Mending
Musicians have a good bit to think about - notably, what they're going to do when they're playing. Building a decent act is a full-time job.
Musicians shouldn't have to worry whether or not their gear will crap out when they're playing in front of an audience. But they do - the little bits of electronic gear required for any amplified music show are (for the most part) crap. Preamps burn out, wires come disconnected, pickups don't, microphones buzz and rattle, amps fry and short. The worst of this is when an instrument has an intermittent electronic fault - it works sometimes but manages to die at the worst possible time. Intermittents are difficult to diagnose, but they have to be fixed, because an unreliable instrument will be set aside, discarded, the worst possible fate, and it's hard on performers who often don't have the money to either replace the instrument or fix the problem.
Tonight, a friend (S) came by with an inexpensive but much-loved acoustic guitar. He thought the preamp was blown, and was pretty upset - he's got a gig tomorrow night, and didn't have a lot of options. He'd recently had a place in the East Bay work on it, do some repairs. It worked afterwards for a month or two, but it started cutting out more and more often, very unpredictably, until it died completely in the middle of a show on Wednesday. He had to mic the guitar for the rest of the show on Wednesday and was able to get away with it, but the lack of electronics was going to be a serious problem for his Friday show, where moving around is part of the show.
Despite the instrument being old and beat up - it's a four-hundred-dollar plywood acoustic, fifteen-odd years old - it's much-loved. The particular preamp and pickup combo - which are decidedly not high fidelity - forms an intrinsic part of S's show. The pickup is percussive and noisy and makes the guitar into a pretty effective bodhran as well as a string instrument. So I had to figure out pretty rapidly whether or not the preamp was blown or whether the problem lay elsewhere. If the pre was blown, big problems....
The general rule for diagnosing electronic problems with instruments (and, in fact, for sound equipment in general) is to start at the input and go stage by stage to the output, testing each in turn and chaining them together to determine where the failure resides. So I plugged an audio feed into the preamp and clipped on some wires into an amp, and was able to verify that the pre was working. That was a relief, to say the least; a preamp with a blown component would have taken a couple of hours to diagnose, and it would have been very difficult to get the parts (mostly, the op-amp integrated circuit) that would probably have been the problem in time to get the instrument ready for the gig. The preamp working meant the problem lay further down the signal chain. So I asked how much of the electronics I could disassemble, and S told me to go for it - he trusted me to take it apart, and more importantly, to manage to get everything back together, hopefully working.
Ten or fifteen screws later, we had pulled the pre out of the instrument and opened the box. A quick check with a multimeter established that all of the connections were tight and signal was being delivered, so the problem had to do with internal wiring or the output jacks. Hmmm.
The output stage and jack, the focus of recent work at more cost than was reasonable, had unfortunately not received due care. The people working on it had created huge blobby solder joints without any internal stress relief, and after checking the (way more complicated than necessary) jack plate wiring, it became clear that a particular joint had failed completely, with several others soon to follow. Much scratch-resoldering ensued, and bolting the whole thing back together, this time with appropriate strain relief and appropriate cable lengths and such.
Once reassembled, the moment of truth arrived. S plugged it into The Great Ancient Amp to test, and ta-da! it worked...the smoke stayed in!* Given the relative fragility of the repaired solder joints and the disparate wire lengths, I suggested he move about the way he does on stage, with rather vigorous movements, and everything held together. We agreed that at some unspecified point in the future, we'd redo the entire output properly, but for now the instrument is repaired and robust enough for gigging. And he knows where it failed so we have a baseline for future testing.
Yeah, it's a four-hundred-dollar plywood acoustic, and it's fifteen years old, and the frets are shot, but it's his mojo. He's used it for everything from street busking to show gigs on two continents, has shared it with his (also a musician) wife. who writes wonderful songs, has spilled beer and whiskey and 'you don't want to know what else!' into it, and it's become a locus of memory and a touchstone for his live show. He could certainly play a better instrument (and he has one or two), but this one is where he's comfortable. A commercial shop charged good money and did a crappy job. S & I, working together, fixed it more effectively, because we care about it - it's not just a cheap piece of junk to be patched.
And he's now able to focus on the gig, on the music, and not worry whether his gear will let him down, and do a wonderful show. It makes every second spent diagnosing and fixing the problem after a long work day worth it.
* for those unfamiliar with electronics - at the factory, they stuff the smoke into the electronic components. When the smoke leaks out, the components don't work any more. Really, that's how it works. Honest.
