Epiphone Les Paul - the final mod

I've finally reached the point where I can say that I will no longer delve into the guts of this beast.
Honestly I've no idea of the amount of hours I've put into it, but it's now very nice to play and sounds great!
Currently it's setup with 12-56 gauge round wound strings, has a Wilkinson Roller bridge, Bigsby B7 with Vibramate and a pair of matched humbuckers from a Gretsch 5120.

The original and replacement PAF style pickups never sounded much good to my ear, and the P-Rails did not really suit. The Gretsch pickups have turned out to make the guitar sound rich and gutsy. Excellent clean tones and can really drive a valve preamp.

I modded the Bigsby a little as the arm did not come far enough over the strings for my playing style. I filed the aluminium nub down a to get the end of the bar over the 3rd string. This way I don't have to reach across with my stubby fingers to play the way I want to.

As with many things that have passed across my guitar rack, this one was recently sold, in favour of another instrument that is on it's way to me in the post. Somehow it became apparent that I might have too many electric guitars and not enough tonal variety.

Hopefully the new owner appreciates the work that was put into it.

Epiphone Les Paul: a Mod Story

My Les Paul hasn't seen much action since I bought it. A cheap guitar that I never had professionally setup.
Playing it was like fighting it. The action was all wrong, the intonation was impossible and the neck was bowed.
I hadn't had the confidence to have a crack at it myself as getting information from the net isn't always reliable.
A couple of months ago I bought a book on setting up guitars. It explained clearly and with pictures what needed to be done. Also a few tools that were recommended that I hadn't considered.
One of them being an 18" straight edge. I'd looked around online and they weren't cheap.
I wasn't about to spend $40 on what is essentially an 18" ruler.

From one of my other projects, I had some leftover U shaped aluminium rail, which was a little longer than needed. After testing how straight it was against a known surface, I trimmed the excess and set to work on the Les Paul.

I loosened it off before tightening, using the DIY straight edge to ensure that I was on track.
Gradually tightening the truss rod and checking with the straight edge, I could see that the bow of the neck was becoming less pronounced. At each adjustment I'd play each string along the neck and double checking the trouble spots that I'd known about from before.

Pretty quickly it was obvious that the playability was improving. I'd adjusted the bridge for a fairly low action, so when I hit the strings hard there's a bit of buzz on the neck, but it's not audible through the pickups. I need the low action on this guitar as the neck is quite fat and I have fairly small hands.

The next thing that needed attention was the intonation. I'd had a lot of trouble with intonation on this guitar, to the point where the saddles would not travel far enough in either direction to compensate. Some of this was no doubt due to the action and lack of setup, but it was also a common problem with the cheap bridge used on a lot of Epiphone guitars. I'd added a Bigsby recently and figured that having a roller bridge wouldn't hurt any, so I picked up a Wilkinson clone for around $20 online, which turned out to be the best thing I could have done.
The design of the bridge is such that there is a lot of room backward and forward to adjust, as well as being able to flip its saddles without much effort. Intonation was breeze and the guitar was setup in maybe half an hour.

When I installed the Bigsby, I used a Vibramate to mount it in the existing post holes. The posts came out with little effort (I only needed to use my fingers), which I thought might be a problem later on. during the setup, one side of the Vibramate had lifted out of the body. I wedged it back in, but this doesn't seem like its going to be the end of that issue. I left it overnight, so it's holding for the time being.

The Bigsby design has two design flaws in my opinion. One, the way that the strings are mounted and the other is the limited movement of the vibrato bar. It doesn't allow the bar to move over the strings and sits just next to the high E. This means an adjustment of technique, by either grabbing it with my pinky, or pausing on a chord to move the bar. On my other guitars I usually have the bar centered over the strings and Hold it with three fingers while playing. I'm probably going to grind the stopper off the Bigsby to retain that freedom of movement.

