Grateful Dead Music Forum

Very nice Pics! Lots of great info here thank you so much. I have seen these guitar in person (not yours) but it has been a long time now. This is great I like that you have modified yours. The output panel is where I was misunderstanding what was going on, you see in many of the pics I have seen of Weir's guitars it seems that yes he used the 2 quarter inch jacks, these were sent to the rack via y cable, yet he did not use that midi Pin cable output. I imagine with a guitar like this anything is possible for changing electronics simply becasue of all those routed compartments it seems ready to be a "controller" even more than a guitar. Does yours mix the midi output like on my GK2a? I mean can you tell the guitar to send only a guitar signal or half w sound effects or all? Then I stll wonder about Weir and his bodypacks and how they relate to these guitars and the wireless signal? The boxes that they used on their straps seem homeade?

NashvilleMike wrote:

jeffm725 wrote:Beware though that I would say that 70% of the casios available now will not track across all the strings properly until they have a cap job done to the board. These guitarsare 22-24 years old now and unless the midi functionality was used regularly the caps lose it, and need to be reformed. There is information online on how to do it, but is a pain because the original board is surface soldered.

In this case I think I would like a new piece for this with modern electronics. Why mess with stuff so old? Who is making a similar axe new today?

I have seen a few guitars that come close by Brian Moore, Godin, and Steinberger but alas I have never seen and new guitar achieve what this Casio is got going on.

jdsmodulus wrote:s. The output panel is where I was misunderstanding what was going on, you see in many of the pics I have seen of Weir's guitars it seems that yes he used the 2 quarter inch jacks, these were sent to the rack via y cable, yet he did not use that midi Pin cable output. I imagine with a guitar like this anything is possible for changing electronics simply becasue of all those routed compartments it seems ready to be a "controller" even more than a guitar. Does yours mix the midi output like on my GK2a? I mean can you tell the guitar to send only a guitar signal or half w sound effects or all? Then I stll wonder about Weir and his bodypacks and how they relate to these guitars and the wireless signal? The boxes that they used on their straps seem homeade?

I think I understand what your are asking. There is a quote on the Dozin site from Weir saying and I paraphrase " I like the casio because it is the only midi guitar fast enough to use wirelessly".

What I believe he meant by that is in the 80's especially, with early midi, there was a great deal of latency involved with the triggering of the midi effects. The casio latency was real good especially for that time period. There is no magic routing secret as far as his box or anything. Because it uses 1/4 inch standard instrument outs for the regular signal as well as the midi signal, he was able to use a standard wireless pack unit to get rid of stage cabling. Other midi setups of the time could not offer that. He simply used two wireless transmitters one for the regular signal and one for the midi signal (and maybe the homemade looking thing is the combo box).

As far as mixing the output of midi to regular; there are only 3 pots on the casio the one closest to the strings is guitar volume, the one in the middle is midi volume and the bottom is the tone pot (with a pull to split the bridge pup). So you can simply mix and match your midi vs. guitar signal by whatever ratio you want. You can go anywhere from all guitar to all midi and any mix in between.
It is actually very elegant in its simplicity and maybe another reason why Bobby liked it.

Again thanks alot for the info. I understand now what I was wondering about!

Yes, Bob's UE-400 was modified for true bypass and had his own custom built switching unit. Notice how his control pedal was always in the rack.

They tried midi on one of the Blackknifes, definitely not the Pink one. I believe it was a gold Blackknife. The guitar didn't have a quick enough response.

I hear there's a lot of problems with the caps on the Casio's preventing the midi to work on certain strings? Jeff probably knows more about that. I think we spoke even a few years ago about it???

The info is here:

http://jpsongs.com/troubadortech/sick380.htm

Years ago I owned a PG380 and it had tracking issues. I looked into replacing the caps, however, they were tiny surface mounted caps - no way I could handle the job.

I sold the guitar.

btw...the PG380 has different effects cards - not sure which one Weir used.

mk