ELECTRIC GUITAR
01 Change Your Tone Without Changing Your Guitars
Our desire to change our sound often becomes an excuse to buy a new guitar. But how about revamping your existing guitar’s sound with a new pickup? There’s a vast range available, allowing you to make dramatic tonal changes without routing your guitar’s body or replacing your pickguard. Want to swap your humbucker for the punchier cut of a P-90? Try a humbucker-sized P-90. Want the opposite? Check the offerings of Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, Fralin and others. There are single-coil-size humbuckers for players who want more meat, and coil-splitting mods to deliver more diversity.
02 Check Under Your Pickguard
Just because your guitar is factory-fitted with a single-coil pickup doesn’t mean that’s all it can take. Look under your Strat- or Tele-style guitar’s pickguard — it may be pre-routed to accommodate a humbucker. If so, modding your guitar will be as simple as adding a new pickguard to fit the new pickup. Hold onto your old parts so you can easily put the guitar back to its original spec if you ever decide to sell it.
03 Stratocaster Tone Mod
If your Strat features the classic tone control wiring, you might find it frustrating that your tone pot doesn’t affect your bridge pickup. There’s an easy (and free) way to remedy this. Better still, it’s nonpermanent, so you can always restore the original control setup if you want to sell your guitar.
With the pickguard removed, you’ll be able to see the back of your pickup selector switch. This will have three wires going to your two tone pots and your volume pot. Simply desolder the wire in the middle and move it to the empty tag next to it. Alternatively, if you want