You might recall that I scored some pickups from my friend's Gretsch. One of these I modified to fit in the neck position of the Les Paul. The biggest delay in putting this guitar back together was that I had not been lucky with trying to make a pickup ring to suit. It's not a standard sized mini humbucker, so there aren't any off the shelf solutions going around. What I ended up doing was modifying a standard humbucker ring to hold it on place. Now I have the same problem with this pickup as I do with the Filtertron on my Surfcaster. The string width is different. On Gretsch guitars the spacing is a little wider than Gibson spacing (which the Les Paul and Surfcaster use). This is no big deal on the center strings, but the E strings fall inside of the pole pieces and not directly over the op of them as intended.

I never thought it would make much of a difference. But it does. It makes a huge difference. The inner strings have great clarity and impact, where the outer strings are dull and lackluster. The pole pieces can be adjusted, but it only makes the string louder without the characteristic tone of the pickup.

One way of compensating for this is to put the pickup on an angle, so that the string almost sits in middle of the pair of poles. At this point I haven't managed to get quite enough of an angle and will need to extract the pickup and trim some more metal off the pickup casing.

The Gretsch pickup has a nice piano like tone, which really changes the character of the guitar. Coupled with the Semour Duncan P-Rail and the active EQ, I really do have a lot of tone options available on this guitar.
It's not quite finished, but I'm happy with the sound and feel, so it will likely be some time before I attend to the remaining issues.


So many guitars. So little time!

2011 - Weber Z-Matcher

Weber Z-Matcher 50W version

I've had this red box for a few months now, and have used it exclusively with my Fender Princeton Reverb RI and Epiphone 12" cab, which resided in my isolation cab.

The Princeton is engineered for a nominal load of 8 Ohms, but the Epiphone cab is 16 ohms. Everything I've read about the subject is that the amp down't handle the higher load very well, and that it would be better to run two 8 om speakers in parralell(gets you 4 ohms), rather than an 8 and 16. It's all to do with math and ratio's and running mismatched loads is a no no. Sure it's going to get you a load of 6 ohms or so, but since one speaker has less resistance, most of the power will go through there and will naturally be louder than the other as a matter of course. Also this doesn't fit the ratio that the amp requires.
First I tried using a resistive dummy load to match everything up, but since a speaker doesn't have a fixed resistance (due to the combination of frequency and inductance of the voice coil), the results weren't exactly pleasing.

I'd read all about inductive loads being the way to go, and pretty much the only one that I could find with any reviews, was the one from Weber. The manufacturers of fine speakers for guitar amps.
After a lot of deliberation and indecision, I decided that having a variable inductive load would be the way to go. so I bought the 50w Z-Matcher.

The purchasing process is a little odd, it's all via email and can take some time to get your quote back, but the staff were helpful when arranging the postage. But the transaction itself was done via Paypal and they were happy to send it Via USPS when asked. Weber build all of their stuff to order, so there's a bit of a waiting period, but being in Australia, I've gotten used to waiting for my stuff to arrive. Hey, if I can't get what I want locally (or locally at a competitive rate), then I have to go offshore for the products I want/need.

They estimated up to six weeks for assembly, but it was at my door in less than a month (not bad in my opinion). Anyway, back to the box. It came in a simple postage container wrapped in paper and bubble wrap. It's quite a heavy unit, so I delayed taking it home for a few days.
There's no manual to speak of, but there's no need if you're familiar with the basics of speaker matching (all us amplified guitars and bassists should be!).

Front Panel:
amp in
amp impedance (2-16 ohms)
speaker impedance (2-16 ohms
speaker out

Rear Panel
Line Volume
Line out - Balance
Line out - unbalanced
Parallel Speaker out

It was put to work matching the Epiphone Cab in the isolation box.
The first test I ran it through was the line out. Honestly I wasn't really impressed. Clean guitar was fine, but overdriven just sounded fizzy (pretty much like any amp with line out ever).
But hey, I wasn't exactly expecting a miracle there.

The next test I did was mic (Shure SM57) up the speaker and A/B that with the line out. Guess what? The mic even carelessly placed, sounded a lot nicer than the line out. I left it like this for a few months, and just playing with it when I had a couple of spare hours. After a while I noticed a bit of a weird distortion when using reverb on the Princeton. Especially if I was driving the reverb hard. I figured it was either a dodgy cable or maybe a quirk of the speaker cab inside a fairly small volume of air (there's a lot going on in an iso cab with a large speaker. Standing waves and other funky things can send voltage back to the transformer of the amp if you're unlucky). Also my headphones are a little rattly in some frequencies.

