The remaining build activity for the Ghettocaster was to install the electronics, and I decided to take a somewhat unconventional apporach here. You might recall from the initial sketches and early posts, that I intended to put a telecaster like control bar on the front of the body, however after finishing the body a week or so back, I’ve more or less gone off that idea. Partly because I like the look of the wood, partly beacause I probably wouldnt use the controls that much anyway, and partly because it would mean opening a big hole in the front, which would then make the body entirely drilled through, which I thought might lessen its stability.
In the typical SG scenario the jack plug would emerge from the front deck of the body, again to preserve the wood finish, I dont want to do that, so nstead I’ve decided to route both pickup signals off the guitar unmodified, by using a stereo jack plug and route it out of the back-side of the body.
I bought a stereo jack plug for this, but unfortunately as you can see the there is quite a bit of wood between the cavity and the external surface, to get the jack plug to emerge at this point would have required taking a large amount of wood out, but all I wanted was to drill a small hole. So then I had a bit of a brainwave, I took a stereo minijack to jack adapter, and wedged it into the socket, like so:
Form the back of the guitar, all we see is a fairly neat mini jack socket. Obviously this means I wont be able to use the standard 1/4 inch jack plugs with this guitar, but I have a splitter cable which converts mini stereo into two quarter inch jack sockets (sorry forgot to take a picture of that).
So, then it was just a question of wiring it all up. I soldered wires to the stereo socket, but as there wasnt any pots to solder to for the remaining wires, I just screwed in a bit of block connector, which was handy as it allowed me to have a couple of goes until I got all of the wires in the right order.
So that was it, time to plug in and test. And it works!
Here is a small snippet of how it sounds, this is running both the neck pickup (as the left signal), and the bridge pickup (as the right) into Guitar rig, there are two overdubs here, one for the rhythm part and one for the lead. Both are using the “Jimi’s little wing” GR setting with a few tweaks. Apart from the dodgy quality of the playing, which hopefully we will be remedying over the next year, I think it sounds pretty good.
So thats it, basically done. All that remains is to get a couple of plastic covers for the rear chamber and the pick guard (when I finally settle on a shape!).
Toodle pip twangsters,
Sean.
