Electric Guitar James May: The Reassembler

Hello and welcome to The Reassembler, with me, James May.

It's a show where we put things back together again.

That's it.

That's not a familiar bit.

'It is only when these objects are laid out in hundreds of bits

'and then slowly reassembled...'

Done, done, done, done, done.

'..that you can truly understand and appreciate how they work...'

Eeugh.

'..and just how ingenious they are.'

Deep joy.

'And if painstakingly putting hundreds of pieces

'back together again...'

Oh, God, it's electrics.

'..wasn't hard enough...'

Fantastic, we've used all the bits.

'..I then have to find out...'

Ho, yes!

'..if they'll work.'

It's all come apart.

This time, we're delving deep into the bowels of rock,

and we'll be reassembling something that changed the world

for the better and stopped an army of ukulele players

and harpists topping the charts for the last 60 years.

Now, today on the table, we have the 147 components

that make up an electric guitar.

And as long as they stay there like that,

laid out beautifully,

there is no danger that anybody will attempt to play Stairway To Heaven.

However, I am going to put it back together and take the risk.

And we will start, even though this should normally happen

in the middle of the performance, by taking it to the bridge.

This is the bridge plate, there.

That is the trem block, securing screws.

All this will go together into a rather pleasing

and shiny subassembly.

Now as usual on this show,

I don't have an exploded diagram

for the electric guitar, although I do know roughly

what one looks like and how it works.

So, this is the bridge, the strings go over the bridge.

This is the trem block, which mounts underneath,

and is connected to the lever that you can pull to make it go

"waah, waah, waah."

And these saddles allow you to minutely adjust

the position of the strings relative to the neck,

because the neck has a slight curve in it, so the strings in the middle

have to be slightly higher than the strings on either side.

This is a...screw-and-forget sort of operation.

But I think once I've screwed this together,

it won't be unscrewed again

until the guitar is completely disassembled.

I'm going to tell you something absolutely fascinating,

really fascinating.

This is a Japanese-made guitar.

It's a replica of a Fender, but it's made by a Japanese company.

And these, you would say, are Philips screws, agreed?

Because they've got a crosshead in, but they're not posidrive

cos they haven't got the little indentations between the slots.

However, if you look very closely, you will see...

Look at the top there.

Can you see there is a very, very tiny centre punch mark?

You can see that.

That means that isn't a Philips patent screw,

it means it's JIS, or Japanese Industry Standard,

and it's an important difference because the Philips screwdriver

was invented primarily for the American automotive

manufacturing industry.

And the point of it is that the shape is designed such that

the operator didn't have to worry about exactly how tight he did

the screw up - this tool could be powered and it would automatically

jump out of the screw when the right torque was reached.

Now, the Japanese came up with a slightly different patent,

which means that if you use a Philips headed screwdriver,

such as this one, in a Japanese Industry Standard screw,

you will largely get away with it,

but you will also tend to chew it up.

Because the profile of the slot is slightly different.

Japanese Industry Standard screwdrivers are actually

surprisingly difficult to get hold of in Europe,

but - and how surprised will you be at this -

I have...three of them here in my tool box

because I've spent quite a bit of my sad spare time

fiddling around with small Japanese motorcycles from the early 1960s.

Yeah, this is...

It's not gripping, I'll grant you that.

Maybe you should watch a pleasant bit of archive

while I just finish this section off.

Here it comes.

The electric guitar was originally spawned out of Hawaiian music.

Good old song of the island.

But it soon became the instrument

that forced rock and roll onto the world.

# Deep down in Louisiana... #

Chuck Berry led the way with his leg-trembling,

dance-inducing string plucking.

And soon, a whole generation of kids were unable to control themselves.

Back in the workshop, however, my own rock dreams were floundering.

Welcome back from the archive trip.

You'll see that I'm actually taking it apart again because

I allowed my concentration to slip.

The first and last saddles have the shorter grub screws -

I put one of the long grub screw saddles in.

So here we are, back to the beginning.