Upon further investigation, it turned out not to be a problem with anything mentioned above, and I haven't got definitive proof yet, but I have a hypothesis which makes sense (need to find an engineer wiling to experiment).

I decided to test the whole rig outside of the cabinet and directly with my ears, reducing the variables where interference could occur(cab, mic, lead, mixer, earphones). First up, I tested the amp by itself on a rubber mat to damp vibrations into the floor. Aside from making the house rattle when it was barely past two on the dial, the amp sounded as it should with the reverb cranked).

The next thing I did was to put the Z-Matcher between the amp and it's stock 10" speaker and set for 8 ohms per side. The distortion came back. Next I plugged in the 16 ohm cab. Again, fine on straight guitar signal, weird distortion with reverb. Last up I placed the speakers in parallel. The 16 ohm cab directly into the amp, and the 8 ohm stock speaker via the Z-Matcher (the amp side of the Z-Matcher was set to 16 ohms in order to present and 8 ohm overall load to the amp). As I'd already had a suspicion that the distortion was happening inside the Z-Matcher, it was no surprise to find that I had the distortion coming through the 10" speaker and not the 12".

The Z-Matcher works flawlessly with any signal presented to it as long as there is no reverb in the mix.
What I think is happening is that there are weird things happening inside the inductors of the Z-Matcher, due to the complex reflections generated by the reverb.

Reverb adds to those complexities and since the coils of the Z-Matcher aren't on the move as they would be with a speaker/magnet combination, there is a bit of a inductive choke effect going on and the result is the distortion that I'm hearing. It's subtle and I don't think that it would matter much in a band setting. The sound does stand out for me now as I'm aware of it. But I don't think it's a deal breaker on the Z-Matcher. It's just a quirk of electromagnetism and I can live with it as the unit serves it's purpose.

Works in progress

I've got the parts for my next upgrade projects.
Well most of them.
Waiting on a roller bridge for the Les Paul and an adjustable wrap tail for the Surfcaster.

The Bigsby and Vibramate were easy to fit to the Les Paul, though the strap button wasn't quite in the right spot, so had to be re positioned.  Haven't got strings on there yet as I want to mess with the pickups again.\

I did a quick and dirty job of rigging up the Filtertron on the Surfcaster.
So far I'm quite happy with the sound of this guitar/pickup combo. It's now got the right kind of bottom end and bite. Very nice cleans, very "alive" sounding.

Both guitars will probably end up being setup for flat wound 12's.

Who knows, it might be awesome?

Am leaning toward Filtertrons on the Les Paul now too.
At least one in the neck and the P-Rail in the bridge.

2011 - DIY Isolation Cabinet

Anyone who lives in an apartment, townhouse or just generally close to their neighbours and plays guitar (or any other instrument) knows that noise can be a point of contention for those who don't appreciate your style or tones. My home is old, and pretty much everything that can rattle, does rattle when my amps are turned up to the sweet spot for tone.

Actually, the house starts to rattle a lot lower than that.
To give you an idea of what that equates to on the dial, it's about 30% on an Epiphone Valve Jr, position 2 on a Fender Princeton and about 10% on a Delta Blues. What might sound great for recording, doesn't translate to a good relationship with one's neigbours.

To get the maximum tone out of my amps and to keep things friendly, I decided to build an isolation cabinet to place a speaker cabinet and microphone inside. Simple enough idea, go get some plywood or mdf and something to dampen the sound waves. I totally over-engineered the box in terms of my level of skills.
I'm no carpenter, and it's fairly obvious by the end product, that maybe I should have gone down a much simpler path. But I've made my bed so to speak, and must lay in it!

The materials cost around $120 Australian all up.

Had I just built it out of 18mm ply or MDF it would have cost around 30% less, and taken about 80% less time too!

