Gretsch Rancher Twin Pickup

ICBM

A friend of mine has one of these cool oddities -



It's a pretty nice guitar really - well-made and plays well.

But unfortunately the sound is not all that great. The pickup is a proper Filtertron-type (Indonesian-made - they call it a 'Fidelitron') and should sound good, but it's just in the wrong place - it's so far up the body that it's at what would be the 19th-fret position, and it picks up so much fundamental and so little of anything else that it's not only a bit muddy, it has an odd 'metal drainpipe' sound to it.

So he wanted to add a bridge pickup - by a lucky coincidence I had a gold Gretsch DeArmond going spare from a previous job, along with a gold-plated Gretsch-tip switch.

So today's job was to make it into this -



It's *miles* better. The bridge pickup is very nicely balanced with the neck for volume, and sounds great - the both-together sound is quite usable too and has an interesting twangy hollow tone, possibly because they're so far apart. Best of all it just looks like it was meant to be like that - the DeArmond fitted perfectly for height and it was an extremely easy mod for something this radical - the body is ladder-braced not X-braced so there was no problem just cutting a clean hole straight through… five minutes with a drill and a pad-saw.



If you've got one of these and you're likewise not happy with the sound but like the concept and the looks, I would very highly recommend this. It just works.

I'll get round to replacing the missing string now .

impmann

I think it looks less odd too.

TheMarlin

I've always though these were damn ugly guitars, still want one though

i quite like the bridge Dynasonic. Good choice.  I know
some people who have added an under bridge pickup, the two blended together sounds great. 

I bet this guitar would really upset people on an acoustic folk open mic night

ICBM

impmann said:

I think it looks less odd too.

I agree. It's really something they should be doing as a factory model, I think.

TheMarlin said:

some people who have added an under bridge pickup, the two blended together sounds great.

The acoustic sound is surprisingly good for something so deliberately overbuilt - if a little quiet. The top is an unusual 5-ply laminate where the outer skin grain runs in the 'right' direction, but all three (including the middle one, strangely) inner layers run across. Easy to see when you've cut a bit out .

TheMarlin said:

I bet this guitar would really upset people on an acoustic folk open mic night