Eastwood Baritones PSA

[comradehoser]

Hey folks--I think several of you have Eastwood Sidejacks--or maybe it's just me and Feral Feline--or maybe just me.

Anyways, I have the Sidejack Deluxe (?) with a splittable humbucker bridge and a P-90 in the neck with a "phase switch". I always thought the neck pickup switch was very weird. It's advertised as a phase reversal switch, but it just sounded horribly muffled in both positions, nothing like what I think a p-90 neck pickup should sound like, until I nudged into a middle position.

Opened 'er up and yup, two caps on either pole of a dpdt switch, one 68nf or something, and the other 47nf. No real phase reversal that I could see.

Heard it direct from Eastwood today, this was a fixed-tone factory "interpretation" of phase reversal wiring (where hot and ground wires should be swapped), and it was meant to be one cap, not two in any event.

I will be changing my wiring to see what gives!

 

[comradehoser]

Found out what the cap is for--preserving bass frequencies from cancelling out from phasing

 

[Feral Feline]

Hey folks--I think several of you have Eastwood Sidejacks--or maybe it's just me and Feral Feline--or maybe just me.

...

I wish I had an Eastwood Sidejack — love that beast.

 

[comradehoser]

This is the most useful info I found about it (Tdpri.com)



I might mess about with the cap value, since 22nf is most likely guitar spec and the sidejack is a Baritone that sounds pretty sweet in drop A.

What he says is not completely correct. The switch in out of phase mode cuts some bass in the neck pickup selected alone. Maybe not audible in a regular guitar, but yes In a Baritone. Also not clear what he means by "half out of phase." I think the pickups are either out of phase with each other, or they are in phase, so... [Edit: the cap preserves bass frequencies from cancelling, but the trebles do cancel, so "1/2 out of phase".]. And finally, the out of phase setting does not sound like a position 2/4 strat. The in phase setting sounds more quacky, actually (unless the humbucker and p-90 were initially wired out of phase). [edit: and hush my mouth, this is Bill Laurence's (BL) handwritten diagram hahahah]

Before:

View attachment 112104

(I'll post "after" in a bit for posterity--I thought I did, but my phone died just as I was taking the image and failed to record)