Installing a vintage tone cap, like this paper-waxed capacitor (PIW), can make a noticeable difference in your guitar’s tone, because vintage caps leak more rich and detailed overtones than new tone caps.
To swap or not to swap? Let’s explore some situations when it makes sense to replace hardware … and instances when it doesn’t.
Welcome back to Mod Garage. This month I want to give you some insight into putting vintage parts into new electric guitars and explore why so many people are doing this.
The trend to put old vintage parts into electric guitars started years ago and it’s still in vogue today. But besides the hip factor, is it reasonable to do so? What can you expect, and are there specific situations where this makes sense for a new electric guitar? In this column, we’ll have to face some sad and unpopular facts (and myths) about vintage guitars and vintage parts, so not everyone will be happy about this.
In general, the vintage world is not limited to guitars or instruments. The scene includes a lot of categories, such as cars, watches, clothing, furniture, books, electric devices, and much more. But the basic principles are always the same and there are many reasons why someone decides to jump on that wagon.
We don’t have to discuss putting vintage parts on vintage guitars, which seems logical and natural. On a vintage guitar, it’s all about stock condition and authenticity, like on every vintage collector’s item, no matter what it is.
Let’s start with sad vintage “truth” number one:
Today we can build much better electric guitars than ever before.
That’s not really bad news, if you’re not a vintage guitar seller. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the old vintage guitars are obsolete or bad in comparison with the ones we can build today. But with today’s high-tech equipment, the level of consistent quality is outstanding and close to perfect. All instruments produced that way are more or less completely identical. Vintage guitars, even if built from the same persons on the same day, are virtually all individual items, which for sure is one of the main keys to their magic. And naturally everyone wants to own an individual item rather than an industrial, mass-produced object.
Today we can build tuners that are far ahead of what was possible in the ’50s and ’60s, as well as bridges and tremolos that are little mechanical pieces of art regarding precision and accuracy. So, does it make sense to put vintage hardware on a new electric guitar?
Regarding quality and performance, it’s a clear NO! I have numerous customers doing exactly the opposite, no matter if it’s sacrilege or not. They want to play their vintage guitars but with today’s highest possible performance, so they take out the vintage parts, carefully storing them away, replacing them with modern 1:1 copies to spruce up the old guitars. This is often the case with tuners, string trees, tremolos, and the like, and it’s important that the new parts will fit 1:1 so no new holes need to be drilled to make them fit.
Sometimes imperfection to a certain degree can be exactly the thing you’re looking for regarding tone.
Old and brittle plastic parts like pickguards and pickup covers are also stored away. You can buy modern plastic lookalikes easily and so the old parts are ready to drop in again when you want to sell the guitar someday. Vintage amp players are taking out the original speakers to protect and store them away. This way you can have both: Play your vintage guitar and amp with the highest possible performance, plus keep their value alive because you can always swap parts back to stock condition. I have quite a few customers who take out the complete electronics along with the pickguard, playing a modern substitute under the hood because they don’t want to risk damage to the original. And, believe it or not, a lot of them say the new pickups and electronics sound better than the originals, but compared to the originals, they are worthless. In general, this applies to all vintage items. For example, today it’s possible to build better cars and watches than ever before ... but they don’t make them like they used to, which is one of the number one pro-vintage arguments.
Naturally, there could be other reasons—including emotional ones—to put vintage hardware on a new electric guitar. This is highly individual. Maybe it’s just for fun because it was already lying around, or it looks cooler because it’s used and beaten up. But this can be had cheaper—the market for aged guitar parts is huge. Or maybe one of your favorite artists did something that you want to copy. This also applies to a lot of other vintage stuff like cars and watches—who doesn’t want to drive a Porsche 550 Spyder model like James Dean or wear the same Rolex Submariner 6538 that James Bond wore in 1962 during his first appearance in Dr. No?
But maybe it’s because people think putting vintage parts into a new guitar will increase its value. This leads us straight to sad vintage “truth” number two:
A new electric guitar with vintage parts fetches more money than it does in stock condition.
