The Jerry Garcia Stratocaster Project
As 2013 was winding down I was busy at work on my latest project, the "Jerry Garcia" Stratocaster. It's really only a Strat at first glance, about the only thing that's unmolested are the neck and tuners, and a few bits of hardware. The body is a MIM Standard but I hacked out a pool rout, added another input jack, and removed a little more wood in the trem cavity to accommodate the pre-amp and battery.
 |
| The "Jerry Garcia" Stratocaster |
 |
| Jerry's Doug Irwin-built Rosebud |
It's wired up to loosely replicate Jerry's Doug Irwin-built Rosebud guitar, minus the midi stuff. What sets this guitar (and other guitars of Jerry's) apart from "regular" instruments in the on-board effects loop (OBEL) and pre-amp. To honor the wishes of Mike Wald, I will not reproduce any of the info on his page here, but if you're interested it can all be found here, along with wiring diagrams and lots of other gear info specific to Jerry's instruments. Mike was most helpful in answering questions about building both the guitar and the junction box necessary to make this whole rig work while still allowing you to use regular instruments… so I want to remain on his good side. For those looking for additional info about Dead related gear, he can often be found lurking around on the RUkind Forums.
I was honestly surprised that everything worked as planned on the first attempt to get this wired up… I cannot express how glad I am not to have had to trouble-shoot the wiring in this puppy!
The box was also my first attempt at pedal building. Here's a "work in progress" shot of it. It's a passive pedal so it was really pretty easy to wire up. Here are some other pictures of the guitar. Again, I could explain what everything does but it's all at Mike's page and explained so well there, that's there's no need to try and explain it all here. Despite having enough knobs and switches to be confused with a NASA launch pad, it's actually all pretty straight forward. The only thing that really took some time to get used to is the fact that the middle pickup has a dedicate tone and coil-tap toggle while the bridge and neck share a tone knob and coil-tap toggle.
I was honestly surprised that everything worked as planned on the first attempt to get this wired up… I cannot express how glad I am not to have had to trouble-shoot the wiring in this puppy!
The box was also my first attempt at pedal building. Here's a "work in progress" shot of it. It's a passive pedal so it was really pretty easy to wire up. Here are some other pictures of the guitar. Again, I could explain what everything does but it's all at Mike's page and explained so well there, that's there's no need to try and explain it all here. Despite having enough knobs and switches to be confused with a NASA launch pad, it's actually all pretty straight forward. The only thing that really took some time to get used to is the fact that the middle pickup has a dedicate tone and coil-tap toggle while the bridge and neck share a tone knob and coil-tap toggle.
No comments:
Post a Comment