Kiwi

Good luck! If you still can't find the problem then there might be a failed component somewhere but this would be very unusual. Ironic that none of us like in the UK, huh?

Well, I'm in the same boat as you. My nearest luthier is 600km away in Hong Kong and unaccompanied baggage attracts import duty. I've learned through trial and error to be self sufficient.

Is it just me or are you missing a .220k resistor and 680 pf capacitor on the master volume? Your tones seem wired up OK but I can't really tell what you're doing with the humbucker wiring. Given silence rather than hum is the main issue, I would suggest that you may be grounding the audio signal somewhere. Are you sure that the humbucker wiring is OK? Through a process of elimination, you should be able to trace the lack of beeps to a specific connection. Take the multimeter and set it to the connectivity mode (it'll make a noise when the two tips are brought together). First take everything off the pickguard and check if you are getting a signal from all the pickups by tapping the magnets with something metal while the circuit is plugged into an amp at low volume. If you hear a tap on all three after isolation from the pickguard then it means the live signal somewhere in the circuit is being grounded directly by the pickguard shielding rather than an earth wire. Check for potential contact between a pot, a joint or a wire and the pickguard. If you're not hearing a clear and distinctive tap on one of the selection settings then you know that the silent pickup is either broken or is wired incorrectly - probably with the live tag touching an earth connection somewhere. To test the pickup, put each tip of the multimeter on one of the leads with the pickup NOT selected and see if you get a beep. If you get a beep, the pickup is OK. To test the pickup selector, you'll need to place the black tip on the earth connection and test each pick up connection on every position of the selector switch, listening for any unexpected beeps. You'll need to pay attention to how the selector is wired, take your time and be ruthlessly methodical. If you're not hearing any taps from the pickups regardless of selection, it could mean the grounding is happening further down the line - either the tone or volume. Put the black tip against any part of the earth on a pot, turn all the pots up full and check for leakage by putting the red tip on each of the live out (middle) tags. Then check the in tags (right hand side when tags are at 12 o'clock) tags on the pot. When the pots are on full you should get beeps. If you don't then that means the earth is connected to the live signal somewhere between the locations you've put the multimeter tips. If still no joy then test the connections between live tags on different pots (turned on full) and see if you get beeps.

It's one of three builds that are planned. The second one is a "Sustain Machine" which is going to include using a Fernandes Sustainer from my Kleinberger copy, a laminated through body mahogany and maple neck and probably a Kahler 2300 series bridge for effortless divebombing harmonics. The third one is more along the lines of an MSG V2.0 with laminated mahogany/maple neck, another Wilkinson VS100C bridge and PRS Mira pickups (medium gain, much like Pearly Gates) maybe with a single coil if I can find one that matches. I know Martin Booth still makes the MSG for discerning clients. But his skills are in a different league to mine and he's resistant to the idea of three pickup guitars so I'd like to think I'm not treading on his toes here. Now I've put together a drawing specifically for the body fabricators and, in doing so, have been double checking and measuring (where possible) all the critical dimensions. It turns out that the Wilkinson bridge DXF block that I was using is out by a few millimetres in critical places, so I really need to nail the distance between the posts and the edge of the bridge rout. The pickup blocks I'd been using were fractions of a mm out as well which impacts on tolerances. It kind of goes to show that third party CAD blocks can't be trusted in most shapes and forms. It also means I'm going to have to partly disassemble my strat, which has a VS100C already installed, in order to measure the clearances. I also borrowed body dimensions from a Les Paul drawing to begin with but the body depth was too thick (56mm vs 44mm for MSG/43mm for strat) and the neck angle was wrong. Putting it right has taken more work than if I'd taken measurements off the MSG. Serves me right for taking short cuts, I guess.

