I've built 3 cbgs so far and haven't grounded any of them. This one, the one I'm moving the bridge on, really needs to be grounded. And I'm not 100% confident I know the right way to do it.
I'm going to take a stab at it though: I need to solder a wire to one of the terminals of the output jack (Or the volume pot?) and that wire needs to be (somehow) soldered to the bridge. Am I right so far?
I saw a Chickenbones video where he drilled a small hole through the neck so that the ground wire from the output jack would touch a guitar string going through a ferule would ground the guitar or something like that.
I'm going to guess that this might be similar. I drill a hole or make a channel for the ground wire to go from the output jack terminal to the screw that's going to hold the bridge plate to the guitar? Or is there a better way that involves soldering a wire somewhere on the bridge and running that wire through a small hole in the box lid to the output jack terminal?
Or am I all together missing the obvious, easiest way to ground the thing? :)
Replies
It would be real easy if you had some copper tape, but if you run a piece of wire from the ground terminal on the jack, you can poke the other end into one of the holes for your bridge screws.
All those methods will work, but i was taught it's better to have your grounds connecting to a continuous wire to the jack to avoid looping effect on the grounds, how correct that is, i'm not sure, maybe one of our elect. guru's can help with it?
In a big scale, a ground loop is when your amp and the PA system are on different grounds in the wall outlets, 2 paths, can make either/both noisy. The "ground lift" button on an amp disconnects the line-out ground from the amp's power ground to help when that happens.
On the small scale (inside a GIT) your wiring diagram ought to look tree-like. Any point along your ground should have only 1 path to the jack's ground. If it can take either of 2 paths, you have a loop like the old UHF antennas on tube-type TV's which can pick up RF noise. Similarly with the hot/red/signal side, any point should have 1 path to the jack's tip or to a ground point, 2 or more paths to the same point makes that old-fashion UHF hoop antenna again.
Well I just drilled a hole under the bridge and layed the wire under there flat, like a 1/2 inch of stripped wire so it flattened under the bridge nice and tight when I screwed it on you know?
I do the same thing with my tailpieces now that they are flat and screwed on the back of the box.
Seems to work, I found it very difficult to get solder to stick to a screw when I tried that way before.