Gilded's circa-1970 Bluesbird is getting ready for frets. Any advice on what size frets to use?

[gilded]

Hey guys, I'm looking for some advice on what size frets I should use in my circa-1970 M-75 hollow-body guitar.

You guys might remember that I started a thread last November about this guitar. The harness was repaired, as were the pots and caps.


1) It has the original frets, but the frets are very, very low and can't be dressed again

2) The original fret width is .08" and the height of those frets after years of playing measured .03 and .022 respectively

3) The radius of the fingerboard is 12". Now, I never had a '60s-'70s Guild with a 12" radius, but Guild may have decided to copy a few of the features of it's main competitor, Gibson!

4) Neck width at the nut is 1.670" The neck has a good shape to it, but the frets are so flat that it's hard to play the guitar.

5) The ohm resistance was measured with the pickups installed, on a day where there was lots of static electricity running around the room.
The measures are 7.19 at the neck pickup and 7.29 at the bridge pickup. Doesn't sound like a PAF clone, does it?

6) I think that the pickups are probably Gibson T-Top pickups in that they sound like Gibson pickups, but aren't as crunchy as the 'No-Tops' in my '65 ES-335. The No-Tops growl while the T-Tops emit a beautiful, brilliant sound. And 'gilded' is very happy with the guitar's sound, by the way.

So back to frets. Any body have some fret sizes for me to consider? The current strats have a fret width and height of .08 wide to .04 tall.
Maybe that's a starting point?

Thanks, Harry aka glided

PS the truss rod cover is now right side up!!

 

[krysh]

can't help with this, but I suggest putting in whats best for you.

 

[mellowgerman]

I personally avoid stainless steel frets because, although they practically last forever, they have a tendency to be a little clanky/clicky and bright, especially when paired with single coils. My Hagstrom Swede bass has them from a re-fret prior to my acquiring it and I find myself rolling off the highs to tame the noisy frets. Otherwise it's a super comfortable, great sounding bass though.
If you're going with nickel, the taller they are, the more crowning/leveling they'll take, and will correspondingly last longer. That said, some players, especially with small hands, may find tall/large frets uncomfortable. There's a good amount of info on the web if you do a search for differences in fret sizes.
No right or wrong answer and just comes down to your preference.

The chart below might also be helpful in choosing.

 

[Guildedagain]

You coulda saved yourself all this trouble by sending me the guitar ;]

There's nothing PAF clone about your pickups, they are still actual 60's Gibson pickups with the Pat # stickers, and the readings are right on the money. Most real PAF's have reading just like these, pickups over 8kΩ are an aberration and actually don't sound as good.

I studied these pickups for years and built them, sold some handmade PAF copies - just recently sold my last set for $1k - and those reading you gave out are dead on for the best of the best PAF's with unusual vocal qualities, "dual tone". I had the pickups wound to the exact specs of your pickups, nearly to the hundredth of a Ohm.

This is the last set of these I just sold. I commissioned someone to build them, with actual vintage Gibson parts like the slugs and screws, this guy had a bucket of old parts at the time, and I did some mild aging to the bobbins and bases.

The internet is full of experts that are just full of it, but I deem your pickups to be authentic and I was obsessed with Les Paul Flametops and PAF's for over a decade starting back in the mid 90's, before the millions of experts/naysayers came on the scene.

On frets, stick with nickel silver like the originals, this is where your tone comes from.

Don't go jumbos, the tangs are so big they will cumulatively tweak the neck back like an extra truss rod you can't adjust, you won't be able to "get no relief".

If you're a chorder jazzer, lower frets are better, fretless wonders of the 60's come to mind, I find them completely unplayable.

If you're a blues player and you bend the G/B/E strings a lot, go with a medium tall fret that makes bends much easier.

The radius on these is fairly flat I imagine, 12.5º?, bends should be easy on tallish frets, even extreme bends that are impossible on an older Strat - 7.5º radius - unless you raise the bridge saddles up high enough to overcome the middle peak of the frets, another way to address this is a "compound radius".

I had a 1960 Strat Sunburst I picked up in Tacoma WA ages ago, didn't have much frets left.

Everybody said "You can't refret that" and shops in fact refused to do it.

So I had to go to this cocky and drug addled 20 something luthier who claimed to have "mastered the blues while still in high school", and got him to refret the guitar, and he did a very good job actually, didn't fk up the board at all like some I've seen.

But the problem came when I tried to do bends down past the 12th fret, couldn't do em on the new frets, too tall in the middle, and a light came on in my head "what if we take the frets down in the middle?"