With the rotary pickup selector, I needed to check what the specification needed to be. At the least, the following settings were going to be needed: Bridge only Bridge + middle (maybe out of phase) Bridge + neck Neck + middle (maybe out of phase) Neck only Normally for a three pickup strat style layout, a 2 pole rotary switch is enough. The neck and bridge pickups can share a pole because they aren't in use at the same time. But in my set up above, I would need at least a 3 pole switch, one for each pickup because I was combining bridge and neck. However, when the low pass filters were taken into consideration, there was also the challenge of how to sum three pickups into two channel eq. Luckily, a four pole rotary switch would probably work, if I summed the four poles into two sides. Each pair of poles into one of the two filters. But there was still the challenge of how to manage the middle pickup in the settings. Again that would be possible if I assigned two of the four poles to it and had the middle pickup switch from one channel to the other, depending on whether it was summed with the neck or bridge pickup. This arrangement does have the disadvantage of upsetting the filter settings with a pickup shift from position 2 to 4 but that would only really be felt if I was playing it live and I have no plans to do that. This is a proof of concept, a prototype which I'll use almost exclusively at home and it's main trick is going to be position 3 anyway so I put together a circuit diagram (without phase switching for positions 2 and 4) as proof of concept where position 1 was now just the piezo and all the others were moved forward by one. Lustihand also advised that in their latest edition circuits, separate boost switches were no longer needed, the boost was activated by push pull pots so there was a welcome visual simplicity and logic to the layout despite despite it being pretty versatile. But while I was browsing on the Stewmac website, I noted they offered 6 position rotary switches with four poles and I started to wonder whether that might be useful. Then I remembered I had a spare Graphtec acoustiphonic preamp left over from my Shuker Headless bass and a quick search of the Graphtec website revealed they offered piezo saddles for the Wilkinson VS100 series bridges. That got me thinking about a clean piezo/acoustic type sound for one of the six positions so I threw it into the diagram and it seemed to work. It would sit with the overall mission of the guitar for cleans. And I also had a spare hexaphonic PCB which opened up the possibilities of pitch-to-MIDI. Hmmm.

For the body I kept changing my mind for things beyond selecting alder for the wood. I started off wanting to do a body shape inspired by my Yamaha MSG deluxes (which Alan Murphy also played while with Level 42). Then reason grabbed hold and I started to ask myself what was wrong with just going with a stratocaster body. But I figured I might as well CAD the MSG body shape up and see what it looked like with the RS Esprit pickup layout. I was quite pleased with how it looked. OK so the dimensions here are all over the place, the scale is wrong and the spacing and size of the pickups is wrong, the bridge is slightly out and the Gibson ES346 inspired headstock is going to be at a 13 degree angle in this view. But it reminded me a bit of the PRS 305. While I was drawing the control layout, I started to think about the pickup selection and realised that a toggle switch wasn't going to be up to the job if phase switching in addition to neck+bridge was necessary. Another option was to use a rotary pickup selector like PRS. Exploring that that bought me onto reviewing the electronics package in more detail.

The hardware will consist of locking tuners as you might expect and for the bridge, I'm going to dive into my stash of stuff opportunistically collected over many years and use a Wilkinson VS100C convertible fulcrum vibrato. These haven't been made since the late 90's due to a patent claim by Gotoh but I happened to stumble across a stash of them being sold by Trevor Wilkinson's daughter on Ebay and bought three for my own personal use, one in gold and two in chrome. The other option was a Kahler 2300 series. Although this vibrato should fit a standard strat 2 post and rout, one can never been too sure, especially when commissioned from a Chinese supplier. The other thing I discovered when measuring the neck is that the scale length is 321mm nut-to-12th-fret which makes it around 25.2". Les Pauls are normally 24.75", PRS is 25" and Fenders are 25.5". The scale length will have a slight impact on pickup locations so this necessitates putting something together in CAD in order to remove as much potential for misunderstanding as possible. Luckily I'm a seasoned AutoCAD user. But it does impose a level of precision on things which is above and beyond what someone might work to in person. It also introduces more risk around areas where high precision is already needed, for example the neck pocket and bridge routs. This is because the measurements can specified and milled with tenths of a millimetre in tolerance but the measurements themselves are based on measurements with fractions of a millimetre. While it might not seem like much, that can make the difference between an acoustically coupled neck and something that just relies on glue to stop it moving about too much. And, to top it all off, if someone is going to commit to that level of precision by virtue of using CAD, then that level of precision can potentially be assumed by the manufacturer across the whole drawing, not just the bits that are measured carefully. So the whole process of manufacture still needs allowance for human fettling for some tolerances after carving. Assuming I'm doing the fettling, that means no finish as part of the fabrication process.