This is simply not true, at least when sold as one piece with the vintage parts built into the guitar. Like any modification, this will not increase the value of a new guitar—time and being witness to countless auctions has proven this.
But this is the perfect transition to sad “truth” number three:
A vintage guitar makes the most profit when sold completely intact.
Exactly the opposite is true. If you want to make the most profit, nothing beats completely disassembling a vintage guitar and selling it in pieces. I know some vintage parts dealers in Europe and the U.S.—I’ve worked with some of them for over two decades—and they’re all doing the same thing: finding vintage guitars that are for sale, disassembling them, and selling off the individual parts.
One dealer told me this: If you can sell a vintage guitar for $10k, take it all apart and you can make $15k with the individual parts. So, if you put vintage parts on a new guitar that you want to sell, take out the vintage parts and sell them off individually to make top dollar. (It’s not a bad idea to store away any hardware you remove from your guitars, because you might need to put it back in later.)
So, are there any instances where it does make sense to put vintage parts in a new guitar? I would say yes, and I can think of two good considerations:
1. Putting vintage pickups into a new electric guitar.
Putting vintage switches, pots, output jacks, and wires into a new guitar is not reasonable. The pickup-selector switches are still made the same way now as they were in the past. Only the materials have changed a bit, enhancing reliability and longevity. So why spend $600 for a vintage CRL 3-way switch when you can get much better performance for $30? A switch has no tone, so leave the vintage switch for a vintage guitar. Same with pots: They don’t have a tone and modern pots are much more reliable. Companies spent years researching the taper and action of vintage pots and you can buy exact vintage copies for only a few bucks. You get the idea.
With a faithful recreation of a vintage pickup plus a vintage tone cap, you can come very close to the magical sound, so investing in a tested NOS tone cap can make a big tonal difference, whereas a new cap can’t.
However, if you fall in love with a set of vintage pickups, it can make sense to put them into your modern guitar. There is no financial risk. They will increase in value, so if you ever want to sell them again you will get more than you paid, enjoying their tone in the meantime. Keep in mind that companies also spent years to analyze, research, and re-engineer vintage pickups and today you can buy almost every given pickup you’re looking for and as close as possible to its original. Such pickups are a lot cheaper compared to a vintage set, but naturally this is no investment.
2. Putting vintage tone caps into a new electric guitar.
This is for sure a reasonable procedure to quickly enhance the tone of a new electric guitar. Installing a vintage tone cap into a guitar is also done easily because it’s a simple 1:1 swap with the original tone cap. It’s still possible to find NOS vintage tone caps today, but prices are rising while supplies are running out. Why is this an improvement in tone? The tone of vintage guitars is often described as detailed, harmonically rich, and open. Part of this tone is from the tone cap. Today capacitors are built to perfection and with very low tolerances so they will do a perfect job. In our electric guitars we use them to only short out the highs against ground, leaving the bass untouched ... in very simple words.
Production processes to build capacitors in the ’50s and ’60s were far from perfect, and besides high tolerances in capacitance, certain caps (depending on the dielectric inside) tend to be kind of “leaky” regarding overtones. A modern cap will do a perfect job, filtering out all overtones that it’s supposed to. Most vintage caps will do a lousy job, still letting some overtones through, especially the harmonic ones. This is what makes the tone so rich and detailed, and, by the way, it’s the same situation with tube amps.
With a faithful recreation of a vintage pickup plus a vintage tone cap, you can come very close to the magical sound, so investing in a tested NOS tone cap can make a big tonal difference, whereas a new cap can’t. Sometimes imperfection to a certain degree can be exactly the thing you’re looking for regarding tone. Back in the golden guitar days, no one really cared about such odd details, and even if they did ... it was state of the art and all new technologies were still science-fiction at that time. Today we know better and can use old technology for certain tasks.That’s it for now.
Next month we’ll explore our next guitar mod, so stay tuned. Until then ... keep on modding!