Musicians shouldn't have to worry whether or not their gear will crap out when they're playing in front of an audience. But they do - the little bits of electronic gear required for any amplified music show are (for the most part) crap. Preamps burn out, wires come disconnected, pickups don't, microphones buzz and rattle, amps fry and short. The worst of this is when an instrument has an intermittent electronic fault - it works sometimes but manages to die at the worst possible time. Intermittents are difficult to diagnose, but they have to be fixed, because an unreliable instrument will be set aside, discarded, the worst possible fate, and it's hard on performers who often don't have the money to either replace the instrument or fix the problem.
Tonight, a friend (S) came by with an inexpensive but much-loved acoustic guitar. He thought the preamp was blown, and was pretty upset - he's got a gig tomorrow night, and didn't have a lot of options. He'd recently had a place in the East Bay work on it, do some repairs. It worked afterwards for a month or two, but it started cutting out more and more often, very unpredictably, until it died completely in the middle of a show on Wednesday. He had to mic the guitar for the rest of the show on Wednesday and was able to get away with it, but the lack of electronics was going to be a serious problem for his Friday show, where moving around is part of the show.
Despite the instrument being old and beat up - it's a four-hundred-dollar plywood acoustic, fifteen-odd years old - it's much-loved. The particular preamp and pickup combo - which are decidedly not high fidelity - forms an intrinsic part of S's show. The pickup is percussive and noisy and makes the guitar into a pretty effective bodhran as well as a string instrument. So I had to figure out pretty rapidly whether or not the preamp was blown or whether the problem lay elsewhere. If the pre was blown, big problems....
The general rule for diagnosing electronic problems with instruments (and, in fact, for sound equipment in general) is to start at the input and go stage by stage to the output, testing each in turn and chaining them together to determine where the failure resides. So I plugged an audio feed into the preamp and clipped on some wires into an amp, and was able to verify that the pre was working. That was a relief, to say the least; a preamp with a blown component would have taken a couple of hours to diagnose, and it would have been very difficult to get the parts (mostly, the op-amp integrated circuit) that would probably have been the problem in time to get the instrument ready for the gig. The preamp working meant the problem lay further down the signal chain. So I asked how much of the electronics I could disassemble, and S told me to go for it - he trusted me to take it apart, and more importantly, to manage to get everything back together, hopefully working.
Ten or fifteen screws later, we had pulled the pre out of the instrument and opened the box. A quick check with a multimeter established that all of the connections were tight and signal was being delivered, so the problem had to do with internal wiring or the output jacks. Hmmm.
The output stage and jack, the focus of recent work at more cost than was reasonable, had unfortunately not received due care. The people working on it had created huge blobby solder joints without any internal stress relief, and after checking the (way more complicated than necessary) jack plate wiring, it became clear that a particular joint had failed completely, with several others soon to follow. Much scratch-resoldering ensued, and bolting the whole thing back together, this time with appropriate strain relief and appropriate cable lengths and such.
Once reassembled, the moment of truth arrived. S plugged it into The Great Ancient Amp to test, and ta-da! it worked...the smoke stayed in!* Given the relative fragility of the repaired solder joints and the disparate wire lengths, I suggested he move about the way he does on stage, with rather vigorous movements, and everything held together. We agreed that at some unspecified point in the future, we'd redo the entire output properly, but for now the instrument is repaired and robust enough for gigging. And he knows where it failed so we have a baseline for future testing.
Yeah, it's a four-hundred-dollar plywood acoustic, and it's fifteen years old, and the frets are shot, but it's his mojo. He's used it for everything from street busking to show gigs on two continents, has shared it with his (also a musician) wife. who writes wonderful songs, has spilled beer and whiskey and 'you don't want to know what else!' into it, and it's become a locus of memory and a touchstone for his live show. He could certainly play a better instrument (and he has one or two), but this one is where he's comfortable. A commercial shop charged good money and did a crappy job. S & I, working together, fixed it more effectively, because we care about it - it's not just a cheap piece of junk to be patched.
And he's now able to focus on the gig, on the music, and not worry whether his gear will let him down, and do a wonderful show. It makes every second spent diagnosing and fixing the problem after a long work day worth it.
* for those unfamiliar with electronics - at the factory, they stuff the smoke into the electronic components. When the smoke leaks out, the components don't work any more. Really, that's how it works. Honest.