Guitar hotwire 101 – Studio secrets of the Universe

[J Kennedy]

Friends,

Here’s some tips and tricks to get a lot more sounds out of electrics. This stuff came about from my work in studios and never being able to get decent sounds out of the electric (apart from playing ability). This is no Loser or Justin stuff, more on the vegetable level of electronics. Good news, since if you can remember not to pick up the soldering iron from the hot end and can drill a hole straight through the pickguard, you can pull this off and get radical transformation of the sounds your electric is capable of producing. There’s only a few basic principles that you can get max use out of.

A couple non destructive tips to start. The modifications are best used with a good floor box compressor inline with a distortion unit after (check out an old Ross compressor if you can find one).

Voltage gain and tonal contour can be altered abruptly by running the electric thru a good quality lo to hi impedence transformer before the amp/recorder. Hook the electric to the low imp end of a mike transformer and the hi end out. Response will not be linear so may need some eq to boost the high end, but works well with thin single coils to get hi output, especially running distortion devices. All kinds of transformers are fair game, and some are the size of a sugar cube that can be mounted inside the guitar with switches to bypass. All these mods are using passive circuitry partly because I don’t understand anything more than which end of the iron is hot, but also, zero additional noise or distortion is introduced if everything is properly grounded.

Fuzz boxes should give you the chance to flail away and not have it obvious that you are using a distortion device. Some of the highest quality distortion boxes are made from old portable cassette recorders like the ones sitting in dusty piles of tangled wires in thrift stores. You have to take out the guts of the amplifier, put it into a metal project box and run the guitar input into the hot lead that connects the record head to the amp. Major clean overdrive. Run a compressor into this and “smooth as silk” takes on a new meaning. Some of the old General Electric junkomatics give an especially sweet sound.

Be back with some blood and guts invasive mods to pickups, body and circuitry.

John K