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Soldering advice / Guitar electronics
valgomir
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey,
I am planning on modifying my guitar and Wah pedal as a small electronics project. I figured this would help me understand electronics in general a bit better, and give me some soldering experience which can only come in handy (I am studying electrical engineering / IT; second semester starts in a month and a bit).
I've come here to ask what I should pay attention to when doing this (since this I have absolutely no experience in soldering whatsoever, apart from watching my father repairing one of my guitar cables a while back), and to confirm the basics I've worked out so far, all the theoretical stuff.
What I want to do
- Guitar mods
The guitar I am planning to modify is a Jackson DXMG with two EMG-HZ humbuckers (the coils are in series), a 3-way blade switch, a tone and a volume pot.
The wiring as it is now can be seen here:
(I am not entirely sure if the north or south coils are the first in the signal chain right now, but it doesn't really matter, as you will see in a second)
Old wiring
Now, I basically want to do two things with this:
* wire the coils for each pickup in parallel
* replace the volume and tone pots with push/pull pots that can be used to cut the innermost coil of each pickup out of the signal chain
I worked out that the wiring should look like this afterwards:
(since the coils are in parallel in this, it doesn't really matter which was the first in the signal chain before -- I'll have to reconnect each cable anyway)
New wiring
- Wah pedal mods
Nothing too fancy here; I own a Dunlop Cry Baby (the GCB-95) and I want to exchange two of the resistors (the "Vocal mod" and "midrange boost" on this page).
I do have a question though: How do I even access the back side of the board for soldering?! It seems to be held in place by only one (incredibly tight) screw, but surely that can't be... right?
What I know about soldering
- before using a brand new soldering iron, coat it with soldering tin first
- don't put your jacket on it when it's hot (I learned that from my dad's bad example
)
As you can see, that is next to bugger-all. So if you have anything to add, any advice, any remarks about how I am terrible and I will blow myself up if I do it the way I figured I'd do it... feel free to comment!
PS: Sorry about the bad mspaint drawings. But that's just how I roll.
I am planning on modifying my guitar and Wah pedal as a small electronics project. I figured this would help me understand electronics in general a bit better, and give me some soldering experience which can only come in handy (I am studying electrical engineering / IT; second semester starts in a month and a bit).
I've come here to ask what I should pay attention to when doing this (since this I have absolutely no experience in soldering whatsoever, apart from watching my father repairing one of my guitar cables a while back), and to confirm the basics I've worked out so far, all the theoretical stuff.
What I want to do
- Guitar mods
The guitar I am planning to modify is a Jackson DXMG with two EMG-HZ humbuckers (the coils are in series), a 3-way blade switch, a tone and a volume pot.
The wiring as it is now can be seen here:
(I am not entirely sure if the north or south coils are the first in the signal chain right now, but it doesn't really matter, as you will see in a second)
Old wiring
Now, I basically want to do two things with this:
* wire the coils for each pickup in parallel
* replace the volume and tone pots with push/pull pots that can be used to cut the innermost coil of each pickup out of the signal chain
I worked out that the wiring should look like this afterwards:
(since the coils are in parallel in this, it doesn't really matter which was the first in the signal chain before -- I'll have to reconnect each cable anyway)
New wiring
- Wah pedal mods
Nothing too fancy here; I own a Dunlop Cry Baby (the GCB-95) and I want to exchange two of the resistors (the "Vocal mod" and "midrange boost" on this page).
I do have a question though: How do I even access the back side of the board for soldering?! It seems to be held in place by only one (incredibly tight) screw, but surely that can't be... right?
What I know about soldering
- before using a brand new soldering iron, coat it with soldering tin first
- don't put your jacket on it when it's hot (I learned that from my dad's bad example
)As you can see, that is next to bugger-all. So if you have anything to add, any advice, any remarks about how I am terrible and I will blow myself up if I do it the way I figured I'd do it... feel free to comment!
PS: Sorry about the bad mspaint drawings. But that's just how I roll.
valgomir on
0
Posts
If you don't have anything to practice on, just go real slow and check each joint as you go. Spend as little time as you can actually holding the iron to the joint though, because you can fry components if you heat them up too much. Looking at the stuff you want to do I don't see anything that's really sensitive to heat, but it's good to form good habits early on.
Also, the best thing you can do to keep your iron working well is keeping the tip clean. A lot of times you see dudes using a damp sponge on the tip to get the shit off of it, but I don't like this because it cools it down and also you start getting a nasty brown crust from the impurities in the water. Radio Shack sells tip cleaner which works reasonably well, but I've found that just rubbing the tip in some steel wool works even better, and it's way cheaper.
hitting hot metal with hammers
Soldering is very easy though. I knew nothing about it when I started learning electronics from a book, after a month or two I had done a bunch of console mods/repairs and built a supergun from scratch.
