Upgrade of archtop electronics

[Dave24309]

Nice job. I admire the effort and skill you put into the modification. It was interesting but mostly beyond me.

I was wondering if you had considered a rotary pot with different capacitors or a Bill Lawrence Q-filter. I have heard that is another method of getting a variety of tones from a setup, although they don't seem as "popular" as one might think. It's not a common option from a manufacturer.

[sgosnell]

Not common, but it still exists. The Gibson Varitone is one example. There are several ways to wire up different capacitors, and there are good reasons you don't see it very often. Few guitarists like it, and it costs more to make it, thus lower profits. For me, it just isn't worth the expense or effort, because I already have tone controls on the guitar and the amp. They work well enough for me.

[Mich]

Thanks guys,
Unfortunately I didn't hear about all this stuff before.. Rotary switches and other things I discovered after finishing this project.
But I also got good and simple advice from nice guy whos name John Cooper, who has a blog about guitar electronics Planet Z and YouTube channel.
The idea is in differences in nature of linear pot and logarithmic one. In linear (that I have) usually we can hear the tone changes only in beginning however in log pot the tone changes going farther from zero.
My particular setup works only there, where the tone can be changed, that's why I can here four different caps (phisicly there only three), when my tone knob moved from 0 to ?3.
So my next upgrade is to switch the ton cap to audio taper with good looking log graph

[frostypyro]

Hey man, it looks nice! I actually have a j600k myself, and and I'm thinking about putting in a humbucker in it (not me but a local tech). Did you run into any problems cutting the hole for the pickup? Also would you be able to post a sound clip to get an idea of what it sounds like? Looks good man!

[Mich]

There were no problems at all with cutting the hole. I watched this video before cutting:

.
I believe it will be OK if you give it to professionals to make this work. But special prudence is needed with the paint job of this guitar because of very poor quality of it - you can see the little piece of dye is missing at button of my guitar. I will try to make some video maybe tomorrow. The strings I have right now is D'Addario .10 Chromes flatwounds but I waiting for shipping of .14 Jazz Tapes from Labella to get better sound. But even with current setup it sounds very good imho.