Problems with my Bridge Pickup

[25%moreCOWBELL]

I removed my stoptail & TOM bridge and added a roller bridge & a b7 Bigsby, but now my bridge pickup is suddenly very weak almost mute compared to the neck pickup. I've raised the pickups closer to the strings but it doesn't seem to be having any effect. I'd like to fix this without taking it to a shop but I'm not sure what I should be looking at.

[SGV]

If are you able to get an output measurement from the pickup, then you can see if it went dead...or if there is another problem.

Take it to a trusted guy...have him work on it.

sv

[sagebrush]

It sounds like the pick up went dead but it could be 1 of a 100 other things . When you changed the bridge did you replace the ground ? what kind of guitar is it ?

[25%moreCOWBELL]

It's a LP style guitar. I didn't see a ground when I changed the bridge and it's brushings out but I did see a ground when I pulled the brushings out for the stoptail so I left the stoptail brushings in and let the Bigsby rest on top of them. Figuring the grounding wire would still need the contract.

I was happy with what I did till I pluged the bastard in...

[BrownSound1]

Try putting the Tune-O-Matic back on. It could be that the roller bridge, for whatever reason, changed the point at which the strings sit compared to the Tune-O-Matic. If that point is closer, then you'll get less string vibration, and thus a muted sound. I really doubt your pickup is dead.

As a point of reference, every Les Paul I've ever seen with a Bigsby still had a Tune-O-Matic on it. They seem to stay in tune fairly well...or as good as you'll ever get with a Bigsby.

[Nitro Express]

Just temporarily connect a ground wire to the bridge and then attatch it to the body of one of the volume pots. See if that fixes it and if not, try another pickup if you have one laying around.

A weak signal can also be the result of something being wired back in wrong or a faulty resistor.

[Don Corleone]

This is an off the wall question, but you haven't re-wired the volume pot in reverse have you?

[BrownSound1]

Why would he have even messed with the electronics when installing the Bigsby? He mentioned the ground wire was connected to one of the bushing where the stop tail piece was originally. If his neck pickup is working fine, then I can't see how the bridge ground wouldn't be.

[Nitro Express]

Yeah, but it's easy to check the ground so why not do it? My experience with pickups is they either work or don't. Usually the culpret is the wire in the windings gets broken. A weak pickup is usually the result of the magnet loosing magnetism and that is highly unlikely unless it was exposed to a high dose of electro magnatism or shook around really hard.

It almost sounds like something is sucking off signal in the signal chain somewhere. Heck, just attatch the pickup directly into the amp and see what you get and bypass the volume and tone pots all together. My guess is something is bleeding signal off somewhere in the guitar wiring.

[GAR]

Originally posted by BrownSound1
Why would he have even messed with the electronics when installing the Bigsby?

Because he got all wet and happy with buying a bigsby unit that he didn't notice on these cheap Paul copies the groundwire is sometimes used by the pickup ground wire to connect the circuit.

He can fix this by running a direct connection from the pickup groundwire to the back of the potentiometer shell, and running a groundwire directly to the Bigsby mounting screw.

[Nitro Express]

If it's an Epiphone rip it all out. It's all SHIT! The pots suck, the switches suck, sometimes the pickups suck but not always. The wire is the same quality you see in some cheap Chiness toy. The same type of wire they run from the AA batteries and the cheap motor.

[25%moreCOWBELL]

Ground wire had to be fixed and I'm back in business. I guess I went a little ape shit yankin on that Bigsby when I first got it.... must have knocked around the ground wire more than the piss poor solder joint could handle.