Installation Slimbucker on Yamaha Silent Guitar

[zeeway]

I was cruising Youtube and I came across a video from Japan of a guy playing smooth jazz tones on a Yamaha Silent Guitar equipped with a Kent Armstrong Slimbucker pickup. That looks easy, I thought to myself. That proved not to be exactly the case.

The batteries in my Silent Guitar seem to go quickly, and as they are going… the tone degrades, so the idea of a pickup free of batteries suddenly seemed like a good idea.

I bought the pickup and an output jack, took the guitar apart, and pretty quickly figured out that the pickup would not easily fit under the treble strings without some routing. So I made a routed pocket that ultimately was .220 in deep. I tried shallower depths and they did not seem to be enough.
Guitar Pocket.jpg

But the professional wannabe that I am, I stained the pocket to disguise it a bit.
Guitar Pocket Dark.jpg

I then wired the pickup to the output jack.
Guitar Pickup.jpg
I also rigged a brass grounding strip for the strings (no patent is pending), and hooked that up to the jack also.
Guitar Grounding.jpg
I located the jack on the treble side of the body, and I have to admit, it looked good.
Guitar Jack.jpg
Put everything together, plugged into my amp, and nada, no sound. First I thought I had wired the pickup backwards – nope, that wasn’t it. Then I thought maybe the pickup was dead…in my brain I was already anticipating a problem returning it. Then I checked the lugs on the pickup…both of them showed a ground to the body of the pickup…yikes. My not-so-stellar soldering job had bridged a gap, and that proved to the problem. I did yell “hurray,” and say a prayer of thanks, and figured I had dodged a major bullet. That episode took about an hour to figure out and fix.
When the other guys in our group see it and ask me how I did it, I’ll like smile and say it was a piece of cake…hah.
Guitar with pickup and strings.jpg

Sorry about the sideways pictures...maybe someday I can figure that out.

[jricc]

Looks great, nice work Angie! now you have a "silent" hybrid. Post some sounds?

[Marshall]

Nice work.

[jonfields45]

I solved this problem a different way...

[Aspiring]

Nice work!

I also solved that problem a different way by adding a Kent Armstrong floating pickup to a Snapdragon Snapaxe E.