My guitars, my friends' guitars, guitars that have been in the shop a long time. It happens to them all, and no sooner have you screwed it tight again, then it begins to work it's way loose. You keep doing it, and then eventually the guitar stops working.

What happens - After repeatedly tightening the outside nut up, the wire inside becomes twisted and under stress, so eventually one of the wires attached to the socket comes off and you're left with a dead guitar. As many guitarists don't have much electronics knowledge, (they just wanna play, man!) they don't know what to do, but it's really simple to fix, and it's really simple to prevent.

When you buy a new electric guitar, the first thing you should do, is stop that socket moving. Take the whole thing off by removing the mounting plate. You'll see that the socket is sandwiched on either side by a nut to hold it in place. Make sure the inner nut is tight then stop it moving permanently with a dab of glue, varnish or something else suitable to lock it in place.

You can do this on the external nut as well if you like, although most people prefer to leave the exterior alone without the ugly blob showing.

If the guitar is dead, this is just the first part of the process. It's likely that one of the signal wires, as mentioned previously, has come off the back of the socket.

I borrowed a friend's guitar recently, and he advised me there was an electrical glitch with it, and was there anything I could do? Nothing on the guitar worked, and there was absolutely no sound coming out of it, so naturally he was really worried about it. My first thought was, one of the signal wires is broken, I'll check the jack socket, and after removing the plate, that's exactly what it was.

All I had to do was strip back the wire, re-attach it with a little solder, and tighten and treat the nuts as described. Put it all back together, and lo and behold, it works beautifully.