About a year ago i bought my ibanez ac340
this is it here still absolutely love this guitar the way it plays
the way it sounds and you may remember if you watch the original video
i'll stick it up there that it doesn't have a preamp system
so i was on my couch thinking to myself as you do i love the Kremona m20e
acoustic guitar it's just behind me there
and the sound that it gets from the lr bags eas vtc preamp i since learned
that it stands for element active system volume tone control element is a lot
less of a mouthful so i digress i was thinking wouldn't it
be good to have that system in the old ibo well i looked online
and you can order it so i did and here it is
so i think it's time to give the old ibo an upgrade
give it what it deserves there's only four steps
and i'll take you through this so let's electrify
this amazing guitar
these are all the bits and pieces that you're going to need to complete this
you can pause the video here and take a look but i'll also put them down in the
description as well so that you can check them out a bit
later on
now you won't need the file if you've got a half inch drill bit i didn't
unfortunately so i needed that so let's crack on with
the pre-install all i'm going to do here is remove the
little strap button and then just remove the strings from
the acoustic guitar i'll speed that bit up
i'm sure you don't want to watch somebody remove strings from an acoustic
guitar
so let's crack on with step one the drilling
all you've got to do is take it slow and take it careful
i've marked the half inch step on my stepped drill bit with a piece of tape
just to make sure that i don't go too deep
nice and slowly we'll get the job done here then let's just check the preamp to
make sure it's going to fit into that half inch hole now as i
said earlier i didn't have a half inch drill bit so i'm using a quarter inch
drill bit here just to drill through the block and then
i'm going to get a file and file out the hole
it actually didn't take too long what i'm going to do here is just check that
the preamp fits this side of the hole because if it fits this side
it's going to fit through the other side
and then the next step is just to remove the saddle because we're going to drill
that three mil or 1/8th of an inch hole down into the
bridge
i'm using as i said a 1/8th of an inch drill bit
but i checked the opposite end of the drill bit down into the bridge just to
make sure that it was going to fit because i didn't want the drill end
marking the bridge unnecessarily i'm just checking that i'm right in the
corner here and it does say in the instructions
to drill this at an angle but also keep the drill straight because you don't
want to mark the bridge unnecessarily i also went quite slowly and didn't push
too hard to make sure i didn't damage the bridge
and here's the hole here okay step two let's install the preamp so first i'm
gonna unpack it just check all the wiring just to see
what's going on the instructions are really good
so they were really helpful but in this cable bundle we've got the preamp
the piezo strip the battery connection and the controls
there are a series of nuts and washers that come with the preamp so what i did
i got one of the nuts and screwed it right the way down to the end of the
preamp now i wasn't sure if i was going to need
to adjust it afterwards luckily i didn't it was a perfect fit
then i put the flat washer on and then afterwards put the grip washer on
the next stage is to feed the complete wiring loom into the sound hole
and then try and get the preamp through that little hole one of the good things
about the ibanez ac340 is the sound hole is quite large i quite
like that aesthetically anyway but it does allow me to get my
shovel-like hands through the hole in order to poke the pre-amp
out the other side then i'm going to put the flat washer on
and then the nut on as well i do use an adjustable wrench or an adjustable
spanner just to nip that up just pinch tight
don't over tighten it because obviously it's metal going into wood
once that's done all i'm going to do is screw the end cap on
which completes the new strap button i'm only doing this up finger tight
okay now i'm going to mark the saddle for later because obviously once the
flat piezo strip is under the saddle it is going to raise
the height of the saddle up so i'm going to make a first mark here
and then i'll explain what's going on in a little bit
and now we need to get this flat piezo strip up through that little hole that
we made earlier it's quite fiddly took me some time so
i'll speed this bit up but i got it through eventually
it's also quite important to keep the piezo strip flat
obviously under the saddle so that when you put the saddle in
there's no twisting on the piezo strip and you get a good transfer of sound
i'm also going to secure that on there temporarily with a small piece of
masking tape that's going to allow me to make that
second mark
now the idea here is because the flat piezo strip has raised the height of the
saddle i'm just going to put some gentle
pressure on there and make another mark there might be other ways to do this but
in my head i was thinking the distance between these two marks now
is how much i need to remove from the bottom of the saddle
although it does tell you in the instructions how much you need to remove
just going to use a straight edge you can use any straight edge
just to make that mark and then we'll carry on with the adjustment of the
saddle i'm using 320 grit sandpaper and i'm
keeping the saddle really straight so that i've got a nice flat surface
underneath and i'm just going to sand it down to
the mark that i made earlier i'll also speed this bit up i'm sure you
don't want to watch me sanding a saddle
okay and now i'll fit the saddle back into the bridge
secure it with a small piece of masking tape and then i'll remove the masking
tape once we've restrung the guitar
here i'm just checking one of my other guitars for reference
because i wanted to know where the battery holder should be placed
okay step four the battery and the controls
so we'll connect the battery up we'll put it into its holder
and the sticky pad on the holder has a really good grip
and i'm going to put this just at the base of the neck
you probably see just through the hole there but i'm going to make sure that
the opening to the battery holder is facing
the left so that whenever i need to replace the
battery i've got easy access to it
perfect
moving on to the controls the volume and the tone
now just underneath the sound hole on my guitar
there's a lot of bracing so i'm not limited to where i can put the controls
but ideally i'd have liked it a little bit more forward towards the neck but i
couldn't do it because the bracing's there as you can see
so i had to move it back just a little bit just to find the perfect spot where
i can have the tone and the volume knobs just sticking
out slightly without too much of the control unit
being seen
i was also careful when i located this just to make sure that when i
put the control unit sticky pad on that i didn't push the tone and the volume
controls from the edge i tried to stay in the center because obviously
i didn't want to bend the tone or volume controls and i didn't want to break
anything you also get a lot of cable clips with
the preamp so now's the time just to tidy up the wiring underneath there
the way i did it was so when you look through the sound hole
you didn't see any of the wiring but you can put them wherever you like
as i always do with my guitars when i take the strings off we just go through
a bit of maintenance i'm going to get all of that dust off
and then i'm just going to use some lemon oil on the rosewood fretboard
not ideal for maple fretboards of course just rosewood
ordinarily i'd polish the frets as well but i've recently polished them so i
didn't need to do that now i'm going to use my mechanical
pencil just to put a bit of graphite into the nut
to reduce the string stick because sometimes the strings can get caught in
the nut and this helps that now i'm going to restring the guitar and
once you've got a couple of strings on you can then remove that masking tape
from the saddle
okay here's the exciting bit so let's plug it in
let's tune it up and let's listen to what this preamp sounds like
with the ibanez it's a alive, it's alive!
Now i know what you're thinking why did i spend 300
on the ibanez and then another 160 on the lr banks element
why not just sell it and get an acoustic guitar with a preamp already fitted well
when you find an acoustic guitar that you just gel with an acoustic guitar
that plays like an electric where the neck is so comfortable and the
unplugged sound is amazing you just have to stick with it there's
no way i'd sell this guitar and now that it has the preamp in there
i love it even more
i hope this helped you out if you fancy giving this a go
just take your time measure twice and cut once as they say
you stay well and i'll see you i'm off to enjoy the old ibo