That one's short, grub screws, short spring.

Medium spring.

Eh-eh. Eh-eh.

Becca, will you leave my tool box alone?

So we have the trem block, the bridge plate, the saddles,

and the adjusting screws, and the springs.

See?

It's nice. Like it.

Right, these are the pick-ups,

the thing that make this an electric guitar rather than just

an acoustic guitar.

And obviously, some screws and springs.

And these mount,

not onto the body of the guitar, as you might imagine,

but on to this, the scratch plate,

along with some other things that we'll be getting later.

Now, the pick-ups,

they are a series of magnets

with copper wire wound around them.

I can demonstrate that they're magnets because, you know,

that screw sticks to it.

And you might remember from physics,

if you ever paid attention, that if you move a wire in a magnetic

field in a coil, you will get a current, an EMF.

And this is really how the guitar works.

The string vibrates

and generates a very tiny current inside the coil.

And the size of that current is dependent on the amplitude

of the strings vibrating - how far it moves -

and the frequency - how quickly it's moving.

And that is then effectively producing an electric note,

which is amplified by the big stack of Marshalls.

Other types of amplifier are available.

And then that comes out as Motorhead, or whatever.

And I've got a spare coil here,

so that I can show you.

If I peel off the protective tape, you will see the copper coils.

There are something like 6,000 turns of very fine copper wire on there.

In fact, the total length of the copper wire

in the three pick-ups is about - I did this calculation earlier on -

it's about 2.6km of wire.

So if you joined the three wires end-to-end and stretch them out,

you'd be able to fill three double-decker buses

the size of a swimming pool and the area of Wales,

which would be visible from outer space.

We can't use that one cos I've effectively ruined it doing that.

'Luckily that was a demonstration pick-up,

'and I do still have the three pick-ups from our actual guitar.

'Watching someone attach pick-ups to a scratch plate is

'like waiting for the end of a Mark Knopfler guitar solo,

'so let's not.

'After an hour and 40 minutes of exhilarating reassembly,

'we have attached the bridge plate

'and the string saddles to the trem block and the pick-ups are in place.

'Now I need the potentiometers, the pots.

'These will control the guitar's tone and volume.'

I'm not going to take the knobs because pushing the knobs on

would be a rather joyous moment that we should save until the end.

So let's take the switch assembly out, and contemplate it.

And then... Right, we've got to line everything up here.

So the switch,

the tone pick-up control switch, will go through there.

And then volume through there.

And...put a couple of these shallow nuts on loosely,

and then we know it can't fall apart - then we can wave it around.

Right, now, we're going to have to do some soldering somewhere

under here, let me just see if I can work this out.

So that's...

..volume.

Tone and tone. So tone would... Oh, God, it's electrics.

Right, the...the pick-up switch

is a three-way,

five-place switch.

'Which is a good thing because the three-way,

'five-place switch is my favourite kind of switch.

'But it's a bit of a sod to solder.'

Soldering is one of those things that is technically impossible

for one person to do, because anybody who does it

regularly will tell you, you actually need three arms to solder.

But what I do have that helps me a bit is this soldering help kit.

It has a nice pair of reverse-action tweezers

to hold the wires in fiddly places.

You've got to be very careful, as you solder on to the back

of something like that, not to hold the soldering iron there

for any longer than you absolutely have to - a few seconds, ideally,

at the most in fact -

because otherwise, you will heat that component up,

and then you could do some damage inside.

There is, for example, a plastic piece in the middle

that it rotates around. If you got that too hot,

it would melt slightly, and then the whole thing would jam up.

I've got to be honest, I don't particularly like soldering.

I like it when it works. But when it doesn't, I hate it.

I am going to use my tweezers

cos it should mean that you can see what's happening better.

Oh, that's not bad.

That's all right.

There you go, there's the scratch plate complete.

Just got two wires left to join on to the jack plug socket,

and we'll put the knobs on. But we'll do that later cos that's nice.

Right. Tea.

