Is this considered the Dark Side?

[Kevin Baker]

Let's start with a story.

I've been really jonesing for a Comanche for the longest time. I like the idea of the Z-coils and I feel like the S-500 isn't different enough from a Legacy (or a Strat) to really fire my rocket. I check for Tributes every once in a while since there's no way in Hell I can justify getting a USA instrument.

So I go to G&L's website and look at their list of online retailers. Just scrolling through looking at all of the neat (used) USA instruments that a lot of them have. Then I see something odd. It's a Tribute Comanche, but it's got this weird maple burl cap, "charcoal" burst, and a roasted neck, and it's only $50 more than retail for any other Tribute Comanche. I keep looking at other retailers and I see similar guitars. They were listed as 2021 Limited Edition Tribute Comanches, and there were others but in different burst colors. Then I realize that a couple of these instruments claimed the body wood was mahogany. Dad had said before that there were a few times when Tributes would sneak out of Indonesia with mahogany bodies, so we figured that was the case with these. Other research that I did found that similar Comanches had other body woods, like basswood or poplar. I found a couple of mahogany ones at a guitar store out in Memphis, but when we tried to actually buy one of them, we were told that both had been bought a couple of days before and they hadn't updated their website yet. At this point, knowing I was going to get a "limited run" guitar of some sort, I ordered a hard case from G&L (By the way, Fender sells essentially the same G&G case for nearly twice as much, holy cow).

In my searching, I had seen one with a basswood body out in Temecula, where we could just go out to them directly to pick it up and save the worry of long-distance shipping. I preferred the look of the cap on that one to the two in Memphis, but it had sat on the alternates list because of the body wood. So I ordered it on 7/5, and we went down to the shop yesterday (7/7) to pick it up.

The store was in an industrial park, and when we went inside, we discovered that there was no showroom, just a small office space filled with guitar boxes. After I identified myself, he went into one of the cubicles and pulled a guitar shipping box out of a shipping case. There were 2 others still in there, and there were a total of 6 S/Ns written on the side of the box, so he's sold at least 3 of these before. When I actually had hands on the guitar, it felt noticeably heavier than I would have expected for basswood. The finish on the back was translucent black, so I could somewhat make out the grain, and it didn't look as plain as basswood tends to. I handed it to Dad and as he took it he gave me a knowing look. I got all of the paperwork squared away and got the guitar in its case, and off we went back home. I may have gotten a mahogany instrument without it being advertised as such. The guy only had one Comanche showing on his site, and it definitely wasn't this one (the grain on the burl was very different), so while he may have gotten 6 at the beginning, he may have thought they would all be the same specs. We're still not completely sure about the body wood, but I pulled the neck and the wood dust that fell out of the holes in the body looked to be about the right color.

Specs as I can figure 'em:

(Probably) Mahogany body, maple burl cap. 3-ply pearloid pickguard. Dual-fulcrum vibrato.
Roasted maple neck, rosewood fingerboard. Locking tuners.

I'm thinking of going in and futzing with the electronics at some point. I'm not the biggest fan of push/pull, so I may swap it out and put in an S-1 switch, but we'll see how that ends up going.

Regardless, I have pictures to show you guys that it actually exists.

[jglunt2112]

I bought one of those guitars about 3 months ago from Pitbull Audio (no affiliation). I don't remember what the body wood was advertised as, but it's a heavy son of a gun. What few guitar-playing skills I had have badly eroded over years of dedicating myself to bass and about 15 years of dedicating myself to pedal steel in the middle. I bought this in hopes of it inspiring me to dig back in on guitar. So far, it has spent its 3 months of life in my possession tucked into the gig bag I bought for it. BTW, I changed out the knobs to make that push/pull switch much easier. They're like the chrome knobs on a jazz bass, P-bass, or ASAT guitar. I bought them from the G&L online store, but unfortunately, I don't see them currently listed there. Here's a pic of mine after the knob change.

Comanche 5.jpg (57.09 KiB) Viewed 1546 times

[deltafred]

That's a sweet looking guitar you have there Kevin from what I can see, the photo's aren't showing up very well on my screen.

Is it the dark side? I would say that depends upon your point of view.

A lot of bassists want nothing to do with skinny stringed instruments but I'm a bit biased and appreciate a nice guitar having played lead for about 12 years. I was starting to get a bit bored with all this weedly deedly stuff and jumped at the chance to return to bass when our bassist quit. That was 2003 and I seem to have got the lead guitar bug out of my system as I've had no desire to take it up again.

fred

[Kevin Baker]

Yeah, when I go to a Guitar Center or Sam Ash I do tend to look at the guitars to see if there's anything interesting hanging on the walls. I've seen a couple of USA instruments, but they're definitely few and far between, and, oddly, more basses than guitars. Tributes are more common, but they're still a rarity.