He said he wanted nothing to do with it, but that I could use his files, and having never done any fret work, I freehanded the top of my frets down, recrowned, polished, etc.

I sold that guitar to the most eminent guitar collector in this area some time later, and he called me out of of the blue and asked me "who did the frets?" because they were amazing. I didn't have the heart to tell him, "it was Junkie Larry and me" because that would have ruined for him, so I just said "I can't tell you that" ;]

I later found out that's called a "compound radius", Warmoth may have invented it, they certainly use it because it makes a ton of sense.

Necessity is the mother of all invention.

 

[Groundwire]

I agree with the other posters that recommend sticking with Nickel Silver frets. I am not a fan of stainless steel frets. To slippery and clackety for me.
I really like 6105 frets (or the Jescar equivalent). They are .090 x.055. They are narrow and tall and feel great for bending and chording. I like them on Fender and Gibson style necks/scale lengths. The other nice thing is that they are high enough that you can have them milled down a bit if you find them a bit tall for you liking, but if you e not used taller frets before, I suggest playing them for a month or so, because your technique will adjust pretty quickly. I like them because they help me lighten my grip so I’m not bending sharp by pressing down so hard.
To me, they are the perfect fret size for electric guitars, if you play lead stuff and like to bend the strings (as I do).

 

[Groundwire]

You coulda saved yourself all this trouble by sending me the guitar ;]

There's nothing PAF clone about your pickups, they are still actual 60's Gibson pickups with the Pat # stickers, and the readings are right on the money. Most real PAF's have reading just like these, pickups over 8kΩ are an aberration and actually don't sound as good.

I studied these pickups for years and built them, sold some handmade PAF copies - just recently sold my last set for $1k - and those reading you gave out are dead on for the best of the best PAF's with unusual vocal qualities, "dual tone". I had the pickups wound to the exact specs of your pickups, nearly to the hundredth of a Ohm.

This is the last set of these I just sold. I commissioned someone to build them, with actual vintage Gibson parts like the slugs and screws, this guy had a bucket of old parts at the time, and I did some mild aging to the bobbins and bases.

The internet is full of experts that are just full of it, but I deem your pickups to be authentic and I was obsessed with Les Paul Flametops and PAF's for over a decade starting back in the mid 90's, before the millions of experts/naysayers came on the scene.

On frets, stick with nickel silver like the originals, this is where your tone comes from.

Don't go jumbos, the tangs are so big they will cumulatively tweak the neck back like an extra truss rod you can't adjust, you won't be able to "get no relief".

If you're a chorder jazzer, lower frets are better, fretless wonders of the 60's come to mind, I find them completely unplayable.

If you're a blues player and you bend the G/B/E strings a lot, go with a medium tall fret that makes bends much easier.

The radius on these is fairly flat I imagine, 12.5º?, bends should be easy on tallish frets, even extreme bends that are impossible on an older Strat - 7.5º radius - unless you raise the bridge saddles up high enough to overcome the middle peak of the frets, another way to address this is a "compound radius".

I had a 1960 Strat Sunburst I picked up in Tacoma WA ages ago, didn't have much frets left.

Everybody said "You can't refret that" and shops in fact refused to do it.

So I had to go to this cocky and drug addled 20 something luthier who claimed to have "mastered the blues while still in high school", and got him to refret the guitar, and he did a very good job actually, didn't fk up the board at all like some I've seen.

But the problem came when I tried to do bends down past the 12th fret, couldn't do em on the new frets, too tall in the middle, and a light came on in my head "what if we take the frets down in the middle?"

He said he wanted nothing to do with it, but that I could use his files, and having never done any fret work, I freehanded the top of my frets down, recrowned, polished, etc.

I sold that guitar to the most eminent guitar collector in this area some time later, and he called me out of of the blue and asked me "who did the frets?" because they were amazing. I didn't have the heart to tell him, "it was Junkie Larry and me" because that would have ruined for him, so I just said "I can't tell you that" ;]

I later found out that's called a "compound radius", Warmoth may have invented it, they certainly use it because it makes a ton of sense.

Necessity is the mother of all invention.

GA, you really need to write a book. You have such good stories.
I think I need a set of your PAF’s. I agree totally about low wind humbuckers that breathe in the top end. I was thinking of having JM Rolph wind a set for me…

 

[gilded]

Dear GA, and all the other guys, I'm so happy to get all these opinions from my 'best internet, best Let's Talk Guild friends.'