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An ode, and historical snapshot, to the tone-bar played, many-stringed thing in the room, and its place in the national musical firmament.
Blues, jazz, rock, country, bluegrass, rap.… When it comes to inventing musical genres, the U.S. totally nailed it. But how about inventing instruments?
Googling “American musical instruments” yields three.
• Banjo, which is erroneously listed since Africa is its continent of origin.
• Benjamin Franklin’s Glass Armonica, which was 37 glass bowls mounted horizontally on an iron spindle that was turned by means of a foot pedal. Sound was produced by touching the rims of the bowls with water-moistened fingers. The instrument’s popularity did not last due to the inability to amplify the volume combined with rumors that using the instrument caused both musicians and their listeners to go mad.
• Calliope, which was patented in 1855 by Joshua Stoddard. Often the size of a truck, it produces sound by sending steam through large locomotive-style whistles. Calliopes have no volume or tone control and can be heard for miles.
But Google left out the pedal steel. While there may not be a historical consensus, I was talking to fellow pedal-steel player Dave Maniscalco, and we share the theory that pedal steel is the most American instrument.
Think about it. The United States started as a DIY, let’s-try-anything country. Our culture encourages the endless pursuit of improvement on what’s come before. Curious, whimsical, impractical, explorative—that’s our DNA. And just as our music is always evolving, so are our instruments. Guitar was not invented in the U.S., but one could argue it’s being perfected here, as players from Les Paul to Van Halen kept tweaking the earlier designs, helping this one-time parlor instrument evolve into the awesome rock machine it is today.
Pedal steel evolved from lap steel, which began in Hawaii when a teenage Joseph Kekuku was walking down a road with his guitar in hand and bent over to pick up a railroad spike. When the spike inadvertently brushed the guitar’s neck and his instrument sang, Kekuku knew he had something. He worked out a tuning and technique, and then took his act to the mainland, where it exploded in popularity. Since the 1930s, artists as diverse as Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong and Pink Floyd have been using steel on their records.“The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.”
Immigrants drove new innovations and opportunities for the steel guitar by amplifying the instrument to help it compete for listeners’ ears as part of louder ensembles. Swiss-American Adolph Rickenbacker, along with George Beauchamp, developed the first electric guitar—the Rickenbacker Electro A-22 lap steel, nicknamed the Frying Pan—and a pair of Slovak-American brothers, John and Rudy Dopyera, added aluminum cones in the body of a more traditional acoustic guitar design and created resophonic axes. The pedal steel guitar was born out of the curiosity and persistence of problem solvers, on the bandstand and on the workbench.
As the 20th century progressed and popular music reflected the more advanced harmonies of big-band jazz, the steel guitar’s tuning evolved from open A to a myriad of others, including E7, C6, and B11. Steel guitarists began playing double-, triple-, and even quadruple-necked guitars so they could incorporate different tunings.
In Indianapolis, the Harlan Brothers came up with an elegant solution to multiple tunings when they developed their Multi-Kord steel guitar, which used pedals to change the tuning of the instrument’s open strings to create chords that were previously not possible, earning a U.S. patent on August 21, 1947. In California, equipped with knowledge from building motorcycles, Paul Bigsby revolutionized the instrument with his Bigsby steel guitars. It was on one of these guitars that, in early 1954, Bud Isaacs sustained a chord and then pushed a pedal down to bend his strings up in pitch for the intro of Webb Pierce’s “Slowly.” This I–IV movement became synonymous with the pedal-steel guitar and provided a template for the role of the pedal steel in country music. Across town, church musicians in the congregation of the House of God Keith Dominion were already using the pedal steel guitar in Pentecostal services that transcended the homogeneity of Nashville’s country and Western clichés.
Pedal steels are most commonly tuned in an E9 (low to high: B–D–E–F#–G#–B–E–G#–D#–F#), which can be disorienting, with its own idiosyncratic logic containing both a b7 and major 7. It’s difficult to learn compared to other string instruments tuned to regular intervals, such as fourths and fifths, or an open chord.
