A 1987 Westerly-made GF-40 is my first Guild acquisition

[Br1ck]

Nice score. My favorite pickups, Dazzos, might be too expensive for you. K&Ks are a decent choice, but buy a pre amp with a lot of EQ options. You will need a pre of some sort if you have a piezo pickup of any kind.

 

[JohnW63]

Bottom line, had I seen it first and played it and checked the basics, I would have bought it for that price with a big smile on my face.

 

[welshtoast]

Nice score. My favorite pickups, Dazzos, might be too expensive for you.

With respect, denigrating my budget with uninformed speculation is a bit rude. Nonetheless I checked out Dazzos pickups, but ran away screaming when I saw the website (http://www.dazzopickups.com/HOME.html). Geocities called, it wants the <blink> tag back.

Bottom line, had I seen it first and played it and checked the basics, I would have bought it for that price with a big smile on my face.

Yup, same here and I still have the big smile!

Until now my go-to acoustic guitar has been a Seagull 25th Anniversary Flame Maple CW EQ, a fine guitar that sounds fantastic and plays incredibly well. A week ago I'd have argued that I couldn't imagine anything swaying me to get a "better" axe than that.

And then I picked up the beat-up old Guild GF-40.... and the rest is history!

Anyone want to buy a Seagull?

 

[welshtoast]

1984 Ovation 1758 12 string

I have that exact same guitar in black with the brown wood trim. Fantastic beast! I played that guitar on my first ever open mic session

 

[welshtoast]

K&Ks are a decent choice

This is really interesting because your other recommendation is Dazzo, a passive piezo system from another vendor. I'd actually never considered passive until your suggestions! The idea is growing on me.

but buy a pre amp with a lot of EQ options. You will need a pre of some sort if you have a piezo pickup of any kind.

I've been imagining an on-guitar system of mic(s) plus volume, eq, buffer, tuner, wiring, battery clip, battery... loads of shit affixed to the inside of my lovely Guild, changing the acoustics of the guitar. But by going passive - as per your suggestion to have off-board buffer/pre/eq/etc - most of the problems associated with active pickups can be avoided.

At the same time, I'd lose the benefits of active, too, which for me (playing at open mic nights) are: volume/tone controls at my fingertips; and a low-impedance buffered output that can drive long cables without rolling off the treble and without requiring pedals. I don't bring any pedals to open mic.

An active system like the LR Baggs Anthem is perfect from a usability perspective: volume, tone, at the fingers, buffered, check, check, check. But.... it fills the inside of the guitar with lots of stuff I don't necessarily want in there:

The same goes for the K&K active pickup system:

But the K&K passive system seems far less intrusive:

...which comes back to needing a preamp to buffer the signal, provide eq, gain, etc. And if I need all that stuff anyway...

It happens that I'm fairly handy with electronics and diy stuff, and I quite like the idea of building a wearable preamp fixed not to the guitar, but discretely to a nice leather strap.

In fact now that I think about it, it should be possible to hack the LR Baggs Anthem (which has an on-guitar pre-amp/battery/etc) into a passive system! The Anthem pickup itself is a one-piece combined mic/piezo that affixes underneath the bridge and has a single cable terminated in a 3.5mm TRS plug, which is easy to convert to a TRS jack on the back of the Guild. Tadaaaaa, passive outputs!

Taking the idea further, I could remove the circuitry from the LR Baggs plastic housing and 3D-print a replacement strap-mountable case + 9V battery holder. The new case would have holes for the volume/mix controls plus two standard 1/4" jacks: one TRS input from the passive wiring in the guitar, and one active mono output from the LR Baggs circuitry that I'd use for playing at open mic, etc.

As a bonus, plugging a normal mono 1/4" guitar cable into the Guild (without the strap-based pre-amp) would connect passively to either the mic or the piezo, whichever was connected to the tip of the jack.

Thank you @Br1ck, you've given me a lot of food for thought and a bunch of ideas for a hare-brained project. Good stuff.

 

[plaidseason]

For the sake of whatever, I use a Fishman Rare Earth Humbucker into a Fishman Platinum Pro EQ. There's not a lot of heavy lifting with respect to installation, just reaming the tail block for the jack.

