The guitar came to me with an interesting wiring set up - in addition to the volume knobs (master plus one for each pickup) the upper bass bout switches were a three way toggle for neck and bridge and the Gretsch tone switch. The middle pickup was wired to the output through the standby switch on the lower treble bout. I rewired it to have two three way switches on the upper bout (neck + middle) + bridge and I moved the tone switch down where the standby was.
The Dynasonics are great pickups, somewhat similar in character to the Mosrite pickups in that they're high output (10+K) single coils. This baby oozes twang!
The neck on Anniversary models often had a pretty low angle, and this is one of them, so there's not much string break over the bridge with the Bigsby. Short of a neck reset, the only way to increase the angle is to raise the bridge. Not very good for the action. So, I thought about this for a while and came up with another way. I made a new roller for the Bigsby, notched down 2/16", just 1/16" over the centerline of the roller. Have to keep above the centerline or the tremolo action gets reversed - down raises pitch, up lowers it. This adds a bit over 1.5 degrees of angle to the strings over the bridge - minor, but it helps!
Here’s a close up of the bigsby where you can see my notch job:
And a look at the stock bar and my hack notch bar. Yes, the posts on my roller are made from a sliced up 3/32" drill bit.