Right, we will take obviously the most significant bit,

move it very carefully, the body.

Front. Back.

Right, because this is a valuable thing and very shiny,

I always carry a pillowcase around with me.

Whose pillowcase is this? That's disgusting.

PRODUCER LAUGHS I should correct that,

I always carry an old pillowcase around with me.

I think it's probably neater to put in the bridge plate.

And put in the screws.

What music would you like to accompany

this bit of screwing the plate down?

Er, I think Bach's Chorale Prelude Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns Die Stimme.

Played on the organ.

ORGAN MUSIC PLAYS

The great thing about the guitar is that it's portable,

obviously, it's - even if you needed a small amplifier - it's reasonably

self-contained, you can play the whole music on the one instrument.

The downside of it is

it's one of tho... They're a bit like drum kits in a way,

a lot of people...

..say they're a drummer, but what they really are

is a drum-kit owner, which is not the same thing.

In the way that if I bought a Formula One car,

I wouldn't be a Formula One driver, I would be a man who happens

to own an old Formula One car. It's a different thing.

I have put all of the screws into the bridge plate,

which aren't tight. They are...they're nipped up,

but they allow a small amount of movement in there,

which it needs to have obviously to produce the tremolo effect.

'Now I'm attaching the springs to the trem claw.

'This can be adjusted depending on playing style.

'And when the whammy bar is used,

'the springs ensure that the bridge returns to the correct position,

'when that Carlos Santana moment has passed.'

Right, so that, I would say,

looks quite promising.

It still looks like a guitar,

so I don't think I've messed anything up, particularly.

Erm...

We have a choice now - we can put the neck on,

which makes it a bit more unwieldy,

or we can put the scratch plate on

and do the last bit of wiring, but that makes it a bit more vulnerable.

I think once the neck is on, it becomes a little bit

Laurel and Hardy walking around with a long plank of wood type thing.

You know, I'll say, "And over here we see..."

And then the cameraman's teeth are gone.

And then I can say, "If you look at that end," you know,

and then Rebecca's face is all smashed in.

Let's put the scratch plate on and do a bit of wiring.

There, that's going to go there.

And those wires are going to pass through that hole

and be soldered onto the jack plug socket.

And this wire, which is the other end of the earthing bit

from the trem bar arrangement,

has to be soldered onto... Let's have a think about that.

I'm guessing it would go on the volume pot.

That means I've gotta do it like...

Oh, oh, I hate this.

Hate soldering.

OK. "That'll do," comes the cry of the perfectionist down the ages.

So, what we can now do, we can feed the wires

through the hole to go onto the...the jack socket.

The thing that connects the essentially private

electromagnetic activity of the guitar

with the amplified world of rock and roll,

making sure not to disturb any of that other

extremely fragile soldering.

We should be able to drop that into position.

Otherwise, have to go through the channel in the middle,

which they're not quite doing.

Need a benign poking device.

Big fat screwdriver.

METALLIC DING Sorry.

There.

That's ready to screw together.

'Before I quite literally screw this up, let me remind you

'that in the past three hours and 45 minutes,

'we have built up the scratch plate, attached the volume and tone pots,

'the trem block, the trem claw and springs,

'and prepared the jack socket for its cover.

'And I've done a lot of soldering.

'Once I've attached the scratch plate,

'it should all begin to look a lot more guitar-y.'

What I quite like about a moment like this

in the reassembly of a thing is that something that's been...

..flapping about in a rather annoying way,

and in a way that offends my slight sense of order in the universe,

will suddenly become tight and taught and rattle-free

and, you know, it will assume some permanence.

There's all that wiry stuff underneath, which could become

tangled and broken and trapped, terrible things like that.

I also have a bit of a phobia about wires - I can't stand

looking behind my desk where all the bits from the computer go.

Got this massive pile of wires. And whatever you do, they always

end up all knotted up and it ju...it makes me feel...

I get a sort of strange pain in my teeth

when I look at things like that.

Oh, God, horrible.