 

[HeyMikey]

If you are going K&K passive then you do want an external EQ. I find with K&K you need to tame the low end and balance more to the highs. For open mic where you are only doing a few songs and don’t have time to set up your own gear, then a basic portable belt clip system such as this will help.

LR Baggs Gigpro Single Channel Belt Clip Preamp

Acoustic Preamp with Passive EQ, Phase Inversion, and Low Cut Control

www.sweetwater.com

 

[plaidseason]

If you are going K&K passive then you do want an external EQ. I find with K&K you need to tame the low end and balance more to the highs. For open mic where you are only doing a few songs and don’t have time to set up your own gear, then a basic portable belt clip system such as this will help.

LR Baggs Gigpro Single Channel Belt Clip Preamp

Acoustic Preamp with Passive EQ, Phase Inversion, and Low Cut Control

www.sweetwater.com

Or if you want to go on the cheap, this is what I've used for super quick-change shows (and also at regular shows with my stick dulcimers), where my regular setup might take too long. Stick a battery in (it's not phantom powered), and bring it onstage with you.

Behringer ADI21 V-Tone Acoustic Driver DI Pedal

Acoustic Amp Modeler/Direct Recording Preamp/DI Box with 3-band EQ and Ground Lift Switch

www.sweetwater.com

 

[walrus]

I'm late to the party, but that is a great score! Love the finish checking on the top!

walrus

 

[chazmo]

I've been hoping to hear something from folks who may've gone with the K&K active system (Trinity), because the bridge-plate piezos don't require you to install a UST. The K&K pure mini piezos are pretty good by themselves as a passive system, but their active system is easier to install than a UST-based system like the Seymour Duncan Wavelength Duo or the Baggs Anthem.

Good luck in the hunt.

 

[welshtoast]

While pontificating upon amplification options I have stripped the guitar and started a conversation with Bob Colosi (http://www.guitarsaddles.com) about making a matched set of bone bridge pins, nut, and saddle. While he's working on that, I've been working on sorting out the worn, dented frets and replacing the 14:1 Grover 102C tuning machines with more modern 18:1 Grover 502C locking tuners.

I know, I know! Controversy! Locking tuners on an acoustic! Sacrilege! Insufficient break angle! Non-standard parts! Danger, Will Robinson!

Don't worry, the 502Cs are a drop-in replacement and will have perfectly sufficient string break angle. I know this because the previous owner of the guitar wound the strings backwards so that the strings looped upwards (instead of downwards) on the tuning posts; this reduced the break angle considerably, but there wasn't any rattle, tuning instability, etc - it played and sounded fine. As such, it stands to reason the locking tuners will also be fine. And I love locking tuners, so I'm very happy. (I know I'll get flamed to oblivion, I just don't care ;-) And if I'm wrong I can swap them back.

 

[chazmo]

Welsh, seems interesting to me. Check out So, you don't want any wraps around the post when you use these if you do it "right." Very interesting. I like these, they look really easy to use. What, may I ask, is the controversy on using these locking tuners?

Oh, and by the way, 18:1 ratio is a great upgrade on (all) old guitars if you ask me. Of course, no one's asking me...

 

[welshtoast]

The nut, saddle, and bridge pins were all plastic. As I mentioned above, I'm replacing them with custom-made bone parts. I'm sending the originals to Bob and he'll send back bone equivalents, all made from matching bone. These are the old parts:

In the meantime I fixed up and leveled the frets, which were in pretty poor shape. The first 5 frets had a dent in the B string location:

In addition to the dented frets, they were worn unevenly and using my rocker tool I found that there were several sitting proud. Time for a fret leveling job! First step: level the neck with the strings off. I have a straight edge for doing this and made sure to set the truss rod to a point where the wood of the fretboard was perfectly level. Once it was level I left it overnight to settle and check it again.

