removing the replacement, I somehow removed the markers. Shit! So I had to take a bit of a guess as to where wires went, and after quite a bit of trial and error, I finally figured out which wires went where. 

So I hooked everything back up, and all seemed to be well. At least, that’s what I thought, until I went to play a solo and moved to my bridge pickup, and all I got was a whole lot of silence! Luckily I had another guitar, and mid-song, I swapped out guitars and finished the gig with my backup.

But that experience kind of turned me off to my CV Tele, and I’m just a little ashamed to say that I let it sit in its gig bag for a couple of years. But the other day, I was on the /guitar Reddit and a few people were showing off their CV Tele’s. I got this guilty feeling from being neglectful of my guitar, so I pulled her out, cleared a space on my coffee table and proceeded to take off her control panel.

Looking at the “work” I did a few years back, I realized that I had been extremely messy with my work, so I reconnected some wires and put new terminals on and just made the whole thing a lot neater. But upon doing a test of the guitar, my bridge pickup was still acting a bit wonky. So I started jiggling wires. What I found was that my original solder of the bridge pickup wire to the switch was tenuous at best. So I took out my soldering iron, and re-soldered the wire back into place. Wow! Everything worked!

After I finished and got everything screwed back into place, I sat back and played for awhile. Then I just laughed at my fear of electronics. It literally took me less than five minutes to get that wire put back into place. Oh silly me…

But I still have a healthy fear of electronics. What I did was a pretty simple fix. If I couldn’t figure it out, I would’ve brought the guitar to my tech. But this particular exercise was a lesson in trying to figure things out myself first. After all, you never know until you try…