G&L tech resources: Parts & patents

 
 

This section does not present any patents. Just smart engineering as applied to (most) G&Ls from the pre-BBE era. The problem? Depending on your location on Earth, the prevalence of an audible 50-60Hz hum coming through your amp, especially when playing single-coil pickups. Humbuckers solve the problem by adding the signal of the secondary coil out-of-phase to the primary, with the relative phase of the string vibrations being such they are not cancelled out. For single-coil pickups one has to resort to shielding. Many of the instruments built in the 1980s came equipped with a rather heavy pickguard, either black powder-coated aluminum or white enameled aluminum. And although aluminum is not the greatest conductor, especially not the aluminum oxide at the surface where induced AC-currents reside, it provides some amount of shielding. Nowadays, all guards at G&L are plastic. In that case, one needs conducting tape to create a Faraday-cage. The control panel cover on the ASAT is still metal, even to this day. With the CLF Research L-2000 in 2018, a metal control panel even made a return among the basses. In older G&Ls, to complete the shielding enclosure, thin copper foil or thicker templates with holes for the controls were used for control cavity shielding.

 

guards & shielding - The index