![]() ![]() NEARLY ALL GIBSON GUITARS HAVE CARVED TOPS. After all, they are the biggest brand to utilize the Tune-O-Matic bridge. What is infuriating about this, you know Baggs made this bridge to work as a direct replacement for Gibson guitars. It doesn’t span the distance necessary to mount on a carved top body. A short shaft pot only works when mounted to small distances a pick guard (like a Strat or Tele). So after wiring the system up, drilling irreversible holes into the customer’s guitar, I feed the electronics into the guitar to find the shaft of the pot is not long enough for the nut and washer to catch on the top side. The second problem (and this one is a lot less inexcusable), the T-Bridge volume pot, is short shaft. The old holes for the bridge posts had to be doweled and re-drilled before anything else could move forward. The bridge posts originally on this guitar were the wide variety and the T-Bridge were the narrow. Let’s just call them wide and narrow for simplacy. The first problem: There are two standard sizes for Tune-O-Matic bridge posts. I didn’t manage to get pictures of them since I was preoccupied trying to finish the job on time. Most aftermarket guitar mods come with some sort of “gotcha” or hiccup in the process. It is possible to wire the T-Bridge into the same circuit as the magnetic pickups and have a single output for the guitar. The controls were then wired as 2 volumes and a master tone, with the T-Bridge volume in place where the bridge tone knob was originally located. The customer wanted a separate output jack for the T-Bridge so he could send the signal to a separate amp. From there, you can decide which way you want to wire the controls. It installs discreetly with a hole drilled under the tune-o-matic bridge to feed the 6 wires. The piezo pickup acts as a makeshift acoustic guitar for those who don’t want to change instruments between songs. The T-Bridge allows a guitar to blend the magnetic pickups with a piezo pickup in the bridge. ![]() I hope this blog post can serve as a reference to other luthiers trying to find installation tips for the T-Bridge as I was when I took on the job. ![]() There isn’t much info on the T-Bridge system aside from purchasing and the product page on LR Baggs’ site. This one in particular was as much of a challenge as rewarding when finished. Well, this was a noteworthy project to me. You know it’s a busy year when I took pictures of a project from February and have not got a chance to write about it until September. Epiphone 335 – LR Baggs T-Bridge Install South Austin Guitar Repair ![]()
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