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On Restringing a Rickenbacker 12-String Guitar

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Restringing a Rickenbacker 12-string is not for the fainthearted.

If you do a Google search on the topic, one of the first hits you’ll get is titled “Restringing a Rickenbacker 12-String: How to become an alcoholic”. I’ve owned my Rickenbacker 360/12 Fireglo for about 20 years and in that time I’ve sold it and re-bought it twice and listed it for sale another 3-4 times, each occasion following the ritual of restringing.

For a bit of context, restringing and doing a quick set-up on any of my other guitars is a 5-10 minute job. Yesterday I spent five hours accomplishing the same on my Rick. Like any tool developed during wartime (it was an invasion, in case you don’t know) the original Rick 12 design was rough and ready, thrown together to present to the Beatles during their first US tour. This first contact is actually captured on audio, as George was sick in bed conducting a radio interview (with his sister) when the presentation party arrived. Unlike most tools of war, however, the Rickenbacker 12 has been frozen in time since, apart from an early design change that actually made it less user-friendly. Restringing a guitar was only an occasional activity in the early 60s (George admits to never restringing his Rick 12) and I can only assume that the designers at Rick assumed the guitar would be treated like a piano, keeping its strings for life.

So let me list just three design choices that beggar belief:

First, the famous headstock. When you add another 6 strings to a guitar it necessitates another six tuners that have to be put somewhere, usually creating an elongated, inelegant headstock that plunges the neck towards the floor like a diver’s weight. The Rick solution is, on paper, a good one: have six tuners positioned as normal, sticking out of the headstock at 90 degrees, and put the other six perpendicular to these, with the tuning pegs pointing backwards and the spindles in routes along the headstock face like a classical guitar. However, for some reason, they didn’t cut the routes all the way through to the back of the headstock like a classical guitar, so every manoeuvre of the strings is a piece of surgery requiring needle-nosed pliers, like building a ship in a bottle. What’s more, the strings that wind onto these horizontal spindles, by design, have to rub over the white, plastic Rickenbacker truss-rod cover. Predictable, this leads to all sorts of tuning hijinks and fractures when the strings catch in the grooves they have channeled into the plastic.

The truss-rod cover is the main culprit in the second design choice. Completing a set-up on a guitar is the basic process of manipulating geometry to make sure the guitar is playable. There are only a few points of manipulation, including the nut, bridge and truss rod (or ‘rods’ in the case of the Rick, as it has two). The latter play an important part, counteracting the natural force of string tension that is trying to fold the neck in half. It is adjusted to create ‘relief’, a slight backbow in the neck. To play in tune, Rickenbackers need an almost perfectly straight neck with zero relief. It has to be adjusted with the guitar in battle condition, strung and in tune, but to access the truss rods on a Rick you need to take off the white truss rod cover on the headstock, now held tightly in place by a dozen strings running across it. Removing it requires string tension to be slackened off completely so the cover can be slid aside. The Rickenbacker lettering on the cover is raised, so it invariably catches on the strings. I’ve broken more than a few this way. The strings have to stay slack to adjust the rods, as it’s impossible to get a tool in otherwise, so the guitar must be adjusted, tuned, detuned, adjusted, tuned etc until the relief is correct. Once it is, you then need to slacken the strings a final time to slide the cover back into place. Tuning a Rick 12 takes five minutes or so. Yesterday I did this most basic of tasks 30-40 times for various adjustments. Metal easily fatigues, so several strings break in the process and have to be replaced along the way.

Let’s get onto the third, and most egregious choice: the chromed ‘R’ tailpiece. A tailpiece is a holdover from early acoustic guitar design, anachronistic even in the 60s. It has one job: an attachment point for the strings before they pass over the bridge and up the neck to the tuners. On the very first few Rick 12s (with pointy horns, like George Harrison’s) this was accomplished with a square but elegant metal plate that the strings threaded through. In one of the more bizarre design choices in electric guitar history, this was replaced with a beautiful, chromed ‘R’ that relied instead on a series of channels cast into the underside of the tailpiece to hold the strings. To be clear, these are open to the underside, so the only thing holding the strings in place is string tension pulling on the ball end of the string against the back of the channel. Any drop in tension and the string, enslaved by the laws of gravity, will drop straight out (Remember above when I said that I had to drop string tension dozens of times?). Reattaching them is like fly fishing, throwing the string back under the bridge and hoping the ball will catch when you reel it in. It’s hard to describe how bad this design is to someone who isn’t had to go through the ordeal. Imagine trying to sew a seam using a needle that has its eye open on one side.