[Kevin Baker]

A couple of updates:

The first one is that I've had the guitar open, front and back, and it looks like the body is basswood and not mahogany. Especially in the trem cavity I can see that it's a significantly lighter colored piece of wood, but it's still really heavy.

The second is that my electronics futzing adventures have occurred. The 5-way switch didn't work so good, in position 5 it had a propensity to not connect the switch contacts properly, resulting in static and/or no sound at all. So, I went and took a look at StewMac to look at my options for drop-in replacements, and to see how difficult it would be to find an S-1 switching pot to replace the treble pot. In my search, I discovered Free-Way Switches, which essentially takes your standard switch, 3/5-way blade or full-size 3-way toggle, and doubles the number of switch positions. I though it was a really neat idea, and after taking a look at their wiring diagrams, ordered one, as well as a regular pot to replace the push-pull. I'd considered just swapping the knobs for knurled chrome, as jglunt mentioned with his, and keeping the push-pull and a standard 5-way, but I couldn't get it to fit nicely into my vision for the instrument.

Free-Way are quite secretive about how the internals of their switches work, but they provide a whole raft of schematics for their switches that include diagrams on how the different and additional positions will affect the signal chain. Taking a look at just the 5-ways, there's a whole lot of weird stuff going on with pickup selection on those things, especially if you've got a HH, HSH, or HHH setup. All sorts of coil splitting going on there, and, while a neat concept on a Comanche, a lot of those switch positions would leave you with only 3 strings, so definitely a no-go. G&L treats Z-Coils as single coil pickups, so that's the way I went about it.

I decided to go with a scheme that would allow for all 3 pickups at the same time, which would preclude the need for the expander switch, as well as some series-parallel switching that looked interesting. So I swapped the switch and the pot out, and in process of putting things back together, discovered that either Tribute PTB is different than Fullerton, or someone got tricky with the initial wiring. The signal chain was slightly different from the US version, and was also missing the 0.001μF cap on the treble pot, so I went about rectifying that, and also added some copper shielding tape to the pickguard, as we at the Baker household are wont to do. I buttoned everything up, and went about testing with a headphone amp and one of the neck screws, just making sure that all of the pickups were working and that the switch was doing what it's supposed to. Imagine my surprise when none of the series connections worked the way they were supposed to!

I contacted Free-Way, and was enlightened. The cause was the shielding I installed, that the pickup screws were contacting. Because the screws were contacting both the tape and the pickup baseplate, all of the pickups were hitting ground together, instead of having the grounds go through the switch to allow series connections. Once that was all figured out, I went back in and cut out the shielding around the pickup screws, and now everything works the way it's supposed to. The difference between series and parallel sounds to be about like the same on an L-series pickup, and boy, do those Z-coils sound good in series.

I did end up replacing the knobs with knurled chromes, but I also replaced the standard plastic switch tip with a chrome one from Schaller. Note for anyone watching, the metal switch tips are only for blade switches with "metric" posts, measuring 3.5mm across, so if you're interested, make sure it'll fit before ordering anything.

I'd like to thank Free-Way Switches for getting back to me so quickly. It seems like they're based in the UK, so I got an answer to my question at about 1:30A while I was at work, so I had a good 6/7 more hours to call myself an idiot for not thinking about how the shielding would have affected things (Had a nice long discussion with Dad about why this is a bigger deal for guitars than it is for basses, I think I got his head wrapped around it).

Thanks for reading,

Kevin.

[Ken Baker]

I'd like to thank Free-Way Switches for getting back to me so quickly. It seems like they're based in the UK, so I got an answer to my question at about 1:30A while I was at work, so I had a good 6/7 more hours to call myself an idiot for not thinking about how the shielding would have affected things (Had a nice long discussion with Dad about why this is a bigger deal for guitars than it is for basses, I think I got his head wrapped around it).

It all has to do with the metal mounting plate of the Z-Coils. The screws that attach the pickups to the pickguard do so through this metal plate. If the back of the guard is fully shielded and grounded (as we would do with a bass), the screws ground the pickup. The Free-Way switch requires that the pickups be totally isolated from ground so that it can do its magic internally. Kevin removed shielding tape as necessary and the rest is history.

Ken...