'73 Gretsch White Falcon

[Joshua Levin-Epstein]

I have this guitar in for wiring issues. It would certainly be easier to diagnose if I was certain what all these switches were for. Anybody have hands on experience (or an owner's manual) for this thing? Any help or direction would be appreciated.

 

This is a stereo guitar, where one channel is the E/A/D strings, the other is G/B/D.

 

Joshua

[Mark Pollock]

Wow - I'm guessing one is the garbage disposal, one is the fog lamps, one is the ejector seat...

Couldn't resist. That is an amazing bunch of switches. Is there access from the back, or is it all through the F-holes?

Mark

[Joshua Levin-Epstein]

Actually, the switch on the lower left bout (under your elbow) is defrost/off/defog. The off position sounds the best.

[Paul Verticchio]

http://www.6v6power.ru/inf/Wiring/Gretsch/Gretsch%20White%20Falcon%...

This appears to be a hand drawn diagram for the WF Stereo version.  It's the only one on the net that I could find in stereo.

These are a major challenge.  I hope you still have some hair left when you're done. (:

Best of luck with the repair,

Paul

[Joshua Levin-Epstein]

Paul,

Somehow I knew you'd bee the one to come up with this. I had much of this figured out (the wiring is not totally bad). I just need to figure out what it is intended to do. The two main "junctions" are wrapped in masking tape and I really don't want to open them up. I'll never be able to age new tape to look like original...

We're getting closer.

Thanks,

Joshua

[Paul Verticchio]

My pleasure Josh.

As you likely already know: once the circuit is "healthy", the sound of a vintage Gretch is phenomenal!!!!

Have a productive week (:

[Joshua Levin-Epstein]

Because Paul was kind enough to find the schematic, I thought some of you might want this for your files. The problems with this guitar was about half the components were not grounded (from the bass pick up selector up) and one leaf of the standby switch would not make contact. Kind of anti climactic after about 4 hours of bench time. I discovered the lack of grounding by accident when I was trying to move the tremelo arm out of the way. When it hit a switch, the guitar worked better (not well). Once I knew what was supposed to do what and made the repairs/adjustments, it was out the door. Observations:

1) Test the guitar in true stereo, two amps. And put the amps at ear level so you can better determine what is happening.

2) The stereo separation at the pick up level is dubious. Even though there are separate bass and treble sides, there is enough leakage through inductance to confuse the ear.

3) These are such itty bitty coils that they don't have much output. Also, the pole pieces are not recessed into the coils so it was hard to get the pick ups close enough to the strings.

4) I still like the Bigsby, but what were they thinking with that bridge? Of course, this thing originally had the bridge with the suspended tuning fork, so the roller bridge looked like a stroke of genius in comparison.

 

As an aside, if you're working on an older Gibson stereo guitar, the pick ups are out of phase. Don't ask me why, but they are. I think they changed that with reissues. Apparently the bridge pick up on the old ES-5 switchmasters was out of phase, as well (no personal experience).

 

Thanks again to Paul.

 

Joshua

[Phil Keener]

Joshua,

Thank you for the annotated photo. I will file it away for future reference.

You never know when you might run across a stereo Gretsch White Falcon.

Regards,

Phil