Radio shack will have cheap perfboard which you can use to practice. Pickup some cheap components, resistors etc and practice with them.
Something like this
http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2104052
If you don't have one already get a cheap digital multimeter, make sure it has a continuity check but i'm pretty sure its hard to find one without it. You can use this for checking your soldering. And it makes troubleshooting a hell of a lot easier.
I like to clean/tin my iron after every 10~ points done, that might be overboard but it seems to make it easier to get clean connections. I also use one of the non sponge cleaners which look like steel wool and prefer them over the wet sponge.
Make sure you have ventilation.
this is also really helpful
http://mightyohm.com/blog/2011/04/soldering-is-easy-comic-book/
Steam/PSN/XBL/Minecraft / LoL / - Benevicious | WoW - Duckwood - Rajhek
It'll be a while until I can actually practise on my old guitar as I am spending some time at my parents' home and haven't got the guitar with me. BUT I will take my soldering iron with me and practise on the cables. Once I do get around to it, I'll update this thread though.
Instead of soldering the T junctions as they look on the diagram I would solder the two wires onto the switch connection (so they are actually a V with the switch at the bottom of the V). Then when the switch disconnects you don't have a section of wire running to nowhere. Wires that are only connected to a circuit at one end form an antenna. Since the wire is short and the cavity is probably shielded it might not make a difference, but I thought I'd mention it anyway, as I'd play it safe if it was me.
Few guitar related soldering tips:
-Try and get every joint perfect, having something fail on stage is a high price to pay.
-If the jack socket gets loose on the guitar, tighten it up right away. If it juggles around it jiggles the wires around inside the guitar, and eventually something will give out.
-Usually its good to leave a bit of slack with wiring, but in a tiny guitar cavity it can end up turning into confusing spaghetti, so keeping the wires just long enough makes things neater and easier.
-Solid core wire breaks eventually if you bend it repeatedly, so if you wire it up with that try not to flex it more than necessary.
-Soldering to the back of potentiometers is a huge pain in the ass. You need a powerful soldering iron and something to roughen the surface. Depending on the pot you can ground the casing in easier ways though, which is worth considering if you don't have spare potentiometers around to practice on.
About the potentiometer soldering: My soldering iron goes up to 400 °C, if that's what you mean by powerful. (I got a soldering station from my father. It has a temperature control knob.) How would I roughen the surface? Use sandpaper or something similar?
Easier alternatives would probably be better. I assume by that you mean grounding directly to the tremolo system / bridge / pickguard (which is not the case on my guitar, but in general), right? I guess I could practise on my old guitar's pots, but I'd rather not waste them by being silly.
Shrink tubing is fantastic. Easier than tape. I'll recommend it for anywhere you have a connection on exposed conductor. Also works as a bit of strain relief on the solder joints that get bumped around in there. A hairdryer or very carefully holding a low temp solder iron near (no contact, keep it moving) are enough to shrink them down.
In this specific case do what Technicality said, I totally agree you need to watch out for interference over these wires. Actually, do everything Technicality said.
Power isn't just max temp (though yours is fine there). It's also going to be the ability to hold that temp while you're making contact with the components (which will be acting as a heat sink). Heck, you're an EE: it's wattage. You'll need the iron pretty hot to de-solder anything.
Since it hasn't been brought up yet: the pedal. Yeah, it might just be that one screw holding the board in. Or it might have the biggest blob of hot glue you've ever seen on the other side.
In general soldering tips: just watch out for cold solder joints. Make sure what you are soldering to is what gets hot: the solder should melt to the component, not to the iron. Needle-nose pliers are a fantastic thing to have for holding stuff. You'll totally need something to grip the components you're trying to remove from a printed circuit board (like your pedal).
About the shrink tubing: if I soldered together the wires and put shrink tubing around them, wouldn't there still be a small gap in between two wires? I imagine that since the shink tubing only has two ends, but three cables are supposed to come out, two would have to go through the same end of the shrink tubing...
Thankfully though, it's not necessary to do this, as mentioned above.
I think I still have some needle-nose pliers lying around somewhere... I'll make sure to use them.
Thanks
Edit:
Switching diagram
I just meant that in general, shrink tubing is nice. You are correct and should certainly avoid splicing wires to other wires when you can, since it's often a better idea to solder to a solid point (on a component). If I had to make a three way splice (which you have noted that you do not), yeah, two wires in one end, one in the other. Not optimal.
(picture link)
The next step will be to
I've made some progress now.
First of all, I rebuilt the blue guitar I took apart a while ago (see last post) and resoldered everything as it was, with one exception:
I had to leave out the bridge / middle tone potentiometer because for some reason the cable from the SPDT switch to the pot was too short all of a sudden o_O I did not shorten it, and I'm pretty sure I used the exact same cables for every connection I used before. Maybe mixed up some grounding wires, but those were not the problem.