Originally I'd had in mind something that was a bit more Yamaha SG-ish but set in rather than through neck. But that never got off the ground because the manufacturer's sales representative decided that I wasn't going to buy enough from them. So the neck is a five piece laminate made from maple and mahogany with an ebony fingerboard. It's not the one piece maple job on the Aria because I prefer laminated necks for strength and wanted a bit of mahogany in the mix just for the mid range definition and slightly sweeter attack.

I've been a little obsessed with guitarist Alan Murphy in Go West for a number of years. The quality of my playing is a borderline insult to his legacy of talent but hasn't stopped me from a bit of a dive into 80's sounds. So to scratch the itch, I'm working on a new build which is a bit of a mish mash of some of the instruments he played in the late 80's. The primary mission is to recreate the cleans from his Aria RS Esprit. The Esprit is a very interesting guitar technically because it not only featured active electronics (which runs against the tide of prevailing opinion these days) but the circuitry was actually licensed from Alembic, a company whose reputation is founded on bass guitars. Alan was quoted in a Home Recording Studio article, published a month after he passed, that the Aria sounded like nothing else on the market for cleans. So that was the starting point for this build - crisp, shimmery cleans with not much bottom end. But, as previous builds will attest, I have a habit of making things far more complicated than they need to be. The Esprit has only two pickups - neck and bridge and both pickups are single coils with that middle 'pickup' a dummy hum cancelling coil. The neck and bridge together are where it shines (or shimmers if you will) but just having a guitar for that setting seemed like a wasted opportunity. So I felt the need to build in more options. The controls are volume (pull = active circuit on, activates a flashing red LED), Lo pass sweep neck pickup, bridge pickup boost switch at shelving point, lo pass sweep bridge pickup, neck pick up boost switch at shelving point and 3 way pickup selector switch. The alder body and 1 piece bolt maple neck are nothing remarkable and neither is the Floyd inspired fulcrum vibrato. That middle coil was at the centre of my concerns about 'waste'. Firstly because hum cancelling can be achieved more effectively through other means these days (stacked coils for example). Secondly because arguably the positions 2 and 4 on a strat are arguably some of the most evocative, conventional clean sounds. So it would be nice to have them as well but that wouldn't be possible if the middle position was just a coil. So I wanted to find a way to re-utilised that middle position for a pickup but without compromising what the Esprit does best. This means having to use pickups that don't need a dummy coil and that also throws into the air questions about wiring direction, phase and inductance. As it so happens, Aria commissioned Kent Armstrong to make the pickups for the RS Esprit based on information supplied by Alembic so after an exchange of emails with Aaron, we had a short chat on Skype about what Aria were up to. Aaron makes almost all my new pickups since Andy at Wizard retired. He can tap into all of the work that his father did for major boutique brands like Celinder, Ken Smith and others (as well as Aria). Aaron advised that most of the clean sound of an Aria probably came from the filters and that to get traditional strat sounds from positions 2 and 4, it was more phased on the phase relationship between the pickups than on the wiring. This meant that doing the RS Esprit thing AND the Fender 2 and 4 thing could be technically feasible. Aaron kindly offered to dust off the plans for the Aria pickups and wire up a set of improved coils when I was ready. I also did a bit of research on Alan's signal chain and found that he ran a clean and dirty channels separately. For overdriven sounds with Go West, the Aria was shunted into Alan's cherished Fender Super Champs and then into a Session power and JBL cab. But for clean sounds, he went straight into the PA to preserve that crystal high end. Here's a clip of Alan playing cleans into a Roland Dimension D and then direct through the PA at a shared billing gig in Japan with Go West, (or should I say 'Go Wet' given the inclement weather conditions.) The next trick was the filters and there are a few options available. First option was to use Alembic's Activator preamp. I happen to have one in my Pedulla fretless which I wanted to replace so I just needed to find another. But they're not cheap and the second option, replacement lo-pass filter circuits by Boogieman on Ebay are on the pricey side as well, now. I also caught wind of a low volume manufacturer called Lustihand who were making circuits for Wal and Alembic basses and contacted them through Facebook. A new double circuit was going to cost the same as a single, used Alembic Activator and Lustihand offered to tailor it for guitar frequencies so that might mean filtering anything out below 80Hz and above 8KHz. I'm not sure yet, will have to think about it some more. In the meantime, a set of Alembic Activator stratocaster pickups popped up on Reverb. Normally they'd be about 400 quid for a used set but the seller was asking for less than half that. So I snagged them after confirming with Mica at Alembic that they were indeed stacked humbuckers and therefore independently hum cancelling. While not quite as shimmery as the Series instruments, I bore Aaron's advice on the role played by the pickups in the RS Esprit in mind along with a few clips on Youtube that suggested they'd be good enough. All the while this was happening, I also had in mind a guitar neck that I'd commissioned for thirty quid in April...