Dave Maniscalco puts it like this: “The more time one sits behind it and assimilates its quirks and peculiarities, the more obvious it becomes that much like the country that birthed it, the pedal steel is better because of its contradictions. An amalgamation of wood and metal, doubling as both a musical instrument and mechanical device, the pedal steel is often complicated, confusing, and messy. Despite these contradictions, the pedal-steel guitar is a far more interesting and affecting because of its disparate influences and its complex journey to becoming America’s quintessential musical instrument.”The author dials in one of his 20-watt Sonzera amps, with an extension cabinet.
Knowing how guitar amplifiers were developed and have evolved is important to understanding why they sound the way they do when you’re plugged in.
Let’s talk about guitar amp history. I think it’s important for guitar players to have a general overview of amplifiers, so the sound makes more sense when they plug in. As far as I can figure out, guitar amps originally came from radios—although I’ve never had the opportunity to interview the inventors of the original amps. Early tube amps looked like radio boxes, and once there was an AM signal, it needed to be amplified through a speaker so you could hear it. I’m reasonably certain that other people know more about this than I do.
For me, the story of guitar amps picks up with early Fenders and Marshalls. If you look at the schematics, amplifier input, and tone control layout of an early tweed Fender Bassman, it’s clear that’s where the original Marshall JTM45 amps came from. Also, I’ve heard secondhand that the early Marshall cabinets were 8x12s, and the roadies requested that Marshall cut them in half so they became 4x12s. Similarly, 8x10 SVT cabinets were cut in half to make the now-industry-standard 4x10 bass cabinets. Our amp designer Doug Sewell and I understand that, for the early Fender amps we love, the design directed the guitar signal into half a tube, into a tone stack, into another half a tube, and the reverb would join it with another half a tube, and then there would be a phase splitter and output tubes and a transformer. (All 12AX7 tubes are really two tubes in one, so when I say a half-tube, I’m saying we’re using only the first half.) The tone stack and layout of these amps is an industry standard and have a beautiful, clean way of removing low midrange to clear up the sound of the guitar. I believe all but the first Marshalls came from a high-powered tweed Twin preamp (which was a 80-watt combo amp) and a Bassman power amp. The schematic was a little different. It was one half-tube into a full-tube cathode follower, into a more midrange-y tone stack, into the phase splitter and power tubes and output transformer. Both of these circuits have different kinds of sounds. What’s interesting is Marshall kept modifying their amps for less bass, more high midrange and treble, and more gain. In addition, master volume controls started being added by Fender and Marshall around 1976. The goal was to give more gain at less volume. Understanding these circuits has been a lifelong event for Doug and me.
Then, another designer came along by the name of Alexander Dumble. He modified the tone stack in Fender amps so you could get more bass and a different kind of midrange. Then, after the preamp, he put in a distortion circuit in a switchable in and out “loop.” In this arrangement, the distortion was like putting a distortion pedal in a loop after the tone controls. In a Fender amp, most of the distortion comes from the output section, so turning the tone controls changes the sound of the guitar, not the distortion. In a Marshall, the distortion comes before the tone controls, so when you turn the tone controls, the distortion changes. The way these amps compress and add harmonics as you turn up the gain is the game. All of these designs have real merit and are the basis of our modern tube–and then modeling—amplifiers.
Everything in these amps makes a difference. The circuits, the capacitor values and types, the resistor values and types, the power and output transformers, and the power supplies—including all those capacitor values and capacitor manufacturers.
I give you this truncated, general history to let you know that the amp business is just as complicated as the guitar business. I didn’t even mention the speakers or speaker cabinets and the artform behind those. But what’s most important is: When you plug into the amp, do you like it? And how much do you like it? Most guitar players have not played through a real Dumble or even a real blackface Deluxe Reverb or a 1966 Marshall plexi head. In a way, you’re trusting the amp designers to understand all the highly complex variations from this history, and then make a product that you love playing through. It’s daunting, but I love it. There is a complicated, deep, and rich history that has influenced and shaped how amps are made today.
