josepdelafuente
New member
Hi all, first post here! Hello from London.
I have a 1965 Vox Eko Tornado, a cool quirky old archtop made in Italy for Vox,
one of these - http://www.voxshowroom.com/us/guitar/tornado.html
I don't think they were particularly designed to be high-end guitars at the time, mine wasn't very expensive for a good condition vintage guitar,
but I never loved the pickup (stock original single coil), it was somehow simultaneously too noisy and too quiet, and also quite thin and scratchy.
I have the guitar strung up with flatwounds for a big thunky old school mellow swing thing.
So I was looking for something to replace the stock single coil with that wouldn't require any surgery (as the guitar is so lovely & old!),
and that would sound more "jazzy", e.g not scooped, lots of mids, higher output etc.
and pretty much the only single coil sized humbucker I could find was the JB Jr for Strat, which kind of surprised me tbh, I thought I'd find loads, maybe I didn't look hard enough.
Anyway I bought the neck JB Jr and just put it in yesterday, and it's lovely! It sounds so much better, exactly what I wanted, plus the individual notes/strings when I play chords are
all super defined, which is also great.
The pole pieces don't quite line up, but it doesn't seem to matter. The bass strings are a tiny tiny bit quieter than the treble strings, which I suppose could be a result of the pole pieces not lining up (?), but if so - it's quite serendipitous as it suits the way I play and the sound I try to get! I like quite a "hollow" sound on the bass strings..
Only slightly odd thing is there's some kind of very quiet grounding hum which I need to troubleshoot. It's only very very quiet, but it goes away when I touch the strings.
Maybe the tailpiece isn't grounded. Tbh, it could have been there before and I probably would never have noticed it.
The other thing I'm wondering is if I soldered something to the wrong thing. The original pickup just had two wires soldered to it (see pic) which were labelled as Hot and Ground (I think).
The JB jr had five, so I soldered together and taped off the JB red & white, soldered the JB green & bare to the Ground wire, and soldered the JB black to the Hot wire..
Not sure if it's common to use JB Jrs like this, but I'm super happy!
Some pics:
I have a 1965 Vox Eko Tornado, a cool quirky old archtop made in Italy for Vox,
one of these - http://www.voxshowroom.com/us/guitar/tornado.html
I don't think they were particularly designed to be high-end guitars at the time, mine wasn't very expensive for a good condition vintage guitar,
but I never loved the pickup (stock original single coil), it was somehow simultaneously too noisy and too quiet, and also quite thin and scratchy.
I have the guitar strung up with flatwounds for a big thunky old school mellow swing thing.
So I was looking for something to replace the stock single coil with that wouldn't require any surgery (as the guitar is so lovely & old!),
and that would sound more "jazzy", e.g not scooped, lots of mids, higher output etc.
and pretty much the only single coil sized humbucker I could find was the JB Jr for Strat, which kind of surprised me tbh, I thought I'd find loads, maybe I didn't look hard enough.
Anyway I bought the neck JB Jr and just put it in yesterday, and it's lovely! It sounds so much better, exactly what I wanted, plus the individual notes/strings when I play chords are
all super defined, which is also great.
The pole pieces don't quite line up, but it doesn't seem to matter. The bass strings are a tiny tiny bit quieter than the treble strings, which I suppose could be a result of the pole pieces not lining up (?), but if so - it's quite serendipitous as it suits the way I play and the sound I try to get! I like quite a "hollow" sound on the bass strings..
Only slightly odd thing is there's some kind of very quiet grounding hum which I need to troubleshoot. It's only very very quiet, but it goes away when I touch the strings.
Maybe the tailpiece isn't grounded. Tbh, it could have been there before and I probably would never have noticed it.
The other thing I'm wondering is if I soldered something to the wrong thing. The original pickup just had two wires soldered to it (see pic) which were labelled as Hot and Ground (I think).
The JB jr had five, so I soldered together and taped off the JB red & white, soldered the JB green & bare to the Ground wire, and soldered the JB black to the Hot wire..
Not sure if it's common to use JB Jrs like this, but I'm super happy!
Some pics:
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