Here's an interesting screwdriver fact for people

who are interested in screwdrivers.

It's generally thought that you have

a very long handled screwdriver like this

because you are doing something in an inaccessible place,

such as getting to the adjustment screws on the carburettor

of a complicated motorcycle or a deeply buried car engine,

and they are very good for that.

But there's another reason for using a long screwdriver if you can,

which is that, obviously,

the purchase of the screwdriver tip on the screw

depends on it being exactly square.

And the longer the screwdriver,

the more chance you have of

getting it properly lined up and exactly right.

If you use a very stubby screwdriver,

it's very difficult to tell

if you're holding it at an angle.

If you have a very long one,

you know immediately,

which means you get better purchase on the screw and you stand

more chance of undoing a stubborn one with a long screwdriver.

So end of interesting screwdriver facts.

It's interesting that there is a tradition amongst

adolescent boys in particular of playing air guitar,

but you can't really do air reassembly, can you?

No-one ever walks round going...

Like that.

Come with me.

'After collecting more bits, I screw in the strap buttons

'and put on the selector switch cap.

'I can then consider the volume and tone knobs.'

So when you're playing your guitar, you want to know they're on minimum.

Then I think the other word should be parallel

with that word when they are also fully anticlockwise.

Any objections?

Apart from, "It really doesn't matter, get on with it."

Right, now we're going to attach the machine heads...

These are the things

that will tension the strings while you tune it.

..with tiny, tiny, tiny little screws.

And we need the neck...machine heads.

Two of them, there's one, have an extra bit on the end.

That one has an extra bit on the end.

And you will see why

as I put them into the back of the neck

and locate them.

They've each got a little pin on.

There's a little hole,

a series of little holes there that locate those,

and then little holes where the screws go in

to join them all together.

So there's a sort of stand-alone screw in the end one,

and then every other screw secures two.

Having to use the greatest screwdriver in the world cos

it's the only one I have with a tip even vaguely close to that size.

That's very guitar-y, isn't it, having those there?

Finally, before we actually attach the neck to the body,

there's a metal bar running down inside -

you might just be able to see the end of it in there -

that's called the truss rod.

And the reason the truss rod is in there is because without it,

they discovered on early guitars, the neck would eventually bow

that way because the string tension is significant

over that length of what is actually

not a particularly fat piece of wood.

So the truss rod working between there and down here

can curve the neck the other way to counteract

the pull of the strings, which would tend to curve it back this way.

Now, a lot of guitarists say the very faintest of bows that way

is desirable.

'And this is a very desirable guitar.'

By the late '70s, people were getting increasingly dissatisfied

with the quality of the new guitars.

Musicians yearned for the classic models of the '50s and '60s.

It was Japan that took the lead by mass-producing exact replicas

of iconic guitars and selling them for half the price of the originals.

The guitar industry was up in arms and took the Japanese to court,

leading to the nickname The Lawsuit Guitars.

But this only spurred on demand for these rebellious

and affordable instruments.

'Now to make this actually look like a guitar as I attach the neck.'

These four screws and this plate will join the two halves

of the guitar that we have at the moment to make a complete guitar.

This is a very, very exciting and important moment.

Now, to think about the best way of doing this,

cos there are opportunities for dropping everything.

That's quite a tight fit, but it's still slightly nerve-racking

because there's nothing actually holding it together, yet.

What I'm holding in my hands...

..is the affordable and believable dream

and desperate hope of a billion teenagers all over the world.

It was the possibility of an escape from drudgery.

And so many people buy these and hang them on their bedroom walls

and learn to play them until their fingers bleed and all that stuff...

..in the hope and belief that it will be their salvation.

Let's put some strings on it.

Five hours and 12 minutes in, and I have assembled the bridge,

attached the pick-ups, the scratch plate and put on the neck.

It finally looks like a guitar.

Now to turn this from a block of wood and wires

into the devil's axe.

It's time for the strings.

E.

A.

D.

G.

B.

E. Should I have sung that?

Now I've got to be brutally honest, I've never done this before.