I'm like all of you guys, I love this stuff.
I wish all you guys could hear what I heard coming out of this guitar a few days ago. A great local musician/tech brought me the guitar back after a set-up and played it through a Fender Blues Jr. with the 6V6 mod. He played it for me, super-thin frets and all and it was a revelation (it was also a mind bogle that the Blues Jr. sounded so good, too, but that's another story).
I heard big, beautiful chords, played through the amp one setting at a time; neck, bridge, then combination. Just a beautiful, clean tone. I remember saying to myself, 'that's as close as I'm going to get to the Geo. Barnes Acousti-Lectric guitar I had around the end of the '70s, etc.'
Personally, I would be happy to have an .08 or 09 fret width along with that 12" fretboard. But again, that's not based on a lot of experience, so I'm trying to get some thoughts from my 'crewe' here at LTG. Thanks, thanks, thanks and....Thanks!

gilded

 

[Guildedagain]

Gee I wanted to write a book a long time ago, but most of the stuff in it wouldn't even be legal to talk about ;]

PAF's in that low 7kΩ are magic, but it's lost on a lot of people, enter the JB, 16kΩ of attack, feedback and sustain galore.

If you want magic PAF's on the cheap, I'll give up a secret.

Look for very old - 70's - Seymour Duncan pickups with the old paper labels, 59N, Jazz, JB, all magic pickups, be patient, be stealthy, don't tell people on a forum, etc. Buy as many as you can find if they are a good deal, that would be the only sane thing to do.

Next up, vintage Dimarzios, killer pickups, used to be just dirt cheap.

Speaking of Dimarzio, his first pickups were PAF's, not Super Distortions, and again, they're [were] out there, and they were never priced very high, that has probably changed some.

Next, Shaw pickups, but everybody knows about this, and T Tops have been crazily hyped for decades now. Les Pauls at the time at the time actual had some kind of PAF sticker right on the pickup ring, with Tim Shaw's name on it?

80's Gibson pickups are mostly great and pretty amazing, Dirty Fingers, dual lead pickups, a different way to split the coils.

Even the Sonex pickups were killer.

I remember going into "Music World" waayyy waayy back in time, the ahole clerk would always spring this one on me "You ever gonna buy anything? even though I'd already bought guitars there, and they had the brand new Sonex's and geez I went full on Jimmy Page Heartbreaker note for note, really impressing some customers lol, the Sonex's were just killer, plastic guitars with cheaper pickups. Next up, the Firebrands, Dirty Fingers, I could play that for hours through a Marshall JCM800 of the time, tone heaven.

That the "chords were beautiful" doesn't surprise me, these low wind PAF's are actually crazy loud pickups compared to others of the time, very clear, this is almost unknown now it seems, they are first and foremost very good loud clean pickups. All manners of dirt heard through amps breaking up by accident or on purpose is not really how these pickups shine.

That's the beauty of guitar pedals. Take a beautiful fat clean sound and squash it into a bassless wall of noise. This is why I must have over 50 pedals, I never understand why when you just listen to a guitar through a good amp, you hear the nuances of the instrument, so many... But sometimes you just gotta get the Led out ;]

 

[Groundwire]

Gee I wanted to write a book a long time ago, but most of the stuff in it wouldn't even be legal to talk about ;]

PAF's in that low 7kΩ are magic, but it's lost on a lot of people, enter the JB, 16kΩ of attack, feedback and sustain galore.

If you want magic PAF's on the cheap, I'll give up a secret.

Look for very old - 70's - Seymour Duncan pickups with the old paper labels, 59N, Jazz, JB, all magic pickups, be patient, be stealthy, don't tell people on a forum, etc. Buy as many as you can find if they are a good deal, that would be the only sane thing to do.

Next up, vintage Dimarzios, killer pickups, used to be just dirt cheap.

Speaking of Dimarzio, his first pickups were PAF's, not Super Distortions, and again, they're [were] out there, and they were never priced very high, that has probably changed some.

Next, Shaw pickups, but everybody knows about this, and T Tops have been crazily hyped for decades now. Les Pauls at the time at the time actual had some kind of PAF sticker right on the pickup ring, with Tim Shaw's name on it?

80's Gibson pickups are mostly great and pretty amazing, Dirty Fingers, dual lead pickups, a different way to split the coils.

Even the Sonex pickups were killer.

I remember going into "Music World" waayyy waayy back in time, the ahole clerk would always spring this one on me "You ever gonna buy anything? even though I'd already bough guitars there, and they had the brand new Sonex's and geez I went full on Jimmy Page Heartbreaker note for note, really impressing some customers lol, the Sonex's were just killer, plastic guitars with cheaper pickups. Next up, the Firebrands, Dirty Fingers, I could play that for hours through a Marshall JCM800 of the time, tone heaven.