And so it came to be that at midnight, after another dozen needlessly difficult adjustments, my Rick was finally ready. Weakened by fatigue, I started falling for her once more, the contoured edge like a sucked lozenge, the gleaming chrome of the overstocked headstock and the slashed f-hole on the body. Plugged in, I’m smitten again, lost in the jangle. Although when I go to bed in the early hours of the morning I quietly check the going price for a used Rickenbacker 360/12 in Fireglo.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.12fret.com%2Finstruments%2Frickenbacker-360-12-thinline-electric-12-string-fireglo-2009%2F&psig=AOvVaw2tyPPnVEPIpT7TKFqi91Do&ust=1690607786363000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=0CBAQjRxqFwoTCJDh1fbSsIADFQAAAAAdAAAAABAK

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Comments

  3. I have a mere 6-string Ric, but yes, the R tailpiece is a pain. But it’s so darn beautiful.

    I’m almost certainly telling granny to suck eggs, but do you put in the octave strings first? And do you use a capo near the nut? This keeps the tailpiece from falling off.

    Re. The truss rod cover. I’d take it off, scan it, and make an identical but much thinner (and smoother) copy for everyday use.

    My worst instrument for stringing is a Telecaster with a Bigsby vibrato. That requires pointed nosed pliers (for making a ‘kink’ in the strings just past the ball end), a capo, and lots of swearing.

  4. Reading this made me grind my teeth to bitter paste in my mouth, several major muscle groups crimping up in sympathy. Worrapalava!

    Do you treat your strings with a proprietary emulsion? I use Kyser Dr. Stringfellow™, which might be useful for Rick owners as you can kill yourself by drinking it.

  5. I remember being in my local guitar shop and the manager was changing the strings on a Ric 12 at the request of a potential owner. “He’d better fukin buy it” he growled.

    I had a Dano 12 which I loved but never had a use for so it had to go. But I would never part with my Martin D28/12 which I love unconditionally.

  6. I’ve never had a Ric 12 – but I did have a Shergold 12 at one point…and a Gordon-Smith GS1-12. All gone, all gone.

    But I do still have my Hiscox 12 boat-backed acoustic – couldn’t ever get rid of that.

    Wonder why the acoustics survive the culls?

    • I have trouble picking the difference between cheap and expensive acoustic 12 strings, and I’ve played a fair few. The pull of the 12 strings necessitates a thick top and stiff bracing, which are hallmarks of cheap acoustic guitars. Coupled with the slightly out of tune chorusing of the strings, many of the refinements of a nice acoustic are completely lost.

  7. I have found a fool-proof and highly effective method: the guitar shop down the road! I tried restringing it once and never again. Happy to part with my hard earned to have someone else do it. I’m not nearly technically minded enough to like it ‘just so’, so I’m happy.

    Mine’s currently awaiting maintenance. I bought the 330-12 Jetglo second hand and everyone I’ve ever sent it to for setups had said “gawd that neck is bowed. I’ll do what I can.” Given that I only ever play up the safe end of the neck I don’t suffer the fluctuations of tuning this might cause to someone more capable and widdly, so it’s all been good.

    My current guy tried to adjust the truss rod and it broke on him. The previous incident was the R tailpiece boinging straight off as if it were a cartoon violin. That was a palaver as Rickenbacker don’t have a reliable distributor in Australia so it took months to establish they they won’t even sell you a part unless you mail them the broken one (Assuming so you can’t build a whole one yourself). Ended up replacing it with an after-market one. Shoulda gone with the original wedge shaped tailpiece but the curvy one looks just fine. Oh, and when I bought it the nut had been replaced so the strings went ‘thin-thick’ (as most 12 strings do) whereas Ricks go ‘thick-thin’.

    Guy said it’ll be a couple hundred for an off-brand truss rod and a couple hundred for labour. Bit tight at the moment so it’ll be a labour of love for next year. Meanwhile for tonight’s gig I’ll just slap a bit of chorus on the 6 string 360 for those songs I play it on.

    There’s something about the Ship of Theseus about it now, but I still love it.

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