Jacks

So you’re playing your electric guitar and everything is going well, but then suddenly you move the wrong way and sound stops coming out of your guitar. What?! How does this happen?!

Lucky for you, this is incredibly common and something that you can easily fix yourself. 99% of the time, when you don’t get any sound–no buzzing, humming, or anything, just dead silence–the culprit is a faulty output jack. In the rare case that it’s not the jack, you may want to seek help, but I want to give a little primer here on how to diagnose and repair this super common problem.

So first, what even is an output jack?!

Right. The output jack is the part of the guitar that connects it electrically to your guitar cable, and thus to your amp, and then to the electricity coming out of your wall outlet, and ultimately to the power plant that supplies you with ample (hehe) electricity. You plug your quarter inch guitar cable/cord/whatever-you-call-it into your guitar’s output jack. Without the output jack, your guitar is just a piece of wood with some neatly organized metal pieces inside of it.

Fortunately, output jacks are incredible simple. On a mono jack–which for the record is the standard for all guitars–there are only two connections: one for your guitar signal, and one for ground. I won’t go too deep into electrical theory here, but a brief understanding of ground is going to help. Suffice it to say that “ground” is an integral part of electrical circuits that can protect you from electrocuting yourself, and that also has the added benefit of keeping audio signals quiet, safe from interference. Without a ground, your guitar will be incredibly noisy, and you could potentially hurt yourself under the right (or I guess I should say wrong) electrical conditions. Remember that movie Almost Famous, when Russell gets electrocuted by the microphone? Classic bad grounding scenario. Unfortunately for him, his guitar was actually properly grounded. It was the microphone, and likely the venue itself that wasn’t properly grounded.

There you have it, the two components of an output jack: signal and ground. Now let’s take a look at how the jack physically interacts with the plug:

See how there’s a little black strip separating the tip of the plug from the other part? That plug, and the whole cable is comprised of two conductors (pieces of metal) that run separately from one end to the other. They don’t ever touch. That’s because your signal is connected to the tip, and your ground is connected to the “sleeve.” This is cool because in two conductor cables, one wire runs down the center, the other wire wraps around it, and the two are separated electrically with some kind of insulator, sometimes rubber or cloth. With this setup, the ground actually “shields” the signal from interference, keeping it quiet and at the same time connecting the ground of the guitar to the amp. Double rainbow!

If you look at how the plug goes into the jack, you’ll see a little metal tab that locks into the neck of the jack’s tip. If you look closely, you’ll see that the tab is part of a single piece of metal that has another little tab hanging out on the outside of the jack. And look! There’s a wire connected to it! Guess what that wire is? Yup, it’s your guitar signal, or “hot” wire/lead, or whatever you want to call it. That’s where the guitar sounds come from. That means that the other tab is ground, which you can confirm by looking at the piece of metal again. It touches the sleeve of the plug. Neat, right?

So now that you know how it all works, there are really only a handful of things that can go wrong.

• One: the signal wire gets disconnected and needs to be soldered back in place. In this scenario, you would hear dead silence coming out of the guitar.
• Two: the ground wire is disconnected, and your guitar is making the loudest humming and buzzing noises you’ve ever heard. Kill it with fire! No, don’t, just solder it back together.
• Three: The tab that touches the jack tip is loose or rusted and needs to be filed, cleaned, and/or pushed back into place.
• Four: The part of the jack that connects to the sleeve is rusted. Take a file or some sandpaper and rough it up and spray on some contact cleaner, or some tri-flo, or even WD-40 would work.
• Five: Your jack is fine, but your cable is bad. This should actually be the first thing you check. Right, that’s what I should lead this post with: always check cables first. They fail way more often than jacks, so try a couple different ones before you go taking your guitar apart.

Pretty simple, right?

The fixes are all just as easy. You’ll just need a cheap soldering iron ($10 or so), some solder, a screwdriver, an adjustable wrench, and some kind of abrasive. A nail file works fine, jeweler’s files, random scraps of sandpaper, a brillo pad, the rough part of a sponge, steel wool, the asphalt outside your house (Gool ‘Ol one-grit, as I like to call it), or anything that will rough up the metal and remove some rust. Get creative. Lubrication isn’t absolutely necessary, but it will help, and will prolong the time between cleanings/repairs. I use Deox-it Fader (F5) contact cleaner, but you can use any kind of oil/cleaner you like. Even just rubbing the oils from your thumb–or nose–into it will probably make a little difference. It rusts because you are sweating all over it, blech! Gross! All you’re trying to do is displace that water so it doesn’t just sit there and ruin your jack.

