Setting up and tweaking vintage single-coil Guilds

Hey all,

This is an observation more than anything else, but here goes :

I got the twin to my beloved, magical X175 last year, and it took me a while to take it to my tech and get it refretted, too broke, one of us too busy, etc... so it basically spent almost a year in the case until recently.
Long story short, I finally got it refretted, put a Bigsby on it, potted the pickups, and put a tune-a-matic on it.

Now I'm in the long, tedious process of tweaking the nut height, bridge height and saddle radius, pickup height, etc.., and that's what this post is about :

-the result is worth it, but setting these things up is a major PAIN!!! Done it a bunch of times, but somehow these guitars (my Franz equipped 175's as well as my DeArmond 200 equipped Starfire) seem extremely sensitive to even the smallest adjustment.

Adjusting Franz pickup heights is a pain from the get-go because they weren't really made for that, and it involves carefully bending the pickup baseplates until they balance out nicely with each other and sound their best.

I hate it when the neck pickup overpowers the lead one in a guitar, and getting that bridge pickup so it sounds just right and then balancing out the neck pickup height just takes forever, and even the slightest difference in height can make the difference between fantastic and horrible with these things.
Add to that I'm doing this in my apartment, and getting frustrated I can't turn the amp up and see how a pickup behaves under stage volume with the amp breaking up a little and the guitar almost on the verge of feedback - just rehearsed with the "new" 175 today, and while it played great, I'm going to have to pop the hood on the bridge pickup again and lower it some, and then get the neck pickup to balance out all over again. Ugh, slowly getting tired of it, just want to play the thing now!!!

Like I said, the reward is big enough to keep me tweaking until I'm 100% happy, but it's a lot more tedious than on any other electric guitar I've ever owned - including filtertron Gretsches, not the easiest to change pickup heights on either, and fairly sensitive to that too.
Anybody else have the same experience?

Sorry for the long rambling post.

pic!

Here's a pic of both of my 62 Manhattans to lighten up my post some..

Btw, there's another x-175 on the Bay!

Hey Walter

Every time I see your Guild's I get Gas. Yours have P-90's. I just got a guitar modded with P-90's, let's see if it does it. The Guild P/U's were boring!

Walter, shimming the pickups doesn't work?

Oh, it works alright, and it's not like I don't know what I'm doing, it just takes *forever* to get everything in that "sweet spot", you know?

I may not have quite the ear for the sweet spot that you do. :wink:
I only have the one guitar that doesn't have english mounts, so I guess I'm spoiled.

Walter Broes said:

Oh, it works alright, and it's not like I don't know what I'm doing, it just takes *forever* to get everything in that "sweet spot", you know?

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I'm still always tweaking my CE-100 and T-100, Walter. I know what you mean. I got kind of lucky with the Franz PUs on the T-100. They were perfect from the get go. However, I'm forever tweaking the truss rods and adjusting the bridges to get the action how I want it on both.

jp said:

I'm still always tweaking my CE-100 and T-100, Walter. I know what you mean. I got kind of lucky with the Franz PUs on the T-100. They were perfect from the get go. However, I'm forever tweaking the truss rods and adjusting the bridges to get the action how I want it on both.

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hmmm..that hasn't been my experience - once I get the guitar to where I want it to be, I almost never have to touch the truss rod, and only have the adjust the bridge every once in a while. My N°1 Gigging guitar, the '62 X175 is an extremely stable instrument that way.

Default, my ears are probably damaged by now... :|

Nothing wrong with your fingers!

Walter Broes said:

hmmm..that hasn't been my experience - once I get the guitar to where I want it to be, I almost never have to touch the truss rod, and only have the adjust the bridge every once in a while. My N°1 Gigging guitar, the '62 X175 is an extremely stable instrument that way.

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I guess it's more accurate to say that I've never gotten my CE-100 exactly the way I want it. I keep messing around with different action, different strings, etc.--also trying to eliminate a slight buzz past the 12th. I just swapped out the top of the bridge with another old Guild which better matched the fretboard radius. My days as a working musician are at a lull, so I can mess around with it. My old jazz workhorse '64 CE-100 was absolutely stable, and I never touched it. Most heavy gigging back in the day were with my No. 1, a '76 Strat and a '64 Duo-Sonic as backup.

Woohooo!!!!! I think I finally got my second X175 to where it sounds, feels, and responds almost exactly the same as my N°1! They're as good as interchangeable now, and that's what I was aiming for with these two! Dang, I love those guitars.

Walter. Congratulations!

Imagine what a tech would charge for a 7-month setup project. :lol:

Any chance you could measure the distance of the pickups from the strings? Just for reference for the group here?

Well, measuring the exact distance from the pickups to the strings would involve taking off the covers, which is something I'm glad I don't have to do any more with these... :?

Also, it's a fairly pointless exercise I think, as none of these archtops are exactly alike - the neck set is just slightly different on all of them, so I don't think one set of measurements could apply to a bunch of different guitars anyway.