The wireless Les Paul guitar introduced with Guitar Hero III is my favorite fake plastic guitar of all time. I’ve owned them all, and I think the Les is a cut above in every category — it has style with the detachable faceplates, it has the best fret buttons, strum, whammy bar and start/select positioning, and it performs great. And it’s wireless!

But the Les, even though it’s arguably the best fake plastic guitar on the market, has one recurring problem area: the detachable neck. The neck doesn’t attach very firmly to the body in many of the Les Pauls out there, leading to the neck sliding around a bit as you play. This is aggravating at best — nobody likes a loose, slippery guitar when playing tricky sections. But it can be much, much worse. It can cause you to screw up songs when the buttons to fail to register due to the loose connection points between the neck and the guitar.

I’ve been hunting around for solutions to this loose neck problem for months, ever since Guitar Hero III was shipped in October. There are some low-tech fixes out there for the loose neck problem, such as:

1. Wrap a rubber band around the neck peg and the rear guitar strap peg
2. Move the neck contact board forward
3. Hard-wire the neck and permanently attach it to the guitar

I don’t like these solutions for various reasons, mostly because I think they’re too complicated and/or ghetto. I’d rather tighten up the neck connection itself with judicious use of tape. I’ve been experimenting with different tape locations for a while and I’ve finally found the perfect location for tape that gives a super-secure, rock-solid neck connection!

Simply place several sections of duct tape (or similar) on the neck itself, in the small rectangular area on each side of the neck, where the neck presses against the body of the guitar. See the picture, below– do this on both sides of the neck.

It will take at least two layers of duct tape on top of each other. For me, it took three to get a completely rock solid connection. The “push back” of the tape equalizes the neck pressure, so when you snap it in to the body, it’s held with quite a bit of force now. (Pushing the neck in will be a little bit harder, but it should snap in with a bit more force than without the tape).

You can see the tape mashed between the neck and the body of the guitar in this photo with the neck attached. There are three layers of black duct tape in this closeup.

I was ecstatic to finally stumble upon this great fix to my loose guitar neck problem, after months of trying so many different types of tape and so many locations on the neck and body.

With this simple tape mod, my Les Paul necks are now rock solid. They don’t budge an inch while I’m playing. They feel so solid now you’d swear they were permanently attached.. and they’re still easily removable, too!

If you’re interested in quieting down the fret button noise on your guitar, or if you just want smoother button action, here’s an easy mod.

Pick up a white lithium grease crayon at your local hardware store. This is usually in the automotive or lubricant section. It’s only a few bucks.

Remove the buttons from the guitar neck. I documented how to remove the fret buttons in an earlier post.

Once you have the buttons out, apply the white lithium grease around the edges of the button, as pictured. Don’t go too high, but cover around all the edges.

Replace the buttons in the neck, and enjoy smoother, quieter button action!

One of the common fret button tweaks is to insert a bit of thin material under the buttons so they’re more responsive. Here’s how. Let’s start with the Kramer wireless PS2 guitar neck– but the procedure is very similar on the wireless Les Paul.

We’ll need our old friend, the T-10 Torx screwdriver..

.. to remove all the screws from the back of the neck. Flip the neck over and dump the screws– make sure they all come out– then pry the two halves of the neck shell apart.

What’s inside is very simple. On one end we have the contacts that the body pins push against when the neck is inserted in the guitar (note that I have lubricated these contacts with dielectric grease for better performance) ..

The ribbon cable connects the neck contacts with the button circuit board. To remove this, use a small philips screwdriver on the two screws that hold each end.

Under the circuit board is a small rubber spacer. When the fret buttons are pressed, they depress this rubber spacer, which presses on the circuit board to register a button press. Remove this spacer by gently pulling it loose.

Under this, of course, are the fret buttons themselves. This is a also a good time to lubricate your fret buttons with white lithium grease while you have them out!

You can remove the fret buttons as well, if you need to; they just slide right out of the neck.

As you can see the neck is remarkably simple; there’s almost nothing in it. About the only mod that makes any sense is to tighten up the button travel for better response. To do that, cut several small square shims from thin cardboard, plastic, or heavy card stock paper. Size each piece to fit on top of the buttons.

Be careful– don’t make your shims too thick or the buttons will be super stiff. Place the buttons in the neck and lay the shims directly on top.

To reassemble, follow the above steps in reverse order. I highly recommend testing the spacers before closing the neck up– place the rubber spacer and the circuit board on, but don’t screw it in. Hold it against your hand as you test the button action to make sure it’s what you want.

Now your fret buttons have less travel, and thus respond faster! “Flatter” buttons with a shorter throw make it easier to do slides and trills. This also has the nice side-effect of making them a little quieter, too, if you lubricate the fret buttons with lithium grease as well.

Both of the new guitars introduced with Guitar Hero III– the Playstation 2 Kramer Striker, and the Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 Les Paul– have removable necks. This is quite handy for packing and storing your guitar, but it can also lead to connectivity problems between the buttons on the neck and the body.

One relatively easy fix for most (but not all) intermittent button issues on guitars with removable necks is to add a dab of Dielectric grease to the neck contacts. Dielectric grease is only a couple bucks at your local hardware store (look in the automotive section).

Today’s victim is one of my Kramer Striker guitars.

You can see that I’ve done the silver fret mod, added a custom strap, and painted it metallic black. What you can’t see is that I’ve also added internal weights to it, too. What can I say? I’m a fake plastic guitar mod addict.

Remove the neck from the guitar by depressing the lever on the back, then gently glide it out.

Slide the neck up and out, then flip it around to look at the contacts on the end.

Put a dab of the dielectric grease on each of the neck contacts. Don’t worry, the dielectric grease is NOT CONDUCTIVE, so you don’t have to do it perfectly.

When we slide the neck in, those contacts will touch these pins in the body of the guitar, here.

I’m not entirely sure why this works. I think it reduces the friction between the pins in the guitar body and the contact surface in the guitar neck.

But the proof is in the fake plastic guitar rocking — after applying this fix to my guitars with removable necks, intermittent and dropped button problems almost never occur any more!

In order to de-clutter our “boom boom room” where all manner of fake plastic rocking goes on, I wanted to come up with a way to mount the guitars on the wall. The method I found worked great for my Guitar Hero Les Paul model. The same technique should apply to any fake plastic guitar, whether you have a Rock Band Stratocaster, a Guitar Hero Xplorer, SG, or Kramer.

I performed a quick measurement of the Les Paul guitar neck and visited my local hardware store. I found a cheap (I think it was $2 or $3) convenient two pack of these generic “Screw-In Storage Hooks”. The width of the hook is a little over 1 1/2 inch, which is exactly the right size to hold the guitar neck.

These are of the self-tapping screw-in variety. The walls in that room are drywall, so there’s no way a simple screw will hold any significant weight. Here’s what I did: I screwed them in, then pulled them back out to create a properly sized hole. I then placed a generic plastic hollow-wall screw insert in the hole and tapped it in with a hammer. I then screwed the hook into the plastic insert– perfect!

Now when my friends and I are done fake plastic rocking, we just casually slide our guitar necks into the hook on the wall, like so, and gravity does the rest. The hooks are rated to 15 lbs, and with the drywall plastic insert, they do fine — even with the extra weights I’ve added to my guitars.

Hanging your guitars on hooks really cleans up the place, and it’s so easy and simple to do, too!

It does look pretty great, if I do say so myself.