2016 SG Faded - Upgrade Recommendations?

andyp

So, I'm thinking of (very lightly) modding / "upgrading” my 2016 SG Faded…

The first idea is to replace the stock vintage Kluson style tuners. I find they are the only thing about the guitar that isn’t brilliant, they just seem a bit “wishy-washy” and don’t seem to move the string as much as they should, then it’s too much… just kind of grabby and remote compared to the (I assume) cheap Grovers that are on my Epiphone LP. Anyway, they kind of get on my nerves and I think I’d like to replace them with some decent locking tuners but I don’t want to be drilling new holes for them or anything. What options are out there in the kind of good but not top of the line range? Maybe £60-75 sort or bracket... Appearance-wise I think I’d go for modern ones, but I quite like the vintage style ones too so would look at both options... I'm leaning to modern style though. Can anyone recommend any that would be a direct replacement for the standard holes?

Phase 2... (which might never happen) would be to replace the PCB wiring with 50s style and upgrade the cap's and pot's while I'm at it. How tough is this to do and what would be the best bet in terms of components? Again, I want to keep the stock sort of sound but when I read about 50s wiring it seemed like the best option if I'm re-wiring it anyway. The PCB doesn't quite sit well in the cavity as it's too thick / fat (which is pretty daft but I'm sure it's a Gibson-wide fitment so with the SG being so thin it doesn't work as well as on say, an LP) and I guess I just want to get rid of it as I know now I'm keeping this guitar forever and I am pretty sure I can improve on this by going to the 50s wiring.

Any thoughts or recommendations on these two ideas would be brilliant.

Cheers.

Andy

Funkfingers

Given the SG's reputation for neck dive, I would opt for lightweight replacement 'heads. The Gibson-stamped Kluson replicas are built down to a price. Schaller or Grover keystone replicas would work more smoothly and reliably. 

Removing the Gibson PCB and block connector wiring harness is straightforward. If you wish to leave the stock pickups in the guitar, it will be necessary to remove the block connectors from the pickup output conductor cables. 

andyp

That's useful, thanks!

My SG seems to be very well balanced, but I hadn't thought of the tuners maybe upsetting that. Are tuners pretty interchangeable in terms of fitment / holes etc?

Alegree

No they aren't. Always check first.

If you buy a prewired wiring harness it's really rather simple to swap it all out. CTS pots, switchcraft jack/switch and orange drop/bumble bee/paper in oil caps are all popular caps. 50s wiring changes the way the volume and tone interact, by reducing volume as tone is rolled off. It can take some getting used to.

andyp

Brilliant, thanks!

ICBM

Funkfingers said:

The Gibson-stamped Kluson replicas are built down to a price. Schaller or Grover keystone replicas would work more smoothly and reliably.

Don't bother… the Gibson ones *are* Grovers, or the near-identical Schallers on older models - the identical tuners but with Gibson where it would say Grover on the standard ones. They're all shit, all have that imprecise feel and all suffer from failure by the back cover falling off when the rivetted pins break or come out of their holes.

The difficulty is finding replacement tuners which both match the same footprint and have a 10mm headstock bore with a threaded front collar, and aren't the same crap design. Even the Tonepros locking ones are.

The next best alternative is probably Grover Rotomatics, which fit the existing holes but leave one spare screw hole in the back of the head, which the tuner body doesn't cover.

wackojacko

Alegree said:

No they aren't. Always check first.

If you buy a prewired wiring harness it's really rather simple to swap it all out. CTS pots, switchcraft jack/switch and orange drop/bumble bee/paper in oil caps are all popular caps. 50s wiring changes the way the volume and tone interact, by reducing volume as tone is rolled off. It can take some getting used to.

Don't waste your money on buying bumble bee though - orange drops will give you the same result. 

impmann

Funny, I've never had a problem with the standard fit machine heads on my SG. I gigged it weekly for years... I wouldn't say they were shit or that imprecise. I think my Les Paul has the same and they were fine too - that took over from the SG as the main gigging machine.

Grovers are way too heavy for an SG if you want to preserve the balance. If you don't care about neck dive go right ahead...

Experience tells me that it's usually the nut that causes problems on SGs and LPs. Your description of it grabbing etc sounds like a nut issue to me.

As for the electrics, I'd suggest 500k pots. The caps aren't really important as long as they are the right value.

Biggest improvement I made to my SG was changing the pickups - I'm not a fan of the standard fit jobs.

ICBM

impmann said:

Grovers are way too heavy for an SG if you want to preserve the balance. If you don't care about neck dive go right ahead...

True .

Actually a large part of the weight of Rotomatics is the huge cast metal 'D' keys - if you change those for something plastic or ebony you can save about a third of the weight. Even the metal mini keys are noticeably lighter.

andyp

Hmmm. Interesting stuff, thanks guys.

I somehow knew this wasn't a simple "buy these" job...

I'll investigate. Will look at the nut some more before I go hunting for some solution to the tuners.

andyp

Sorry for the Zombie thread thing... but I did actually get round to doing something. Well, my Old Man did. He's handy with a soldering iron and has time to play about with things as he's retired now, so he checked out some parts and we decided to give the re-wiring a go. Part of the reason I wanted to so this was because the PCB setup it came with was basically too fat for the shallow cavity in the SG. Parts of the electronics were really crammed in and were touching the backplate at times and causing an echo / hum / scratchy sound. I stuck some rubber banding in behind the backplate which did help, but it didn't solve it. So we figured this could be improved by removing the PCB with the added bonus that we could upgrade the components at the same time.

We spoke about the re-wiring on and off over a couple of months and I left my SG with him for a few days so we agreed we'd go for it. We replaced the complete standard PCB setup with a "hand-wired" harness. Don't shoot me here if I am just about to type bollocks as only some of this next bit makes sense to me, but I wanted to share it in case it helps anyone looking at doing this. We went for linear CTS 500k pots, nothing that seemed particularly fancy. He originally looked at Alpha pots (I believe) as he'd had good experience with them, but they weren't available so we went for CTS which we also used on the Tele we built. We also went with some WD Music "paper in oil" 0.025uf capacitors, that claim to be "vintage tone" and look to be made or branded KBG.

It seemed to be a wee bit confusing following the wiring information from what my Dad said, but with a bit of figuring out he had it up and running pretty quickly. I wasn't around to collect it for a test drive for a few days so he had it well and truly tested out by the time I got it back.

The end result is much more noticeable than I expected it to be. My only real complaint with the sound of the guitar was that the neck pickup was pretty muddy and dark sounding, and I tend to favour the bridge anyway so the neck didn't see much action. What I've got now is a huge improvement. The neck is much clearer sounding with a very noticeable increase in bass but also just generally cleaner and more "articulate" sounding. The bridge is the same, much brighter and pretty twangy now but not as different in tone as the neck is. The pots work much better too, very smooth action and they have useable settings right from 1ish to 10 on both the tone and volume. I am sure the volume only really worked above about 7 before and the tone was way too dark for me at anything under about 8, certainly anything at 5 or lower was pointless.

Next step is to copper foil the cavity as it still hums a little more than I think it should, but compared to the way it was as standard it's miles better.

So, it was well worth it and I'm delighted.

I'm trying to post pics... fingers crossed.


http://i.imgur.com/p9yhqqq.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/PkNwysO.jpg

After...

http://i.imgur.com/uUl5hr0.jpg