If it’s way too rusted, or metal parts are missing, it may be time to replace the jack. Fortunately they are cheap and you can usually get them anywhere guitars are sold. $5 or so.

Here’s the process:

1. Unscrew the jack plate and pull the whole assembly out a few inches to allow yourself access. If your guitar doesn’t have a jack plate, you either have a hollow body guitar and will have to fish the jack out through one of the f-holes, or you’ll need to get access to the jack through the control cavity on the backside of your guitar. No big deal. I’ll explain reinstalling a jack in a hollow body in a minute.
2. Use your wrench to unscrew the nut, then remove the flat washer and jack plate. This should leave you with just a jack with two wires coming out of it, unless of course those wires are broken, in which case you’ll need to go looking for them. But how do you tell which one is which if they are both disconnected?! Lucky for you, neither your guitar, nor your amp will explode, catch fire, or electrocute you if you install a jack backwards. It just won’t work. You have a 50% chance of getting it right the first time, and a 100% chance of getting it right the second time. Typically though, ground wires are black or bare, sometimes green.
3. Don’t lose your little parts! I use little bags or small cardboard boxes to keep track of small bits.
4. Now look at that jack. Are any of the previously mentioned problems going on? You can still plug your cable in and listen to it through your amp at this point. What’s it doing? Are there loud noises? no noises? Diagnose it, and then decide what the best course of action is based on your knowledge.
5. Clean that bad boy up, or just replace it. Don’t be scared of a soldering iron. If it’s your first time using one, practice a little and see how fast the solder melts. All you’re going to do is put a hot, wet blob of solder on the jack’s tab/lug/connection/thingy and hold the wire there until it dries. It’s not rocket science. Best practices are to “tin” the wire first–which means to put solder on it–and to make a sturdy physical connection that would hold in place even without solder. Make the wire into a little hook, put it through the little hole on the tab, add solder. Patience is the key. Pro tip: No matter how much you want it to, pressing harder will not make your soldering iron get any hotter. You just have to wait.
6. Test it before you reinstall it! Hey! does it work? No? Then don’t reinstall it! Take a look at it more closely and see if you can observe what is going on. Remember, it’s not complicated. There’s only so much that can go wrong. Worst case scenario is having to replace the jack.
7. When you get it working, just put it all back together the same way you took it apart.
8. If you have a hollow body guitar, you’ll want to get some extra wire. All you’re going to do is feed the wire into the hole where your jack was before you took it out, making sure to leave plenty of slack as you fish it (the wire) back out through the same f-hole where your jack is currently dangling. Then just twist the wire around the jack threads so that it holds pretty well. After it’s nicely secured, just pull the wire from the jack hole side, sliding the jack right back into place. It can be a little fiddly to get just right sometimes, but as you experiment with it, you’ll find a tactic that works best for your particular guitar.

Bonus! If this is all way too simple for you, there are a couple extra things that I like to do to ensure longevity and sturdiness of a jack that don’t cost much more. You’ll want to go to your nearest hardware supply store and get some lock washers and a light adhesive–I like Loctite’s “Thread Locker Blue.”

You put a lock washer on the jack before you put it through the jack plate, then put the flat washer and the nut on. The lock washer goes on the inside! (I’ve seen people put them on the outside, which is why this must be said) Lock washers prevent the jack from spinning, which is a common cause of wires breaking. Think of bending a spoon over and over again. Metal doesn’t like being bent and moved around. Eventually it just snaps and turns this damn bus around, ending your precious little field trip.

As a final safety measure, I put a drop of Thread Locker on the nut and then tighten it just a quarter turn past hand tight. Everything should be snug, but not crushed. What often happens as cables are plugged in and out of these poor jacks is that the nuts just get loose, allowing everything to wobble around and spin, which as we just covered, can lead to wire breakage! If the nut can’t loosen, the whole assembly stays right where it’s supposed to.

And that’s it! Now you can maintain your jack in perpetuity for an investment of maybe $20-$30. Hope this was helpful!

Let me know if anything is unclear or if you want to know more! I’m happy to answer questions/add to confusion. My goal is murkiness and obfuscation. Wait… no… the opposite.

Thanks for reading! See you next week!