admin wrote:Many a musician over the years has gone out on the limb and experimented with the look or functionality of their instruments. Following the Beatles history closely revelaed that they were no exception to this practice. This, to my way of thinking, falls within the limits of "it seemed like a good idea at the time." You can't make this stuff up. We have the photos to prove it.
Indeed. I still have my $56.95 Sears & Roebuck guitar my folks bought me in April, 1975, having done more experiments on it than most people ever think about, again, for all the reasons: remedy a manufacturing defect, curiosity to see what a mod would sound or look like, and upgrade deficient components. Not all of them I did myself (like the fretwork), but most of it I did myself. I still have the guitar; it is actually gigable; and it doesn't look from a distance too far off from what it looked like new. Yes, I spent more than buying a guitar with the features I changed, but who cares? I didn't do them all at once, more like over a couple of decades, even though I had the ideas even as a teenager, from seeing what the Beatles and others did to their instruments, and reading about mods in Guitar Player magazine. I'm done modding this guitar; I have done all that can be done without compromising the structural integrity of the instrument. Regarding mods generally, remember, this was the '70's: DiMarzio pickups were new. Mighty Mite pickups and guitar parts, including brass bridges, were new (necks came soon thereafter); Seymour Duncan went from rewinding pickups for the stars at Fender London Soundhouse to starting his own company; BadAss bridges were new, everyone was replacing Klusons with Grovers, and so on. Attached is a picture of a guitar of the same year, make and model to show what my guitar would have looked like new, but for the missing whammy handle, and a picture of my guitar today. Changes: tuners were installed upside down at the factory, so I disassembled them and remounted the plate to get the worms and posts in the correct orientation; changed headstock string bar for string trees; refretted from wearing the frets out; mini humbucker pickups routed and mounted; switches rebuilt from wearing out after re-soldering them in every pickup wiring configuration I could experiment with: series, parallel, phase, etc.; ditched the whammy for a Guild tailpiece for ease of string changes, tuning stability, and balancing the insanely light body (and which by lucky accident bolted exactly into the slots in the plate where the whammy mechanism was attached); added 22nd fret; replaced the bar bridge with a Tune-o-Matic bridge after a couple of different other experiments with bridges; rewired the pots with 1 meg resistors over the 500k pots to bring the value down to @ 330k to take the icepick edge off, changed the tone capacitor from .022 to .033. I learned an immense amount on how electric guitars work, without screwing up something really expensive, and as a result, today, I have my gig box full of tools and parts so when a bandmate's instrument takes a **** I can fix it during break and keep the gig going, which I have done many, many times. And as you all have seen from my posts in other threads, I continue to upgrade, refine and fine tune all my instruments, including my Rickenbackers, including switching mods for 3-pickup guitars, cutting a new saddle for the low E string pair on a 12-string with a 6-saddle bridge for better intonation; custom bushings for the slot tuners of a 12-string; unwinding or having rewound pickups; re-routing the pickup slots to adjust the placement of the pickups on my 21-inch scale 320 so the bridge pickup is closer to the bridge as it is on the original 20 3/4-inch scale instruments, etc.
then:
now:
by (4001G63) » Sat Jan 25, 2020 7:26 pm 
