Greetings from TinyTone! (scratchplates, wiring and pedals, handmade in Manchester)

tinytone · July 2022

Greetings from Tiny Tone!

I’m Jack, and run both Jack’s Instrument Services and Tiny Tone here in Manchester, UK. Jack’s Instrument Services has been running for well over a decade now but I’m keen to build up Tiny Tone’s presence online as it’s a bit of a lockdown baby; my employee Steve and I have thus far been too busy to really look at stuff like marketing etc.

Steve and I both have many years experience as professional guitar repairers from our work at JIS and before, so between us we have all things guitar/bass setup, repair, and manufacture covered. We both play guitar, bass, and various other instruments between us so this is very much something we love doing!

So what do we do?

Wiring

We offer a wide range of guitar wiring looms with solderless installation by default, ranging from basic solderless '6-tone tele' to our 21+ sound ‘Strat-o-blaster’ systems. We can also custom design circuits and make things bespoke to order; all using fancy cloth covered wire, CTS pots, Switchcraft sockets, Oak Grigsby/CRL switches, and paper-in-oil caps. We can also do rewires in person in our workshop, for example if you live locally and need a jack socket replacing...

Pedals

We currently leave distortions and delays to companies that specialise in that sort of thing, instead focusing on utility pedals- primarily our 'Varitone Stompbox' (gibson-style varitone in-a-box), and various flavours of switchable effects loop. These are handy for activating multiple pedals with one stomp, or converting pedals with rubbish buffers(think CryBaby, Boss DS-2 etc) to true bypass.

Scratchplates

Finally, as some of you may already be aware, we specialise in manufacturing pickguards by hand, bespoke, to order. At time of writing, we still do this the old-fashioned way (with specially modified routers), by either copying your original guard, or working from a template(for example if the original guard is damaged/missing, or you don’t want to remove it and take your bass out of action for a few days). On jobs where we copy the original, we offer a fit guarantee- if your new guard doesn’t fit, we will make any required modifications and send a new one, free of charge until you’re happy.

I’ll be upfront- there are others out there making scratchplates cheaper than us, particularly various factories in the Far East.

As price often comes up when I’m pitching our services to people, I’d like address to the far eastern factories in particular, and make the comparison that we’re more of a bespoke tailor; a mass-produced suit from Primark or a supermarket might fit you, but the quality of fit and overall experience will be much better(though also more expensive) from a professional tailor that can liase with you personally. Once people understand that we make all our stuff by hand and consider how many manufacturers still make instruments that way(and the prices they charge accordingly) despite advances in CNC technology, they see better where we’re coming from

A typical Stratocaster guard from a basic sheet material(e.g. 3ply white) currently costs around £54, which we think represents good value for something made by hand and 100% guaranteed to fit.

A particular USP of ours is that in addition to guaranteeing a perfect fit, we offer a greater range of sheet material than any other manufacturer that we’re aware of- from the classic 3ply white, to various types of tortoiseshell(we offer options both celluloid and printed), to metals(anodised/oxidised gold, copper, brass, treadplate etc), to classic options like Bakelite, perspex et all. We can also offer engraving on all sheet materials with the addition of a paint infiltration on certain materials, so logos etc are no problem!

We have an extensive library of colour-corrected sample images on our website and physical samples can be sent on request to make sure you know what you’re getting when you order from us.

We can of course combine our services and do loaded pickguards too- an all-in-one solution, particularly handy for instruments where everything lives on the guard, such as Strats or Flying Vs- upgrade it all at once!

Finally, for scratchplates, we’ve been working our backsides off to cut our lead times right down- until now we’ve been working on a ’10 working day’ turnaround- however now, assuming we don’t need to do any engraving(another service we offer) or order material in specially, we’re now pleased to be able to offer a ‘same day cut’ service- so if your guard reaches us and is paid for by 2pm, we aim to have it cut the same day and posted back to you along with your original the very next morning.

So I hope that gives us a bit of an overview of what we do!

For more information please check out our website tinytone.co.uk

-There’s an FAQ’s tab for all the most common things people ask us

-For those who’d like a really deep dive in to our processes, there’s a Terms & Conditions page linked in the website’s footer- all jobs are subject to these(a box has to be ticked showing they’ve been read and understood at the quote stage).

-The most exciting page is this one: tinytone.co.uk/custom-scratchplates -it features the aforementioned sample images of all our materials, including some sample shots of most materials in situ on the guitars and basses of some of the many hundreds of jobs we’ve done since February 2020(and a few from the many years we were making these under the Jack’s Instrument Services banner)

For all FretBoard folks we’ll be only too happy to offer a one-off 20% discount on scratchplates- I believe we’ve made guards for quite a few people on here already so this is open to customers both new and returning alike! This will be from your entire order including shipping, so if you need a few guards doing, now is the time! Just mention you saw our post on here when filling out the quote form, or after we've sent a price if you want to be sure we're giving you a discount versus what our normal customers would get.

We remain a very busy, very small business, so whilst we’ll do our best to check back here when we can and contribute to the forum overall, for all business enquiries we’d ask you drop us an email at tinytoneuk@gmail.com and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can! For scratch plate enquiries in particular we ask that you please fill out our quote form here: tinytone.co.uk/custom-scratchplate-request-form as it keeps all your information in one place and hopefully reduces the chance of us making any mistakes!

Thanks for reading all this, massive thank you to all on here who have ordered guards from us already (whether as Tiny Tone or back when we were making them under the Jacks Instrument Services banner), and look forward to hopefully hearing from some of you in future!

Jack and Steve

p.s. we're on instagram as @tinytoneuk if anyone fancies a quick browse of some of our recent jobs

suitablyswell · July 2022

Very happy to give Tiny Tone a big thumbs up from me. They took an incomplete scan from a photocopy of a Travis Bean 500 scratchplate and created me a new one that fitted perfectly. Extremely reasonable price and amazing service for a *very* custom job. I couldn't be happier.