I've partly built a harpsichord, but I've not done this.

But I think I know the basics, so...

Like that it flies off and hits you directly in the plums.

PRODUCER LAUGHS

I didn't think it was funny.

So the string goes in from the back.

Through the trem block.

And I feel that that has located correctly.

And it goes up there, through that sort of...

the other bridge, if you like, which is called the nut.

So I would cut it off there.

Should really put your fingers over the end

when you do that sort of thing.

I just sort of harboured a vain hope that it would hit

the executive producer in the face.

There's a string on the guitar, it's coming alive.

HE STRUMS

What this is, I'm doing now, is sort of Pythagorean, really.

This is where we get our ideas about the numerical relationships

between pitches, from Pythagoras experimenting with the length

of a...of a taut string.

And how dividing it up, by effectively having a moving bridge

along its length, affected the pitch.

And that's how we ended up in the Middle Ages with rather academic and

intellectual theories of consonance and dissonance based on numbers.

It was only really in the Renaissance,

in the English Musical Renaissance, which is where it really started,

that people decided that actually

other intervals were OK because they sounded nice, namely the third,

major and minor third, which is the basis of tonality

as we understand it in the modern world.

I just turned the wrong one.

Because I'm dribbling on.

Anyway, there was one, I can't remember which one said it,

might've been one of the anonymous scholars,

said the more trebles...the more thirds that a man sings

in the treble, the merrier it is.

Shall we talk a little bit about strings?

Which in the early days

of stringed musical instruments were made out of,

well, what used to be called cat gut

but wasn't actually made from cats,

it was usually made from sheep.

It was the entrails and viscera twisted together

and strung out.

And some people who are obsessed with authentic Baroque performance,

for example, will still buy or make gut strings,

especially the Germans, they think they're zergut.

Ha-ha.

But that was replaced by nylon because nylon is easier to make,

cheaper and is more consistent.

But of course, nylon wouldn't work with an electric guitar,

you needed steel strings. So these strings are steel.

The bottom three are a steel core wanged,

whereas the top three - G, B and E - are plain steel.

I enjoyed doing that, I found that deeply satisfying.

I'm in a place of great calm now.

Not normally associated with electric guitars, to be honest.

So let's screw in the trem bar, put on the strap,

and then we've just got to find an amp.

Strap.

Lead.

Bar.

Does anybody else of a certain age remember

that Robert Fripp, of King Crimson and Frippertronics fame,

people always said of him,

"Well, you know he sits down to play his electric guitar."

Do you remember people saying that?

Cos he did, he used to sit on a stool and play it.

Well, I've sat down on a stool and reassembled one.

Which is sort of uncool but very cool at the same time.

This is prog reassembly.

If you remember, we put the...

The trem bar itself

is on the back of the bridge plate, inside the body.

And then behind there were the springs that we attached

to a mounting plate, solidly screwed to this.

What that means is, when you do that with the bar,

you're stretching and relaxing the springs, minutely.

I mean it is an imperceptible movement,

you wouldn't be able to see it.

But that gives you that little "waah, waah, waah" effect.

If you really push on it, you can really bend...

bend your chord, or whatever.

The lead.

That says so much about the second half of the 20th century.

The jack plug going into an electric guitar. Bang.

The kids are all right.

Right, there is one of the 147 pieces of the electric guitar left.

I shall go and get it.

That's the final bit gone, the table is clear,

our mission is accomplished.

Could we have an amplifier, please?

'I've just finished reassembling the 1984 affordable Japanese copy

'of the classic electric guitar,

'which has taken me six hours and 11 minutes.

'I have built Lucifer's lute

'up from its 147 individual parts, carefully and lovingly.

'Now it is time to wake up the rock gods and see if this bad boy works.'

So this is exactly what The Reassembler is all about -

147 parts, including the plectrum,

useless as they are as components,

now rejoined and reborn

as the complete electric guitar.

OK, the amp is warmed up.

Cheers, Malcolm.