But that's not a big issue since it was only an exercise in soldering guitar electronics, and that worked well. I don't use that guitar anymore, anyway.
Now, today I made the first "real" step towards modding my Jackson, by taking it apart. Basically the same deal as with the cheap Stratocaster, except I didn't bother to unscrew all the tuners and such
Only when I wanted to start desoldering the parts I noticed something horrible:
I had made the mistake to not look at my pickups (or, more precisely, the cable connection on the pickups).
It turns out that the EMG H-3 pickups in my guitar are connected via a 5-pin connector.
That means, no parallel switching for me.
FFFFF....
Not to worry, I searched around the internet a little and decided to buy some new pickups. Oh well, I said, at least I can be sure that those will sound good (it even said they had great parallel switching and coil cut properties). So that's 140 € down the drain. Hope they're worth it.
So I desoldered the pickup cables from the grounding points and the SPDT switch, went on to desolder everything else, and took it all out of the body.
With all that done, I decided I'd see how much less space would be available in the electronics cavity with push/pull pots instead of the normal ones.
Lo and behold, the actual potentiometer part of the push/pull ones was much smaller than the original ones.
(old one on the left, new one on the right)
(another picture)
Well, shit.
I tried putting them in there, and it worked (just about), but I get the feeling that there might be some problems with that...
The plan is, I'll wait for the new pickups (and some more cables, just in case) to arrive, which should be in about a week. Then it's wiring time.
And the Cry Baby thing I'll probably do sometime soon, as with the money spent on new pickups, I don't exactly have a lot left for a new amp. We'll see...
Also, I edited the last post because tinypic ate the image. *shakes fist*
Pictures incoming:
Now that this has happened, I'm almost ready for the next step. Problem is, I just discovered I have neither a cable stripper nor electrical tape here so I'll have to get that over the weekend. I think in a week or two at most I'll have everything installed and I'll test it out.
Hooray!
Oh yeah, forgot to add, I bought a DiMarzio Air Norton for the Bridge position (it's usually meant to go into the neck position but whatever) and a DM Air Zone for the Neck position.
I finally got around to doing everything after buying the required tools (clamps, cable strippers) and getting a day off.
The guitar was already disassembled, the pickups were here, the wiring diagrams done, so I started soldering and assembling everything.
The pickups go in #1
The pickups go in #2
The pickups go in #3
Cable salad, om nom nom. (That's actually not too bad yet...)
Delicious.
Better view of the electronics.
... I have no words.
I decided that wiring the ground connections to the backs of the pots was too hard for me (solder kept falling off when I tried to push the wires in), so I simply wired all the ground wires together (2 per pickup, 1 from each coil splitting switch, one from the tone pot, one from the casing of the pickup selector and one to the bridge ground).
The assembled guitar, minus strings. (Hence the pencil, to keep the bridge from getting pulled into the body)
Guitar plus strings
But the tale does not end here.
When I finally plugged it in, I noticed that all the guitar did was buzz around a lot.
Touching the outer part of the jack seemed to decrease the noise, as did touching one of the pots at the same time AND the tremolo block.
Obviously, these are not the most practical circumstances when you actually want to PLAY your guitar, so I had to figure out what was wrong.
It was obvious even to me that there was a grounding issue, what with the whole buzzing... I wasn't surprised, given the masterful grounding scheme I had employed.
So I screwed the guitar open again, removed ALL the wires and rewired it from scratch.
This time I even used the pots as grounding points.
And all that came of it was that the buzzing could not even be persuaded to leave if you touched any grounding points.
All. Of. My. What.
I went to a guitar store and had one of the employees (their tech guy) have a look at the guitar and my wiring diagrams. As far as he could tell everything was fine (even my wiring job itself) but he suggested I try out different ways of connecting the grounds (as in, there were some small lugs screwed into the guitar body, and he told me to try and connect them to ground).
So I went back home, screwed the guitar open AGAIN, plugged it in, took a spare wire and tried to find a connection that would make the noise go away.
Turning down the Volume pot proved successful, so I concentrated my efforts on that pot.
Long story short, it turns out I should have connected the ground coming from the volume pot to more than just the outer part of the output jack.
Who'd have thought cables aren't supposed to be used as ground?
So I tried it out without buzz and decided that my whole plan was shit. The guitar sounded okay, but the change in tone when switching between humbucking / single coil mode was so minimal that I decided to instead switch between parallel and series wiring.
(r, g, b and w are the cables coming from the pickup)
The final wiring diagram. Didn't put all the wires connecting ground points in there, because that'd just make it confusing.
So I did that and now it's awesome. Powerful sound with the coils in series, nice sparkly sound with coils in parallel and, most importantly, NO HUM.
Thank you very much.
Now let this thread die or whatever...