Hard-wiring your Les Paul for Guitar Hero

[Ashante]

Why would you want to do this? In total we've had 4 Les Pauls (and one explorer, custom sprayed now ) and two of them have been duff. The motion sensor is faulty in some LPs, but that's because it's been mounted incorrectly and you should take it back to the shop. A more common problem is that through overuse, the buttons start not to work. We had one with a faulty green and red, and there's nothing more annoying than playing a song perfectly then having a button cut out on you. This problem occurs due to the detachable neck, the contact plates are crap, basically.

I learned how to do this from a post on Scorehero - Original Guide.
If you hard wire your LP it will no longer be detachable. Small price to pay, how often do you actually detach the neck and carry it around anyway? This will also obviously void your warranty. Please remove the batteries from the LP before you start.
This is a really simple method that we used, no soldering or anything involved. All you need is:

• Wire Strippers
• Electrical Tape
• Speaker Wire
• T10 + Screwdriver

This method involves removing the contact boards and twisting wires in between the two remaining ribbons, taping them together and sealing the guitar back up.

1. Prepare 8 pieces of speaker wire, about 4 inches long with 1/3 inch stripped at each end.
2. Remove the neck from the body.
3. Remove all the screws from the neck and put them to one side. Open up the neck.
4. Mark on each of the 8 wires with a pen from 1-8 to remind you which way they face.
5. Cut off the contact plate as close as possible to the end, you want as much wire as possible to work with.
6. Carefully seperate each of the 8 wires from the ribbon, and strip 1/3 inch off the end of each wire.

7. Attach a speaker wire to the first neck wire by twisting them together, and tape them up as neatly as possible. Repeat for the other 7.

8. Remove all the screws from the back of the guitar body, and set them aside. Open up the back of the guitar.
9. Mark the wires from 1-8 as you did on the neck.
10. Cut off the contact plate, strip and seperate the wires as before.
11. Very carefully join up the extended neck wires to the stripped body wires, matching up 1-8 as you marked them, by twisting them together and taping with electrical tape.

12. Reassemble the neck. You probably won't be able to have the neck far from the body when assembling it due to the short length of speaker wire, it may possibly be partly inserted, so put the cover back on the neck first, being careful not to pierce or pinch the wire or any ribbons.
13. It is a good idea to cut off the 3 prongs that are supposed to hold the ribbon, because they just rip your wires.
14. Put the cover back on the body and snap the neck down, careful not to jam the wire bridge, soft pressure should do it.
15. Test your guitar, don't put all the screws back in until you are sure it's rewired correctly.
15. Once it's working, screw all the screws back in tight. Once it's all screwed in you can feel the neck is more solid.

Thats it! I would really recommend this to anyone who plays GH a lot, after doing this our performance increased drastically, and it makes you more confident that if you hit the notes properly it will play, and you don't have to remember to hold harder on any faulty keys.