A while back I bought
the Guitar Hero III bundle for the Xbox 360. Came
with a fancy black Gibson Les Paul guitar. Not
only is it wireless, but you can DETATCH THE NECK!
Wowzers! I suppose they added this "feature"
to better facilitate carrying the guitar to and
from random Guitar Hero/Rock Band parties. Okay,
I guess I can see that. However, this idea was
HORRIBLY implemented.
There are 8 little pads at the base of the
neck that are supposed to come in contact with
8 little spring-loaded pins in the body of the
guitar when you attach the neck. Works most
of the time I guess, maybe I got a bad one?
Mine was made on a Friday? Who's to say. Anyhow,
certain buttons would cut out at random if the
neck is wiggled in a certain way, which when
in the throes of head-banging passion, happens
all too often. Using the whammy typically causes
a lot of said wiggle action, resulting in the
missing of notes and booing of fans. Unacceptable!
So how do we achieve a more solid connection
between the neck buttons and the rest of the
guitar, and still keep the neck detachable?
I suppose there are hundreds of different ways
you could do it, but I used what I had available
and came up with this:
Some freakin' CAT-5 networking cable! Eight-conductor, detachable, a little ugly... brilliant.
Found a good place to install an RJ-45 jack (ripped from a defunct iMac) near the top of the guitar and ran the 8 wires on the jack to the board with those stupid spring-loaded pins on the inside.
While I was at it, I also got rid of that conductive
rubber nonsense for the fret buttons and installed
some tactile switches instead. However, this left
me with an annoying gap between the switches and
the plastic colored buttons. ENTER PENNIES AND
DUCT TAPE!
Slap a few good globs of epoxy all over everything to hold stuff in place and we're ready to screw this mutha back together.
The resulting guitar is the first picture you saw. Mmm-hmm.
Also let it be known that I had to fix the goddamned headset jack too, which was ALSO dead-on-arrival. ...This thing MUST have been assembled on a Friday.
...
And yes, I'll have other news and update the site later as well. I know things have been quiet. Doesn't mean I'm dead.