Hide glue is fabulous stuff - nothing else out there beats it but it's not as convenient to use as gorilla glue. For things that need long term maintenance like fingerboards, I'd still use it if I had it.

I think you may be right. Additionally, there are plenty of other makers out there doing almost exact replicas, like Heritage who even use the old Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, who weren't subject to this level of attention from Gibson. So it seems sensible that they would feel threatened by PRS. And there is the 305, plus the swamp ash single coil models - that's all about as strat as a guitar needs to be for the sound and playability. But the shape and the scratch plate also in the Silver Sky? I don't blame some out there for interpreting this move as antagonism from Paul. I think you're right about the pattern of emulation...which is ironic given music is supposed to be a creative industry. One would expect a bit more originality from us guitarists. But anyway, I think some of it is to do with many guitarists not being that interested in their instruments and just want something reliable without going down a rabbit hole of spec. that'll perform predictably...which is arguably Gibson also dropped the ball on...and PRS around the mid to late noughties. Lee mentions in one of the early PRS review vids with Rob Chapman by Anderton that PRS appear to have improved the quality. And speaking of Chapman, and Sire. Two brands that have managed to establish themselves through grass roots support via social media rather than support from the industry. Hats off to both Rob and Kyle Kim for that. Interestingly enough, Kyle Kim actually displayed Sire at NAMM with the support of Marcus Miller already in place. Yet NOONE in the US was interested in representing the brand despite the clear and obvious game changing nature of the products. So clearly even superstar endorsements aren't a silver bullet (although they have definitely helped Sire). Kyle Kim's theory is that there's a music industry cartel in place...which isn't exactly espousing the ideals of free trade and healthy competition.

Yes, and there are probably parallels with the exotic car market and fine art as well. The number of people who can afford original vintage instruments and are interested in owning them will continue to dwindle over the next 100 years. And prices will probably continue to rise mostly because the demand is not driven by players so much as collectors. Gibson actually took them to court over PRS single cut models. Paul was in his element in the witness chair though and Gibson ultimately lost their case. Fender gave up rights to their body shape IP long ago. Endorsements are the most effective form of marketing. Fender have been guilty of buying competitors purely for their list of endorsees - I think it might have been Genz or SWR who were an example of that happening, I can't remember exactly. But it's why good brands die after being bought out by a larger corporate interest. Mark Gooday tells a good story about Fender's interest in Trace Elliot shortly before announcing they'd purchased SWR. Trace had to open up their books to Fender as part of the due diligence process...

Oh you mean the other upselling bit.

Depends on whether you're assuming that past simple or present continuous is the correct verb. Marketing activity for a company that still exists has no end...

Many suppliers have factories located in Shandong which is up north near Beijing, although Guangdong is bigger. But I think you are probably correct, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if someone skilled up at the cost of Epiphone and then went their own way in search of an easier life and more money. But finding someone in that position from outside China would be literally like finding a needle in a haystack. There's already precedent with brands of companies outside China. It's not hard to beat any custom shop on price and quality, the prices of almost all custom shop instruments do not reflect the actual cost of making them. Yes there is better quality and attention to detail in custom shop instruments compared to off the shelf models but not three or four grand's worth of attention. But endorsements, online fan boys and youtube influencers are running effective interference. The key things to watch for are moisture content, tolerances of key joints, finishing and fretwork and they're labour intensive and tend to be skipped in the race to hit production targets. I've been advised that it's much harder to establish a brand these days than it might have been 15 years ago. I think the market is shrinking generally but there are still some players out there willing to shell out eye watering amounts and plenty of sellers wishing to charge outrageous amounts if the market lets them. There's also more competition in the mid price range sector as budget companies like Shecter and ESP are upselling themselves in the same way that mid priced brands like Warwick have upselled themselves to boutique level.

