Burns Marquee – Fret Dress and Setup

A lovely guitar, just not quite as good as you would hope… The nut slots have been widened out and then repaired, rather badly.  The only real way to fix that is to replace the nut. Some of the frets are a little un-even, so I’m going to dress them to get a common level. […]

Guitar Tone Improvement

  Want better tone from your guitar?  Even with good quality pickups you can loose signal through the tone circuits.  Set to 10 there is still some signal going through the variable resistor and capacitor. There is a solution, variable resistors that go to open circuit when at max, thereby disconnecting the tone circuit completely. This is a Stratocaster I upgraded recently.  These […]

Samick – Fret dress and setup

A nice looking guitar, sadly the build quality has rather let it down. The first problem was a dodgy volume control, a little intermittent. I was going to replace it but once I got the wiring out I found a dry joint.  I would say it was an easier fix but the biggest problem is […]

Dean Dime – Service and setup

  One for the Metal fans, not quite my cup of tea but still deserves the same time and attention as anything else.  Nothing badly wrong with it mind you, just needs a nip here and a tuck there… The action at the 1st fret was a little high to start with.  Trouble is, with a […]

Tanglewood Chicago – Service and setup

What a lovely guitar.  I’m not sure if it’s been under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe but it’s not been played for ages and needed a good cleanup and service.The electrics were the biggest problem, scratchy and crackling at best, and plain just not working at worst.To be sure I pulled […]

#Telecaster – Setup and service

A little unusual this one, not the standard Tele’.  It had  few minor problems, nothing too difficult… The first one was a couple of stripped out screws.  It’s easy to do, in this case it’s the screws from the control plate.  I drilled out the old hole and glued in a couple of wooden plugs… Once […]

Epiphone ES339 – Fret dress and setup

A great looking guitar, sadly not playing as well as it should.  In fact they made a bit of a mess of this one, the frets are all over the place..The 11th was the highest but they were all very uneven.  You’d like to think a new guitar would be better than that but, sadly, […]

Squire Jagmaster – New Pickup

A simple way to improve the way your guitar sounds, new pickups… The wiring is actually very simple..What’s not so simple is setting them up afterwards, it’s a bit of an art to get the sounds balanced.  With this one I found the two pickups worked better with the neck pickup flipped round.Looking and sounding […]

Richie Sambora Stratocaster

Nice guitar but It’s got some problems.  Probably been there from new, but now I’m going to put it all right… The first problem is the Intonation.  No matter what the owner did it just didn’t sound right all the way up and down the neck.Looking at the nut the slot for the bass E […]