Connecting the Frets
The internal option requires some more tools and a willingness to cut into your guitar. In order to connect the chip to the frets, you’ll be cutting a thin channel along the neck, soldering thin wires to the frets, and running those wires in the channel and into the body of the guitar. To do this:
- Remove the neck
- Look along neck to find a good place for wires to come into the body of the guitar. In some guitars, there will be a hole from the pick-up cavity that you can route the wires through.
- On the side of the neck that usually points toward the sky (the side your fingers will touch less), mark out a place to cut a channel along the neck from the first fret to the part of the body where there wires will enter the body of the guitar. We always cut where the fretboard meets the neck, but that’s for aesthetics.
Use a rotary tool to cut a channel along the line you’ve drawn. The channel doesn’t need to be too deep from fret 1 to fret 2, but by fret 5, we recommend that the channel be fairly deep, around half a centimeter or more. Note – These photos were taken on a guitar where the channel was cut on the wrong side of the guitar.
- Measure and cut 5 lengths of thin, lacquered wire (found in headphones) that are long enough to reach from the frets to the place in the body where you’ll be putting the circuitry. We highly recommend you leave 6-12 inches of extra wire, since the wire will be curving through the guitar’s body.
Cut notches into the guitar just underneath the first 5 frets. This will allow you to solder the wires to the underside of the frets.- Solder the wires to the frets. This part is tricky, since the solder doesn’t really want to flow onto the fret. Also, in order to solder the wire, you’ll first have to remove the lacquer insulation – we recommend using a lighter to burn it off, then scrape off the ash. Then solder the wire onto the fret any way you can.
- After you solder a wire to a fret, secure it into the guitar by pressing it into the cut slot with your fingernail or other thin object. Then lock it in place with small dab of super glue in the channel, right next to the fret.
Once you have all the wires soldered, inlay them all into the cut channel. Generally, it will work out the easiest to layer them on top of each other, with the 5th fret wire on the bottom, but don’t worry too much about the order; just make sure that the wires don’t stick out of the channel. Secure them in with dabs of super glue along the neck (In the picture, you can see a dab of glue.- (Recommended) If you want to be able to change the circuit board in the future, solder a 5 pin connector onto the end of the wires going to the circuit board. Make sure that the order of the wires is correct (If it’s wrong, it can be fixed in firmware, but it requires programming the chip).
- Run the wires into the guitar body, and reattach the neck.
Congratulations, you’ve just completed what is most likely the most tricky and time-consuming part of the project! Next, we’ll be attaching wires to the strings.
