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Visio-Wiring_Diagram_for_Bertha_1-5

In my second post of ‘Adding the Guts to Bertha’  build blog, I made mention of some p

retty amazing and seemingly underwhelming parts that will make it into that rig.  I knew about those qualities because of an earlier installation in an LP copy Tradition guitar that had a Seymour Duncan Hot Rodded Set of pickups (which is the SH4 JB  in the bridge and an SH2 Jazz model in the neck) installed in it.  Those pickups saved the day when it came to the tired old rattlers that were in the original ‘instrument’ I bought.

Then one day I was surfing along, with images of pickups and tremolos dancing in my head, when along came a man with a LP and fedora whose name was Joe and he had something for me.  It was something called the Pagey project and Joe (tonefiend) was demoing some changes he had made to his Gibson Les Paul to rival the tone choices Jimmy Page had in his guitar at a point in time.  Then Joe played the original pickup tones and flipped a switch on something surrounding his pickup, what looked to be the surround ring.  I dug for it and found out it was the Triple Shot ring and ordered a pair immediately.

When they arrived I had the cover off the electronics bay of the LP copy before the UPS guy had left the drive and started down the installation process.  It was eerily simply to accomplish, primarily due to great engineering and use casing by SD, and fabulous installation instructions.  I took the wires I had from the new pups and desoldered the connections – then re-soldered them in color ordered to the little circuit puck that is attached by a ribbon cable to the ring.  String the outgoing lead from the ring to the bay, solder those connections up and voila the case cover is back on.

Well I sat down in my favorite chair, lit a stogie and started tinkering with the sounds.  First, the cigar went out almost instantly because I neglected it – the fascination with the tone options was out of control and I played for 2 hours just getting my head around the tonal space now available to me.  The TSR (my abbreviation..) allows you to pick from the normal way the pickup works out of the box (serial connection) to a parallel connected set and you can also coil split the humbucker into a north and south single coil pickup that sounds more like a stratocaster sound than a humbucker pickup.  That’s four possible configuration out of ONE humbucker.   (Jeez!)

It gets even better when you add another pickup with another triple shot in the mix – 16 different tone qualities from a pair of pickups that already sounded great.  The tone knobs add even more options to the degree of flexibility this new option gives the instrument.  I encourage you to watch that video (I’ve linked it at the bottom of this post just in case you’re lazy like I am!)  Bottom line, if you just want something that goes ‘grunt’ and makes a distorted floppy fart sound all the time and you don’t care, please don’t sweat it – the rest of you lazy buggers need to get to Amazon or Musicians Friend or Guitar Center – wherever you shop for stuff, and hunt down the SD Triple Shot rings.  If you use a flat top instrument and tone rings will work on it (like bridge strat humbuckers) then you want the flat ring configuration.  Because many of these will find their way onto Les Paul’s and other carved top axes, there is a carved top set as well that you can pickup (the neck side is skinny and the bridge side is a deeper ring, just like the standard ones).   Once they are installed they blend seamlessly into the look of your guitar and few if any will notice them, and that’s good.  You want to have your audience confused, thinking you’re the genius making that killer noise – and you are, just with a large dollop of assistance from our friends at Seymour Duncan.

Thanks for reading as always!

Seymour Duncan makes these little gems called “Triple Shot rings” and they do some amazing things.  In humbucking pickups (means “bucks hum, or cancels out a single pups nature to hum/buzz) it’s a cosmetic treatment to add plastic rings of matching color to the outside of the pickup to frame it nicely and hide the inners that could show.  SD engineers were clever and realized there was missing real estate that could be used there.

Last preface – humbuckers have two coils stacked atop one another to cancel out the hum and in many of the varieties today you get four wires for connections and a ground lead.  Two must be used and typically the inside two wires in the pup are soldered together and taped off (making a series circuit of the two single coils).  There’s a north set of + and – leads, as well as a south set.

Full on crazies want to see what the tone would sound like if you just used the north, or the south, or maybe had them in parallel instead of series configuration.  Now the wires are pretty delicate and you solder everything in a guitar build so just ‘changing’ it doesn’t fly.  You need to have access to change these setups on the fly.  Enter the triple shot.  It allows you to flips small switches on the players side of the pickup and make these changes while keeping the wiring dead simple. (I made it work with no help and just the instructions.  Just make sure you if you have a carved top set that the skinny one goes on the neck pickup; wordy dirds were used).