After that I taped it up:

Once taped I took a red Sharpie and made a line along the top of each fret. This served as an indicator of what I'd already filed, what was flat, and where any dents were still present:

Then I took my FretGuru leveling beam and gently sanded down the tops of the frets until there was no red left, but only just! Part of the trick is to remove as little material from the frets as possible. You can see here how the top of each fret becomes flat:

And on the dented frets there was just a tiny bit of red sharpie left in the dent:

Getting rid of the last remaining dents was a job for the crowning stage, not the filing stage. To do the crowning I re-applied sharpie to the flattened and leveled frets, then set about them with a crowning tool, which rounds over the tops of the frets. Here's the tool:

Here you can see on the left a non-crowned fret and on the right a half-done partially-crowned fret. The middle of the fret is nicely rounded over, but the end is still flat:

I used the crowning tool until the entire fret was nicely rounded over:

Rinse and repeat for the entire fretboard! Once all the frets were crowned I took a set of fret polishing rubbers (180 grit through 2000) grit and smoothed down the edges of the frets:

After that I went back over and used the rocker to identify any spots on the frets where they were still a little too high:

Then used the sharpie trick to crown them down just a bit further until everything was perfectly level:

The finishing touch was to use a dremel with polishing disc and some Meguiar's polish to get the frets nice and smooth and shiny!

Finally I took some Crimson Guitars Finishing Oil (good stuff) and buffed the fretboard and bridge with it:

And that's it for now! The guitar is ready for new nut, saddle, and bridge pins. I've already got a set of fresh Curt Mangan Round Core 13-56 strings ready to go on... it's just a waiting and patience game at this point.

-W

 

[welshtoast]

Welsh, seems interesting to me. Check out So, you don't want any wraps around the post when you use these if you do it "right." Very interesting. I like these, they look really easy to use. What, may I ask, is the controversy on using these locking tuners?

Oh, and by the way, 18:1 ratio is a great upgrade on (all) old guitars if you ask me. Of course, no one's asking me...

I'm very familiar with fitting and using locking tuners - all my electric guitars have them. And I agree that one should never wrap the wires when using locking tuners otherwise you negate one of the benefits, namely that string tension is 100% at the locking mechanism, which prevents slippage due to wrapping.

And I'm a little tongue-in-cheek about the sacrilege part. Sometimes locking tuners are a bit polarizing

PS I agree about 18:1 vs 14:1!

 

[chazmo]

Oh, hey, Bob Colosi's stuff is highly praised around here and elsewhere. Good luck with those new pins and nut when you get them.

By the way, I doubt it was you, but from the nasty imprint you can tell that someone used pliers to get those old plastic pins out at some point. You really want to use a pin puller.

 

[sailingshoes72]

Great photo essay on the process of leveling, crowning and polishing the frets. That was enjoyable to read. The fretboard and bridge look luxurious after the application of wood oil. I think you will enjoy the tone of the bone nut and saddle.

 

[welshtoast]

Oh, hey, Bob Colosi's stuff is highly praised around here and elsewhere. Good luck with those new pins and nut when you get them.

By the way, I doubt it was you, but from the nasty imprint you can tell that someone used pliers to get those old plastic pins out at some point. You really want to use a pin puller.

The marks left by the savage who used pliers made me irrationally angry.

 

[chazmo]

The marks left by the savage who used pliers made me irrationally angry.

"Irrationally?" Hardly!!! The good news is that you're getting better replacement pins!!!!

 

[wileypickett]

Most of my guitars have 18:1 or 21:1 gear ratio tuners of them. And several have locking tuners. No sacrilege as far as I'm concerned.

 

[welshtoast]

After letting the oil rest for 24 hours I worked in some wax in the form of Monty's Instrument Food. I love the stuff. Smells nice, too.

For this I use my fingers, rubbing for a long time and letting the wax get nice and warm to make it easy to work into the pores:

It takes a lot of paper towel to get the surface wax off, and it takes a lot of elbow grease to finish the wax job, but it's worth it! In these next photos the fingerboard isn't wet or sticky or anything like that; the sheen is just the combination of good oil and wax with the natural lustre of played old rosewood:

It feels (and smells!) fantastic. Now I'm going to leave the guitar hanging for a week or so while Bob Colosi and USPS work their magic. I'll wipe it down every day to make sure any excess oil/wax is lifted away by the time it comes to finish the nut and saddle, then... finally... play it!