That the "chords were beautiful" doesn't surprise me, these low wind PAF's are actually crazy loud pickups compared to others of the time, very clear, this is amost unknown now it seems, they are first and foremost very good loud clean pickups. All manners of dirt heard through amps breaking up by accident or on purpose is not really how these pickups shine.

That's the beauty of guitar pedals. Take a beautiful fat clean sound and squash it into a bassless wall of noise. This is why I must have over 50 pedals, I never understand why when you just listen to a guitar through a good amp, you hear the nuances of the instrument, so many... But sometimes you just gotta get the Led out ;]

Yes, the Shaws are awesome. I have them in my ‘85 335. Airy and lovely. I don’t get the high output pickup thing. You lose all the character and personality. It makes every guitar sound the same.
I will have to look for some of the original Duncan’s. Thanks for the tip.

 

[GAD]

I love Stainless frets - just not on a vintage guitar from before the shredder era.

 

[jp]

Good tip about the old Dimarzios and SDs. I regretfully sold my hotrodded LP Studio that my tech found and installed an older SD '59 in the neck. It was a glorious PU that sounded so much better than the new ones.

 

[gilded]

Here are some pics. The TRC is right side up now, a nod to my more fastidious friends.

When we opened up the guitar we pulled a lot of cotton swabbing from the inside of the M-75. It turned out that the when the former owners/techs, etc. put the cotton inside the guitar, they could only get it to fit if they packed it all next to the outside of the body. At the same time, the Cotton interfered with the guitar's harness and the pickups couldn't be placed into their correct placement. Practically speaking, the pickups were reversed with the neck pickup winding up near the bridge and the bridge pickup near the neck.

When the cotton came out, Mr. Tech sorted it all out, built a harness, threw in some CTS pots and started evaluating the fit of the Tune-a-matic bridge, which is another story for a different time.

 

[gilded]

here are a few more.

 

[gilded]

Last ones for now.

 

[mellowgerman]

The ol' Gretsch came home from my luthier yesterday! Just thought I'd mention, I'm loving these nickel "narrow/tall" frets (as recommended by my luthier). I believe they are technically "6105" but can't confirm that numeric descriptor without double-checking again with my tech. At 68 years of age, this guitar really plays like a new top-shelf guitar. Got a neck reset earlier this year, so now it's all set for the next 68 years of pickin and strummin.

 

[Groundwire]

The ol' Gretsch came home from my luthier yesterday! Just thought I'd mention, I'm loving these nickel "narrow/tall" frets (as recommended by my luthier). I believe they are technically "6105" but can't confirm that numeric descriptor without double-checking again with my tech. At 68 years of age, this guitar really plays like a new top-shelf guitar. Got a neck reset earlier this year, so now it's all set for the next 68 years of pickin and strummin.

Gorgeous guitar! Yes, the Narrow/Tall frets are the 6105’s. They are by far my favorite fret for electric guitar. Your luthier knows their stuff.

 

[chazmo]

Hey, beautiful Gretsch there, MG! That's really a fantastic-looking archtop! I guess I've always loved the F-hole look, being kind of a classical guy...

 

[chazmo]

Oh, and Harry, I'm glad the refret on the BB worked out so well!

 

[mellowgerman]

Hey, beautiful Gretsch there, MG! That's really a fantastic-looking archtop! I guess I've always loved the F-hole look, being kind of a classical guy...

Thanks! Yes, I fell in love when I first saw it. Needed quite a bit of work, but I got a pretty good price on it and just felt like it deserved to be restored to it's former glory. LOVE the lighter-wound 1950's Dearmond pickups. Tied only with the Franz pickup in my book. When I decided it was time to acquire a nice vintage archtop, I felt weird about buying a non-Guild, but being a long-time Neil Young and David Crosby fan, I've always had a soft spot for hollowbody Gretsch guitars as well. Now that all of the playability issues have been masterfully remedied, I'm super stoked to have this one in my stable.

 

[gilded]

Oh, and Harry, I'm glad the refret on the BB worked out so well!

Actually, it's being fretted as we speak, using a wire that is .085 wide and .04 tall. The current 'cool' thing is that the fingerboard's been cleaned up a bit along the way. For instance, the fret slots on the Brazilian fingerboard have been getting a good cleaning, and the good ol' Brazilian board now has a beautiful reddish coloration to it.

I asked Mr. Luth' why the board was so dark and he said, 'Easy...Sweat!'

So it's all coming along. I'll let you all know when we are further down the line, too. Appreciate the feedback, friends.

gilded