Anyway, the bill of materials is as follows.
5 x lengths of  19x70x1800mm cut into 600mm sections x 12
1 sheet 9x1200x2400mm Plywood cut into 8 equal panels (leaves two spare to make a pedal board from).
45 x12mm screws
Wood glue
One bag of R3 "Sound Screen" Rockwool

I wanted to get some skills with making joins, rather than using a bunch of brackets to hold the frame together.
My plan was to make a finger joint for the front and back frame, connected by the side frames which were made as lap joints to the front and back. This arrangement in theory would create a perfect 600mm cube.

What I forgot to account for was the thickness of the plywood and my crappy skills getting in the way.

I'd bought a book on woodworking and gone out and bought a cheap set of chisels.
Only one of the chisels was sharp enough to do any cutting, and by the time I got through making one pocket for the finger joint, it was immediately apparent that I was not going to finish the project in a short amount of time. I'd recently bought a plunge router attachment for my Dremel, and wanted to use it, but had never actually played with a router before. So I put together a jig and fooled about until I had a working setup.

The jig worked ok, but wasn't exactly at the right height to work effectively. Also I think the Dremel itself isn't quite up to the task of making the depth of cuts required for an accurate join. I experienced a bit of shuddering in the slot which caused uneven fingers and pockets as well as at one point, the depth guide failed and I plunged too far into one pocket. After all of this I was getting the hang of the tool. Close to completing the routing and having a set of fingers that would work ok, the Dremel stopped dead in it's tracks.

I ended up reverting to a saw and chisel arrangement that was less than ideal. I lacked to tools to do the job accurately, and often I lacked the patience and just rushed the cutting, only to have very uneven joints at the end of the day. Somehow I managed to get the front and rear frames glued square. But at some later point, I forgot to do this when trying to get the cube assembled. I'm a family man and have responsibilities, so I was often called away from the job. Due to my impatience to get on with it when I returned to the task, errors began to creep in. The final product means that it's mostly square, but not quite. Front, back, sides and bottom are all ok, but for whatever reason, the lid is not.

It was all glued up in a day, and while that set, I put the panels on. Everything seemed fine, and after letting the wood glue set for an hour or so, I began to implement the rockwool. This is an itchy business. The insulation is quite thick and difficult to compress via hand. I'd also run out of timber, so that I couldn't add any mechanical force to press the rockwool against the sides of the box.

Out of desperation to complete the job before the daylight faded (I have to work outside) I placed my Epiphone Valve Jr cabinet within the frame, inside the exposed rockwool. It was obvious right away that this had the potential to tear the insulation on insertion and removal. Since the shops were closed, I decided to cut up the tarpaulin that covers my work bench. I'd cut it in roughly 700mm sections that I could place over the rockwool and  stapled it around the opening in the cabinet. The tarp is plastic and made the cabinet slide in and out of the box easy and reduced the amount of particles that would be kicked up, reducing the skin irritation caused by handling the stuff.

After sitting about for a week, due to weather and having to work my day job, I decided to change out the tarp for a rough hessian weave. This isn't completely impervious to the dust and itchiness from the Rockwool, but it doesn't make a crinkling sound when moved about, nor is it reflective like the plastic of the tarp.

I tested the cabinet early in the afternoon, with my Epiphone 12" extension speaker driven by the matching 5w head. It did ok, but there was a lot of bass being let out at maximum volume, which was a little dissapointing to say the least. If it didn't cope with five watts, what chance did it have when three times the power was put to the test? As it turned out, I needn't have worried. Insulation in the lid, wasn't a perfect fit, so I augmented it with a picnic blanket! (Simply because I didn't want to mess around with the leftover Rockwool at this point). I'd adjusted this and then plugged in my Fender Princeton Reverb, the results were more in line with what I expected.

The bass trap absorption in the cabinet isn't great, but even when the amp is at full volume, you can have a conversation at a pretty normal level. The house does vibrate a bit, and I'd done the initial test in the kitchen which has a tiled floor. I spoke with one of my neighbours about it and he told me that he could only just hear it whenhe opened his front door. A good sign! The tone from the speaker and microphone is good too, not boxy compressed sound, it just sounds like the mix is up against the grille cloth(which it is). The box isn't air tight, which might actually be a good thing from what I have read.

Were I to do this over, I'd just get a 1200 x 2400 slab of 18mm thick ply cut to size and glue that together, rather than messing about with crazy joinery that I clearly wasn't up to doing well.