Net net – instead of having to build in crazy wiring options, these rings (bridge and neck) will allow me to control what’s doing what and going where for the best tone at the time.  If you are further interested, an aptly named blog from SD called the “Tone Fiend” has a series of posts called the Pagey Project (after Jimmy Page inspired wiring configs).  You have to listen to the YouTube video at that link if you have a remotely discerning ear for tone.  If you’re still thrilled with your TV’s speakers performance, not so much for you probably…

In addition to those, I opted for the big kahuna of Strat switches – the 5 Way 4 Pole switch.  I won’t bore you with that yet; I’ll do it just one with the wiring diagram so you can skip it!.  I’ll be using three knobs to control volume and tone, and these can have additional things configured when you pull the knob up that can kick on (another pup, a tone switch, different phase options, etc).   All of these config options allow for one thing – getting at the capabilities of the gear purchased instead of connecting and forgetting.  I installed the triple shots in a crud korean les paul copy (around a SD Hot Rodded set) and whoa nelly – those pickups gave new tones and even stronger outputs based on what switch options you used (Joe the Tone Fiend explains – in mime….).

The last major bit I’ve failed to mention is the Schaller locking tremolo system (locks at the top and bottoms of the strings) and allows for Steve Vai like dive bombs in pitch without losing the tuning of the string or adding to the risk they’ll break when you whammy up a note (whammy up: use the tremolo bar to pull up, shortening the string and increasing it’s pitch variably).  The tuners I’l'l get to in the finishing stage, but for now that’s where I am at.

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Cheers!  Thanks for reading!

I failed the last post to outline where I’m going with this build diary/journal thingy – let me rectify that now.

1 – Picking my body, neck and equipment (double entendre intended)

2 – Selecting the guts inside the fair lady (this post and next)

3 – How to wire a three humbucker (H-S-H Sizes) Stratocaster style control with my added flavor

4 – Receiving and cataloging gear as it comes in

5 – Build Step 1 – Add the big bits and make it look like a guitar

6 – Build Step 2 – Routing and wiring and soldering, oh my!

7 – Finish work (knobs, switch caps, tuning machines, etc)

8 – First time making noise!

9 – Problem solving

10 – Final product..

If my luck holds and my estimating skills are decent I’m at the end of 10 with a coprophagia grin that is etched on my face!  Onto installment #2 (more dbl entr)…

After placing my order with Warmoth, I was onto the business of figuring how to make the guitar sing.  This means choosing how the sound will eventually get from the strings to the output jack (and out there…).  Starters were the pickups – for the uninitiated (and maybe some of the old timers) pickups are nothing more than magnets, copper wire (mostly) and a housing to make it work in a gorilla pawed customer base.  The special thing about pickups is the WAY in which those components are selected, what order they are built in and the rules used when winding the wire around the magnets.  Over the history of the industry, the pup-wonks (pickups are abbreviated as pups, pu’s or pup in this world) have literally wound millions of pickups and designed I’m sure in the thousands of variations that  make the cut to the marketplace.  Crazy art associated with the mad scientist and modern engineering manufacturers use.

Enough of me gushing – Bertha has a three pups design (Neck, Middle and Bridge – named so as it’s just above the component called the ‘bridge’).   Before I begin, let me preface to avoid a veritable storm of h8rs my way – pickup selection is as personal as which operating system, church, political party or any other purely optional choice.  There are those who are incapable of seeing choices beyond their own as OK – I’m not writing FOR you; I’m sharing WITH you and if it’s not content befitting you eyes please take appropriate action (re: cya).  (whew)

After much toil and search I chose the Seymour Duncan company over DiMarzio and a host of others – not primarily because product is better because there’s just no way to know before you’ve played them yourself.  It was mostly based on experiences I’ve had with SD in the past, and I figured it would be a good start.

Typically (in my experience) pickups in the neck have the most bold tone in the pickup package.  Think of “Freebird” and the heavy rhythm work starting midway in that Lynyrd Skynyrd song – I’d describe the neck pickup as the chunky guitar in the slight background just killing the chords to underpin everything else going on.  They are thick sounding pups compared to the other two positions.

Next I’m going to jump to the Bridge pup position – this is the selection that we all see soloists or lead guitars take when they want to take hold of the audience;  the sound is thinner and can be nasally in some models.  Bridge pickups are by far the biggest group of pup available from the manufacturers where guitarist want to replace their stock pickup for something with more hair, boost, upper tone and other features mass market pups just won’t have (cuz it’s expensive to build quality most times).

