Here at Gary Brawer Stringed Instrument Repair we celebrate the Winter Solstice, Hannukah, the North American Christmas and the New Year by soldiering on, digging into the stuff, sifting through the detritus, filtering out the dross and aligning the inventory. Just because it’s December 24th doesn’t mean it’s time to rest. Guitars won’t wait! Thanks for your support, your patronage and we look forward to a fantastic 2012!!!
The simplicity of the construction of this pickup give it a wonderful and unique sound. The coil wire is wound directly onto the magnet then fully shielded in the tube. This is one of the harder pickups to rewind due to lack of coil form. We have to build a wire form onto the magnet, rewind it, attach the in and out wires, and somehow fit it back into the “tube”
The pretty bridge blanks in the middle are Madagascar rosewood. It has the beautiful depth, color, contrast and tone of the now hard to get Brazilian rosewood and you can get it reasonably priced. We just scored another small pile to add to our stash. To the right is ebony and left Indian rosewood.
Featured in the center is a plastic bridge that many early Gibson flat top acoustics came with. That is one of the many reasons we keep so many bridge blanks in stock. The other reason, sometime when we are doing a restoration on an old acoustic and have to make a new bridge we may want to try to match the wood of the old bridge to keep the same look.
Here are a couple of past blogs of bridge replacements.
Here’s Gary embroiling himself in yet another spectacularly odd cul-de-sac of guitar design. The “Guitorgan” (Musiconics International, Waco, TX, circa 1968), features more internal wiring than a server farm, plenty of knobs and sliders, weighs a ton and sounds like Lawrence Welk filtered through the mind of David Lynch. It’s outboard accoutrement is an extra large foot pedal power supply and the whole thing packs up into a case heavier than an all-tube classic SVT bass head.
Just look at the guts!
guts!
Overwhelmed with the statistical density of the wiring Gary called in reinforcements, in the form of Kirkwood Rough (aka “the sound of sound”) and together the tamed the demon. But after working on this particular instrument we have become, unfortunately, only too acquainted with its Luciferian construction. Where angels fear to tread… – AW
Our shop has been here, in this same location, since March, 1986. For a guitar mecca it’s kind of a hidden spot; you gotta want to find us, otherwise you may wander the labyrinthine side streets of San Francisco’s SOMA district until you find parking, which, if you haven’t cast the correct spells, is exactly never. Neighborhoods change over time and ours is no exception. An unfortunate human side effect of the last several decades of national economic husbandry was a refugee camp of homeless folks, struggling to stay alive and leaving behind copious evidence of that struggle right outside our door. Our street was nasty. But a new era has dawned with the arrival of a pay-what-you-can yoga studio in the next building. They’re busy, they’re singing, they’re stretching and, when the weather agrees, they spill out onto the street bringing a Message of Love to a block in need. And, since classes last for set periods we can be assured of regular parades of healthy, happy humans passing by our door. If you’re walking down our street carrying a guitar and you smile they’ll smile back. – AW