Sound samples and more pics to come.

2009 - Fulltone Mini Deja Vibe2

For years I wanted a univibe clone. Always baulked at the expense.
All of the clones cost a heck of a lot. There are a lot of clones too, so which one to pick?
Obviously I eventually settled on the Fulltone, but it was an almost agonising decision.

The MDV2 costs RRP $565 or there about the last time I looked.
No way was I going to pay that much for what is essentially a glorified phaser.
So I started looking further afield...

USA prices were much more reasonable, and our two currencies were nearly at a ratio of 1:1.
I'd sold a bunch of lesser pedals and had a few $ sitting in my paypal account waiting to be put to use.
There was a shop in Melbourne that had one in stock, but when I went to try it out the sales guy told me it'd been moved to another store on the outskirts of the metropolitan area and wasn't coming back for at least a month. Since my effort to try one out in person was thwarted, the only thing to be done was hit the internet.

Not a heck of a lot of information was available on this unit. Not many demos either.
So it was a bit of a leap of faith when I decided to buy online. It was a little over half the Aussie RRP including postage.

So I bought it and then had to wait....
It seemed to take ages to get here, but in reality only took a week.
The unit is fairly large, with considerable weight.
Nice and creamy coloured and the PCB is compact and nicely laid out.
It's been modified from the original to allow a higher and brighter output if one chooses.

When I finally had the opportunity to play it, I had mixed feelings.
The wobble and whoosh was nice, but on my DI rig and Epiphone amps it seemed to drop a lot of bottom end off when engaged. The MDV2 does the lopsided swooshy throb thing very well. Vibrato mode sounded quite subtle but more of just an add on option rather than a useful effect. I liked it, but wasn't really all that impressed. So for most of the time I've had the pedal, it has remained in a drawer and potentially facing the auction block. Also the phase on the lowest speed almost sounded as if the effect was off.

That was until yesterday....

Yesterday I dusted it off and plugged it into the Delta Blues, oh boy what a difference!
I swear there's something about that amp that maxes everything sound good. I'm not saying magical or mojo, but something fundamental on the electrical level. The difference I suspect is the input impedance.
On a stock Epiphone Valve Jr, the input impedance is about 100k and on the Delta Blues spec states 470k.
The end result is the Delta Blues has a greater frequency range on input and your guitar and effects can drive the valve stage a little harder (The Valve Jr is easily modified to rectify this).

The effect that this had on the univibe clone was an overall improvement in sound quality. The bass cut I'd experienced before has gone away. The phasing at low speed is much more pronounced and the pitch wobble in the vibrato mode is now clearly audible. In fact on both settings, the depth control doesn't need to be on maximum. The effects come through nice and clear, great on clean and distorted alike!

In all, I'm glad I didn't part with the MDV2. It's definitely a keeper.

2008 & 2009 Epiphone Valve Jr Combo and Stack

As many of you already know, the Valve jr is a simple two valve circuit.
It's also a modders delight, which has spawned a whole sub industry of kits and forum threads dedicated to getting the most out of it. Now I'm a guy who likes to pull everything apart and get the soldering iron in there(more on that in a future post). But I haven't done anything more than swap out the valves.

I happen to own two incarnations of this amp, one each of the combo and mini stack.

Honestly I've left them as is, for the simple reason that I like the sound of them as is.
The only reason I changed any tubes out was because I knocked over my combo and one of the tubes became rattly.

I've owned a number of valve amps over the years, and these are the only ones that I ever noticed a significant change in the tone after a good warm up period. After about 40 minutes the top end opens up providing a crisp tone and a little more volume.

My first one came along because I didn't have an amp at the time and heard the buzz on the interweb about them. I picked it up from a local 2nd hand dealer for about $180 and haven't looked back. The stack I bought new from an instrument dealer in the CBD, can't remember how much I paid for it, but it was less than retail.

They are cheap, but have earned their reputation as good little recording amps.
I use an FX unit with them to get my reverb fix, but other than that I play them as is.

One of these days I'll join the big boys again, but for now I'm running in 5watt stereo.