Ash Les Paul: Sound Demo

Finally got a sound demo done of this beast in action. Unfortunately, it's me playing again, so no virtuoso performance ;). You'll just have to put up with it I'm afraid! The guitar is being played through a Fender Deluxe 112 amplifier with a Joyo Crunch Distortion pedal. It's feeding back to the bullshit, but hey - I like it! The song is "Mother" by Danzig - one of my favourite songs to play. Easy enough for me to get my fingers around (mostly) if you stay with the rhythm.


I'm certainly no great player, but I gotta say, I love the way this baby sounds. The Entwistle HDN pickups just scream - it's the hottest guitar I've ever owned in terms of sheer output. It was hard to sync up the original backing track with my playing so it's a little off. But hey, you get the picture. Let the flaming begin!!

Ash Les Paul: All Wired Up!

Well it's been a hectic couple of days, but the Ash Les Paul is almost ready to rock. Once the neck glue was dry (I gave it 24 hours), I set about shielding the cavities and wiring the electronics on a cardboard template. The shielding was grounded (pickup cavities and control cavity) and in no time at all the pickups were installed.

The electronics were wired using the "Vintage" Les Paul wiring model. You can see a diagram of this below. The difference between Vintage and so-called Modern wiring is that the Vintage circuit connects the tone capacitor to the output of the volume pot (ie. the middle lug) rather than the input (the outside lug).

Vintage Wiring - Diagram Copyright guitar-mod.com

In simple terms this means that the low pass filter is only applied the signal that the volume pot lets through rather than being applied to the entire (raw) signal. The benefits of this approach are hotly debated in forums across the inter-web, but anecdotally it is said to give a brighter response when dialing down the volume. Whatever. I just like anything with "Vintage" in the title :) .

With the wiring done, I cut some circles of milk bottle plastic to sit under the pots (it stops the pot lugs from inadvertently shorting out) and then installed them. The shielded control covers followed shortly, and a tap test confirmed that everything was working as expected. In addition to the wiring shown in the diagram I also used push pull pots for volume, allowing me to coil tap both the neck and bridge humbuckers. When the volume knobs are pulled out, single coils it is!

With everything in and working, I strung her up for a first test of the Entwistle HDN pickups. I reckon she looks magnificent!

A guitar at last. The burst and zebra pickups look killer!

I'm really digging my burst headstock now.

With the burst and the zebra pickups, this is one mean rock beast. At least in my opinion. Something Slash might find himself holding ;). A first test of the HDNs showed that these are indeeed hot, hot pickups. Even on the clean channel they all but melted my face. For the first time ever I found myself diving for the guitar's volume control! Really a wonderful (powerful!) sound. I have only to file a new bone nut for this beasty and I'll be able to take her for a proper sound test. Stay tuned for some very badly strummed tunes on a very loud, very rock-worthy axe! Guffaw...

335 Semi-hollow Bass: 50s Vintage Wiring - Tweaked!

In the process of creating my wiring harness for the 335 bass, I have re-examined how to go about laying out the wiring harness for a semi-hollow build so that it is both simple, and will survive the installation process. For my other semi-hollow builds (the 12 String 335 and the Les Paul Florentine) I used the following circuit. It's a Gibson 50s Vintage wiring scheme, with the independent volume mod added for good measure.

While this orientation is perfect for wiring those big arse oil-caps into small Les Paul control cavities, when you are talking about mounting in a semi-hollow body those capacitors wired "inline" between the volume and tone pots are devilishly hard to secure. You end up attaching wires to one or both ends of the capacitor legs, and then lashing this to another of the joining wires for stability. All in all, it's a hack at best!

Instead, there is actually no reason why the capacitors couldn't be mounted to the back of the tone pots instead. You see this orientation very often in Fender wiring schemes, and in other single volume / single tone configurations. It's actually a very convenient way of mounting the tone capacitors, especially for semi-hollows! Taking the wiring diagram above, it's a simple matter of shifting the capacitor from before the variable resistance in the tone circuit to "after" it instead. The result is electrically equivalent and much easier to secure and install.

In this configuration we need only piggyback the tone caps to the back of the tone pots. No additional wires need be soldered to the capacitor legs, and no lashing is required to secure the capacitor in place. It's so simple and elegant, why the hell didn't I think of it before??

Anyway, the sucker is wired up. With the volume pots at the top and tones at the bottom the wiring harness is surprisingly neat.