Mod Garage News Today

This month, we will honor and remember the great Jeff Beck by taking a deeper look into his guitar arsenal and analyzing how you can come close ... at least electrically. They were chock full of mods and alterations, so get ready for a deep dive on the Tele-Big, the Esquire, and the Strat.

Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll take a closer look into the wacky world of Danelectro and their typical wirings. Danelectro is a very old and authentic American guitar company, founded in 1947 by the genius Nathan “Nat” Daniel (an NYC native, born in 1912 as the son of Lithuanian immigrants) in Red Bank, New Jersey.

Welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we’ll continue our “no tone control” journey from last month [“Mod Garage: The Scott Henderson S-Style Wiring”] with a cool mod for your Telecaster. Something I hear a lot in the shop is that people aren’t happy with the tone of the neck pickup in their Telecaster. It’s often described as muffled, colorless, lifeless, or similar. Why is this? It’s usually a mixture of three things.

To swap or not to swap? Let’s explore some situations when it makes sense to replace hardware … and instances when it doesn’t.

What does this mean? I’ll explain how to do a wiring that yields 16 different sound combinations.

Were getting close to the end of our journey. Weve aged most of the metal parts on our project guitar, so now lets take care of the output jack, knobs, back plate, and pickguard.

Fender just released a signature model for one of Nashvilles most prolific session guitarists. Lets look inside his number one guitar.

Lets look at the wiring and innards of our project guitar and make some swaps before we age them.

When it comes to cosmic tone, it’s critical to have functional potentiometers. Here’s how to install them correctly and keep them ship-shape afterward.

Here are four ways to ground individual lugs to pots, two ways to connect ground wires to pickups, and a clever soldering technique developed by my colleague Mark Foley. Welcome back to Mod Garage and to the second and final column about grounding in passive guitar and bass circuits. If you missed the first part, check out "How to Ground Passive Guitar (and Bass) Circuits, Pt. 1," from April 2021. Today well discuss grounding individual lugs on pots, which is usually the case on all volume cont...