MIMF

There's a pot on the pre-amp that you can use to balance the piezo with the mags. I actually need to dial the piezo down a bit. I moved my mags a bit closer to the strings but got a bit too much dirt out of the neck pickup that way. Don't know if I'll go with quite such hot buckers in the future on a more universal guitar.

The graphtech system will run you about $200 or so for the basic piezo and the pre-amp. An extra $28 or so gets you the selector switch that is pre-wired to plug right into the pre-amp. They also have some midi- systems to go with it too.

Now you see why I wired it up outside of the control cavity and moved it in!

Hi Eric,
Nice guitar! Especially for a second build.
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Thanks.

Ahh, sorry. saw that in another thread after I had posted that

new knobs installed, don't know if I like them yet... I might just buy some amber tophat knobs or some gold knurled knobs

That's amazing man! The wiring looks crazy. I hope mine doesn't end up being that complicated. Me and electricity have a tricky relationship haha. That guitar looks awesome though!

the addition of the push/pull pots and the piezo really added a LOT of wiring to it. A typical 2 humbucker layout is fairly simple wiring.

wow, great second build! Honestly there's nothing that catches my eye as being "off". I'd be proud to wear a guitar like that around my neck. Very well executed sir.

Eric, I really like that! The stringers really set off the body and neck. While I do make archtop electric bodies for a couple clients, I've never built a complete guitar and i've got some inspiration now, thanks!

I did build a "mule" guitar with humbucker/single coul, 5-way switch, and GraphTech's piezo Floyd bridge with both hexaphonic and acoustic preamps. The amount of wiring is almost ridiculous; your control cavity is pretty tidy considering the wires.

Yeah, I'm glad I cleaned up the wiring in there a little bit. I ended up having a poor connection on the blend pot so I re-soldered that one. I figured it out when I opened up the cavity to adjust the volume on the piezo preamp. I was moving the wires around and the sound kept cutting out. I jiggled individual wires until I found the offending party and fixed that a day later.

I did have to raise the action a bit on the low E side

I had quite a bit of buzzing in frets 2-5. I think this is an effect of the radius sanding block that I had made creating some less then desirable geometry. Note for future to get a decent sanding block! It still plays well and I have 1 fret to address (16 on the high e-side) that buzzes so much it almost frets out. But I'll do that when I do the next string change.

At some point I may scuff sand the whole thing and add another layer of poly so I can get that really glassy look/feel. There's a little bit of orange peel left in it that I'll try and sand out first. I should have enough thickness in the current poly to deal with that though