Middle pickups are mostly found in standard Fender Stratocasters where the config is three single coil pups (also shown as S-S-S).  At some point, crazy people (descriptive, not pejorative – I’m crazy!)  started installing and building models with three humbucking pups (also shown as H-H-H) into guitars (See the Gibson Black Beauty Les Paul as reference).  This middle pup is in my eyes a chance to blend tones from the heavier, think tone of the neck pup and the sharp, bright tone of the bridge.  This pickup is used for all kinds of reasons however and they range with the level of loony-ness of the builder/client.

After that explanation I should inform you of my choices – I selected for a chambered Strat; Maple on Swamp Ash. The neck is a Maple w/Pau Ferro fingerboard and a Schaller locker. H-S-H routing (all that stuff matters apparently):

For the Neck – SH-10 Full Shred (7.4k resonant freq; EQ – Treble-8; Mid-4; Bass-4)
For the Middle – SHR-1 Hotrails (10.8k resonant freq; EQ  - Treble-4; Mid-7; Bass-5)
For the Bridge – Dimebucker (16.25k resonant freq; EQ -  Treble-8; Mid-5; Bass-6)

The pickup pictures are posted in the final guitar picture.

(Whew – to keep it managable, the rest of this post is located here – thanks for taking the time to check it out!)

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Lateness and laziness kept from the perfection pickup photoshop inserts; there’s a better composition shot in the next post. Again, thanks for reading!

The Gibson 339 guitar has a very interesting pickup configuration and I wanted to show the effects from this arrangement.  It’s nearly 4mb so if your connection is as slow as mine it may take a spat for it to download…

Enjoy and hope this helps if you are looking at getting this amazing little guitar!

Cervical dystonia, also known as spasmodic torticollis, is a focal dystonia characterized by neck muscles contracting involuntarily, causing abnormal movements and awkward posture of the head and neck. The movements may be sustained (�tonic�), jerky (�clonic�), or a combination. Spasms in the muscles or pinched nerves in the neck can result in considerable pain and discomfort. Cervical dystonia may be primary or secondary.

Terms used to describe cervical dystonia include: spasmodic torticollis, torticollis, adult onset focal dystonia. Specific words may be used to describe the position of the neck: laterocollis (head tilts to side); retrocollis (head tilts back), anterocollis (head tilts forward).

Symptoms
In cervical dystonia, the neck muscles contract involuntarily. If the contractions are sustained, they may cause abnormal posture of the head and neck. If the spasms are periodic or patterned, they may produce jerky head movements. The severity of cervical dystonia varies from mild to severe. Movements are often partially relieved by a �sensory trick� (also known as geste antagoniste) such as gently touching the chin, other areas of the face, or back of the head.

Cervical dystonia may begin in the neck and spread into the shoulders, but the symptoms usually plateau and remain stable within five years of onset. This form of focal dystonia is unlikely to spread beyond the neck and shoulders or become generalized dystonia. Occasionally, people with cervical dystonia develop other focal dystonias.

Cause
Cervical dystonia may be primary (meaning that it is the only apparent neurological disorder, with or without a family history) or be brought about by secondary causes such as physical trauma. Cases of inherited cervical dystonia may occur in conjunction with early-onset generalized dystonia, which is associated with the DYT1 gene.

Diagnosis
Diagnosis of cervical dystonia is based on information from the affected individual and the physical and neurological examination. At this time, there is no test to confirm diagnosis of cervical dystonia, and in most cases assorted laboratory tests are normal.

Cervical dystonia should not be confused with other conditions which cause a twisted neck such as local orthopedic or congenital problems of the neck, or ophthalmologic conditions where the head tilts to compensate for impaired vision. It is sometimes misdiagnosed as stiff neck, arthritis, or wryneck.

Treatment
One of the most effective treatments for cervical dystonia is regular botulinum toxin injections to the affected muscles. A multitude of oral medications have demonstrated some benefit. The categories of drugs reported to help relieve the symptoms associated with cervical dystonia include anticholinergic drugs such as Artane �(trihexyphenidyl) and Cogentin� (benztropine); dopaninergic drugs such as Sinemet� or Madopar� (levodopa), Parlodel� (bromocriptine), and Symmetrel� (amantadine); and GABAergic drugs such as Valium� (diazepam).

Selective denervation surgery is an option for some cervical dystonia patients, and deep brain stimulation surgery is beginning to be explored for cervical dystonia as well.

Gentle physical therapy with a physical therapist who specializes in neurological disorders may improve range of motion and help reduce pain.

Complementary therapies should be explored and regular relaxation practices may significantly benefit discomfort and pain.

Source: http://www.dystonia-foundation.org/pages/more_info___cervical_dystonia_spasmodic_torticollis/46.php from the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation.  To Donate to the DMRF, click here