Your Brand New Electric Guitar

I’ve seen it so many times before. You buy a new guitar and happily strum away on it for a few days, before the jack socket becomes so loose you have to do something about it.

It’s happened on every guitar I’ve had, and just about every one else’s I know too. You tighten it up and it works loose again. Then later on, the guitar stops working altogether – bummer.

The thing is, the constant tightening up, and tightening up again gradually turns the socket round, and with it, the wires connected to it. Soon one of the wires has been twisted round so far, it gives and so the guitar ceases to put out a signal. Now a lot of musicians haven’t the first clue about electrical wiring, so they’re at a bit of a dead end. After all, it;s the music they are interested in, not the physics, but fortunately, it’s actually really easy to fix, and to fix permanently at that.

1stly, prevention is always better than cure, so when you buy an electric guitar, do the following. Unscrew and remove the socket plate. There will be a nut on the inside and one on the outside, and these are what hold the socket in it’s place, and these are what come loose, because the inside one is never tightened up. Well, when it’s all put together, you can’t reach it can you? So you need to make sure it’s tight, then stop it moving, with some glue, varnish, araldyte or whatever.

You can do it to the outside nut as well, but many people leave this as they’d rather keep blobs of glue etc. on the inside of their brand new, shiny guitar.

Now if there’s no signal coming from the guitar, and you’ve been suffering from the loose socket thing for a while, it’s almost a dead cert that one of the wires has come off.

I borrowed a friend’s guitar recently, and he advised me there was an electrical glitch with it, and was there anything I could do? Nothing on the guitar worked, and there was absolutely no sound coming out of it, so naturally he was really worried about it. My first thought was, one of the signal wires is broken, I’ll check the jack socket, and after removing the plate, that’s exactly what it was.

So to cut a long tale short, I pared back the loose wire, soldered it up again, and tightened everything up, along with a dab of glue. Surprise, surprise – it lives again!

M Withers is author of the electric guitar blog. He is a keen enthusiast and has been learning the electric guitar for over 25 years.