Lenny Kravitz’s lead-guitar maestro shares how his scorching hit solo came together.
Hold onto your hats—Shred With Shifty is back! This time, Chris Shiflett sits down with fellow west coaster Craig Ross, who calls in from Madrid equipped with a lawsuit-era Ibanez 2393. The two buddies kick things off commiserating over an increasingly common tragedy for guitarists: losing precious gear in natural disasters. The takeaway? Don’t leave your gear in storage! Take it on the road!
Ross started out in the Los Angeles band Broken Homes, influenced by Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, but his big break came when he auditioned for Lenny Kravitz. Kravitz phoned him up the next day to tell him to be at rehearsal that evening. In 1993, they cut one of their biggest hits ever, “Are You Gonna Go My Way?” Ross explains that it came together from a loose, improvisatory jam in the studio—testament to the magic that can be found off-leash during studio time.
Ross recalls his rig for recording the solo, which consisted of just two items: Kravitz’s goldtop Les Paul and a tiny Gibson combo. (No fuzz or drive pedals, sorry Chris.) As Ross remembers, he was going for a Cream-era Clapton sound with the solo, which jumps between pentatonic and pentatonic major scales.
Tune in to learn how he frets and plays the song’s blistering lead bits, plus learn about what amps Ross is leaning on these days.
If you’re able to help, here are some charities aimed at assisting musicians affected by the fires in L.A:
https://guitarcenterfoundation.org
https://www.cciarts.org/relief.html
https://www.musiciansfoundation.org
https://fireaidla.org
https://www.musicares.org
https://www.sweetrelief.org
Credits
Producer: Jason Shadrick
Executive Producers: Brady Sadler and Jake Brennan for Double Elvis
Engineering Support by Matt Tahaney and Matt Beaudion
Video Editor: Addison Sauvan
Graphic Design: Megan Pralle
Special thanks to Chris Peterson, Greg Nacron, and the entire Volume.com crew.
Tobias bass guitars, beloved by bass players for nearly half a century, are back with the all-new Tobias Original Collection.
Built for unrivaled articulation, low-end punch, and exceptional ergonomics, the all-new Tobias Original Collection comprises an array of six four and five-string bass models all offered in both right and left-handed orientations. The Tobias range features Classic, Killer B, and Growler models, and each is equipped with high-quality hardware from Babicz and Gotoh, active electronics from Bartolini, and the iconic Tobias asymmetrical neck design. Crafted from the finest tonewoods, Tobias Original Collection bass guitars are now available worldwide on Gibson.com, at the Gibson Garage locations, and at authorized Gibson dealers.
The bass world has been clamoring for the return of the authentic, high-end Tobias basses, and now, Tobias has returned. Combining the look and tone of the finest exotic tonewoods, such as quilted maple, royal paulownia, purpleheart, sapele, walnut, ebony, and wenge, with the feel of the famous Tobias Asym asymmetrical neck and the eye-catching shapes of the perfectly balanced contoured bodies, Tobias basses are attractive in look and exceptional in playing feel. However, their sonic versatility is what makes them so well suited to the needs of modern bassists. The superior tone from the exotic hardwoods, premium hardware, and active Bartolini® pickups and preamps results in basses with the tonal flexibility that today’s players require. Don’t settle for less than a bass that delivers everything you want and need –the look, the feel, and the sound, Tobias.
“I’m thrilled to release Tobias basses, emphasizing the use of exotic woods, ergonomics, and authenticity to the original Tobias basses,” says Aljon Go, Product Development Manager for Tobias, Epiphone, and Kramer. “This revival is a dream come true, blending modern craftsmanship with the timeless essence of Tobias.”
“It’s amazing to see this icon of the bass world return,” adds Andrew Ladner, Brand Manager for Epiphone and Kramer. “These models are truly a bass player’s bass, and true to the DNA that makes Tobias world-class—the ace up the sleeve of bass players around the globe since 1978. Today’s players can find that unique voice and feel that only Tobias can offer.”
For more information, please visit gibson.com.
