The Golem

While at first sight it might seem sacriligious to modify a Rickenbacker 360/12 like this—I can assure you that I have not lost my mind.

1. I saved the original pickguard with all the electronics in a baggie for safekeeping.
2. I didn't remove any material and the whole thing is reversable with a little solder.
3. These are all sensible mods.
4. It's my guitar and it brings me joy to have these additional features.

I had this guitar since 2010 and it has mostly behaved itself. I started to desire things that I could not get from the pedals on the floor, and I wasn't fully utilizing what was already there. I craved a built-in noise-free compressor and treble booster. I craved some kind of built-in modulation. I pretty much kept the tone knobs and volume knobs dimed. Occasionally I would switch pickups. Just some things that would go nicely with the beautiful instrument I already had.

So I designed and I sweated and I experimented and I struggled.

I put in the sacred circuits. I brought it to life.

And so it obeys my commands, but sometimes it doesn't.

It seemed appropriate to tag it with the sacred three-letter name and call it "The Golem."

Hopefully it'll kill some fascists.

Here's what we have:

• No tone knobs
• A toggle that can bypass all the circuitry
• A toggle for each pickup
• A toggle for an internal piezo pickup
• JFET buffers
• An onboard effects loop (OBEL) like Jerry Garcia had. The signal goes out of the guitar to the pedal board, then back into the guitar, then I can use the volume knob post effects. I can pull the volume knob to bypass the effects completely. From there it goes into the amp. The guitar already had a stereo and a mono jack for Ric-O-Sound, so it was already a pretty convenient setup for this mod.
• Vox Treble Booster
• Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer (compressor)
• Jerry Garcia's preamp—the Alembic Stratoblaster
• Custom tremolo circuit that alternates between the bridge and neck pickups. I am very pleased the way this came out. It sounds a bit like a Uni-Vibe.
• A big fat light up arcade style kill switch

(click an image to uncrop and embiggen)

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