I'm really curious to know who might be making them. There are only a handful of Chinese companies that do quality builds. I've found the rest of them just rush things and try to get away with sometimes school boy errors. Having said that, the parts are pretty simple and if he's finishing them off by hand and assembling then quality might not be such a problem so long as the wood is seasoned properly.

It's not bad, you can definitely get Richie Blackmore sounds out of it. I wouldn't say it's high gain either - more medium gain with fuzzy tendencies. The voice control will take you into more modern territory as well (which is what I'm after) but it really needs a TS type pedal (I'm using the Mosky Silver Horse) in front of it to kick things squarely into the 80's. I got it to see whether I could get the Def Leppard thing happening, which it does after a boost from the Mosky. BTW my first JF14, which I've had for about 6 years, has developed a persistent scream at extreme settings. So there may be a shelf life to the op amps they use but I'm far away from anyone who could tell me for sure. It was actually cheaper (given they're 13 quid each where I am) for me to get another.

OK phase reversing is a different thing altogether and involves the frequencies shared by both pickups cancelling each other out to get that Peter Green thing. I'll be looking into something similar for a project I'm planning - recreation of an Aria RS Esprit but with middle pickup. I've been advised that phase cancellation will get me in the ball park of positions 2 and 4 on a strat even though I won't be relying on reverse wound reverse polarity in the middle pickup for hum cancellation (each pickup will have a dummy coil and be self sufficient). I think combining splits and phasing on the same switch is way more complicated than it needs to be, assuming that you have found a push pull pot that can offer all the necessary connections. Probably better to leave phasing and coil separate but also you'll need to consider whether how the coil splitting will interact with the phase switching. Are you going to end up in a position where using the phase switches in coil split mode will be like a kill switch due to earthing? I dunno but it's something I'd be checking. Anyways, back on topic: Have you heard of the site Guitarelectronics.com? Some useful stuff on there once you've navigated your way past all the product placement. https://guitarelectronics.com/guitar-wiring-resources/2-pickup-guitar-wiring-diagrams/ For my Esprit project I'm pretty clear about what I want but it needs a rotary switch to keep the number of knobs under control and also because it's the easiest way to make sure that each setting won't interfere with the others. Something along the lines of: Posìtion Bridge only Bridge and middle out of phase Bridge and neck in phase Middle and neck out of phase Neck only

Polarity comes from the orientation of the pickup magnets, it can't be changed via switching. Neither can the direction of the windings of the pickup. I have a master split on my Yammie MSG's which works well for me as the only time I ever use single coils is for both pickups at once. You'll probably need to decide what you need specifically and how much extra complication you want in terms of wiring. There are some schools of thought that say part of the sound of a Les Paul comes from the wiring harness and there are a load of companies that specialise in recreations of the LP wiring. Pots are a complicated thing in terms of inductance and I know that better quality pots do make a slight difference to clarity. https://www.mylespaul.com/threads/whats-the-go-to-wiring-harness-now-that-mssc-is-gone.436264/

I believe they're still being made, but it's a bit of a rabbit hole to go down. In any case a lot of these details just end up being hair splitting and make little difference to things to an on stage mix. I had a set of authentic replica 57 single coils in my Nile Rodgers strat made by some guitar fetishist in Russia. They had period correct windings and aged Alnico magnets...in fact they were so authentically weak and scratchy that I replaced them with some Fender vintage noiseless. Be careful what you wish for.

Various youtube videos that have dissected them to reveal a plain old normal resistor under the orange packaging. A bit like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eek0azC6JV0

Ah...he sounds like a reseller rather than a manufacturer.

Who was the supplier? Chinese manufacturers can be highly variable

All you really need IMHO for a Gibson is some decent PAFs unless you have something specific in mind that needs high output or specific character (like djenting). As for wiring, I think the sprague orange drop caps are a con and I'm not a fan of twin volumes generally...but there again, I like active guitars so...what do I know? lol

To be an appreciating asset, music gear generally needs some kind of cultish or nostalgic appeal, or bragging rights. A sleb name and rarity often isn't enough.