Well I feel silly

DefaultM

I've had 5 sets of pickups in my alder PRS CE24, and I thought that all of them sounded really mushy like they couldn't handle distortion well.
Swapped in my set of Oil City Blackbirds expecting amazing things, but again it sounded shit so I just thought the guitar was a lemon.

The volume pot has been crackling the whole time I've had the guitar, so I thought I might as well change it while I've got it open. Plugged it in to check it works and suddenly it sounds amazing.

Turns out that all the time I've had the guitar the volume pot has been broken and it was affecting the tone. So all these pickups I've bought and sold were probably fine. Oops.

stonevibe

Oh dear. 

Well, at least now you know fella.

maltingsaudio

We all miss the obvious sometimes, it’s what GAS is all about

Sassafras

With me it's often because I've forgotten to plug the guitar in or not switched the amp on.

TTony

Sassafras said:

With me it's often because I've forgotten to plug the guitar in or not switched the amp on.

With me, I always thought it was my playing.




Turns out that it was.

Gwatkins15

I recently took my hot rod Deville to rehearsal for the first time. It started dropping in volume randomly after 5 minutes. Brought new valves, searched forums for weeks and had it stripped down a zillion times..

Turns out the speaker cable was plugged into the extension socket and not the main socket.. Plugged into the other jack and problem gone.

Legionreturns

I hope you've not left shitty reviews for all your pickups all over the internet!

axisus

What a bummer! Oh well, lesson learned

fretfinder

My personal favourites are starting a gig and wondering why the tone is so feeble, not realising for a couple of minutes that my guitar's tone controls are on 0.

Or starting a gig and wondering why the tone is so odd, not realising for a couple of minutes that the wah is on and in the half-cocked position!

  

Edit: we never have the time or opportunity for a soundcheck, by the way...

impmann

Yep done that!

The oddest I ever saw was a mid 70s Les Paul which always sounded flat and down on output, despite High output pickups retrofitted to it.
I was asked to rewire it back to stock - and I found an odd bulging lump in the output cable bound up with tape... it was a resistor wired in series into the output cable to ‘attenuate’ the output! No idea why (perhaps the previous owner was a strictly rhythm guy) but removing that brought the guitar back to life. Very strange!

ICBM

Gwatkins15 said:

I recently took my hot rod Deville to rehearsal for the first time. It started dropping in volume randomly after 5 minutes. Brought new valves, searched forums for weeks and had it stripped down a zillion times..

Turns out the speaker cable was plugged into the extension socket and not the main socket.. Plugged into the other jack and problem gone.

To be fair, the speaker jacks on these are arranged illogically with the Main furthest from the speaker. I've done that while testing one too…

In theory it should mute the output entirely because there is a switch in the Main jack to purposely short it and protect the amp in case nothing is connected at all, but it rarely completely silences it so the problem is less obvious than it should be.

impmann said:

The oddest I ever saw was a mid 70s Les Paul which always sounded flat and down on output, despite High output pickups retrofitted to it.
I was asked to rewire it back to stock - and I found an odd bulging lump in the output cable bound up with tape... it was a resistor wired in series into the output cable to ‘attenuate’ the output! No idea why (perhaps the previous owner was a strictly rhythm guy) but removing that brought the guitar back to life. Very strange!

He probably had some sort of old solid-state amp which went into a horrible blocking-type distortion when given too much input signal.


A few weeks ago I was rewiring a semi-acoustic for @UnclePsychosis, and after first having an issue with a tiny stray whisker of solder on the selector switch which was randomly cutting the signal out and having had the loom out about four or five times before I finally found it, I put the whole thing back into the guitar for the last time, confident I'd fixed it. Plugged in… silence. Now what?!! Moving the cable made it come and go, so suspected a faulty jack (almost unheard of with Switchcraft, but it seemed the only possibility) - took the loom out again and replaced it. STILL cutting out.

It was at this point that I looked at the tip of my old faithful workshop test cable and saw that it was pushed to one side… the paxolin insulator ring had crumbled away so the tip was touching the sleeve.

Of course it's possible that the little whisker of solder on the switch wasn't actually shorting it at all, but to be fair I'm still glad I removed it.