We asked our readers to get their mods out. Here are some of the coolest.
SHANE KELLY: STEAMPUNK STRADIVARIUS
When Shane Kelly grabbed this mid-2010s Dean Cadillac X at a pawnshop for $100, he saw it as something more. After some routing, the removal of a black finish, and the raiding of a local hardware store, it’s now a steampunk tone machine. He notes: “While the hardware”—all for show—“definitely adds weight, it is balanced out by the removal of wood, so it weighs about the same as a standard Les Paul.” How’s it sound? Kelly says it’s killer!
Check out the tube-driven headstock and gauges. We don’t think this is what ZZ Top meant when they wrote “Got Me Under Pressure,” but….
CARY CUMMINGS: SKULLDUGGERY
When Cary Cummings dreamt of jamming with Steve Vai in Pompeii (Was that during or post-lava, Cary?), this guitar was in his hands. So, he brought it to life. His “Skull Top” was originally a made-in-Mexico arctic-white Fender Standard Tele. He refinished the top, leaving the sides and back white, and added a Warmoth T-style neck, and Gotoh Tuners. Cummings also painted the neck dots and headstock to match the blue top. The original bridge was replaced with three Wilkinson-compensated brass saddles, and he added a Bigsby B50 vibrato. Electronics were swapped with a Sprague orange drop tone cap, a Seymour Duncan Jerry Donahue Lead Tele bridge pickup, and a Gibson Burstbucker Pro in the neck. Now it’s ready for Día de los Muertos.
JOHN HEINZ: GILDED GUILD
This alien was born as a Guild X-79 with a red finish that John Heinz scored at a guitar show—minus hardware and kinda trashed—for $35. He stripped and repainted it with auto lacquer: lapis-pearl blue over a black shade with color-change flakes. The original stop tailpiece got bumped for a Kahler trem, and Heinz installed an EMG and a Kent Armstrong pickup along with Grover tuners. He also carved a comfort cut into the back and made the aluminum pickguard. “It played and sounded great, but I found it a little uncomfortable to play, with the very long top horn,” he says. So, now this space critter may be in a galaxy far, far away. Heinz swapped it, along with some cash, for a Gibson Les Paul BFG.
LUIS MARCELO FERNÁNDEZ SEOANE: A HIGHLY PERSONALIZED STRAT
Here’s a partscaster that’s, well, the sum of its parts, if not more. The neck and body are from Fender.com, but the rest of his guitar is highly subjective. Luis Marcelo Fernández Seoane was seeking many switching options for its Fender Jeff Beck Hot Noiseless pickups. Check the pickguard and you’ll see an add-neck switch, a series/parallel switch, a blower switch, a middle tone control wired for the neck and middle pickups, and a bottom tone control for the bridge pickup. The blower switch is wired so he can choose the combination of pickups going straight to the output jack. “For not much more than a stock model, and much less than a Custom Shop offering, I got the Strat I always wanted,” Seoane says. His hotrod also includes a two-point Strat trem ordered with six vintage saddles and Schaller locking tuners. Plus, he steel-wooled the back of the neck for a more organic playing feel. The output is a Pure Tone stereo jack. Why? “I prefer the Pure Tone TRS-style jack, because even though I’m only using the tip and the sleeve, the unconnected ring provides an added measure of security,“ Seoane adds.
TATE FERGUSON: SIMPLY ELEGANT
Here’s an S-style created after Covid ended Tate Ferguson’s gigs for a spell. Starting with a Muslady kit he bought on eBay for $76 including shipping, he did a little sanding, so the neck and body fit together well, and the bridge and tuners that came with the kit did the trick. He finished the body and the back of the neck with a few coats of Tru-Oil gunstock finish. Then things got real. The string slots on the kit’s plastic nut were too narrowly spaced, so Ferguson installed a nut he made from a dog-chew cattle bone he’d bought at a pet shop. “There’s enough bone for a dozen nuts on one of those,” he notes. “I’ve made guitar and mando nuts from scratch now and then, using the StewMac nut files I bought many years ago.” He also made the lovely pickguard from faux abalone, sourced via Amazon, and attached it with Velcro, and installed a Guitar Madness Songbird (Firebird-style) pickup. “The tone knob is a Fender no-load pot, and the knobs come from a long-defunct 1980s MXR limiter pedal,” adds the impressive recycler. Plus, the 3-spring whammy holds its tuning well. “I’ve been messing around with solidbody electric guitars since 1969, and I’m starting to get better at it,” Ferguson says, modestly.
NIKOLAS SIMON: BACK TO THE FUTURE
“In a world full of mods, I decided to bring my 1961 Gibson Melody Maker back to original spec,” says Nikolas Simon. So out went the Seymour Duncan Hot Stack Tele pickup. (That pickup’s base was shaved to fit in the original cavity without routing, and there was a push-pull pot for single-coil tone.) “I had a set of original early ’60s pots that were still wired from the factory, and sourced a 1964 pickup to complete the ‘mod’ for this versatile guitar,” Simon says.
SCOTT HASKITT: SWITCHED UP
Scott Haskitt “absolutely fell in love with this guitar” when he got it, but also loves the idea of bridge and neck pickups with the same amount of highs.
After a few different pickups sets, he found a solution: installing a new tone cap and a bridge-resistor toggle on this Novo Miris T 2021. He also swapped in a Bliss humbucker (soapbar) and a T-Bar Bridge (with P-90 characteristics) by McNelly Pickups. “The DPDT on/on switch is wired to toggle between the bridge pickup with a 500k pot (up) and a 47k resistor in the circuit (down), so it sounds more equal to the neck pickup.”
The neck pickup does not ever connect to the resistor. When the resistor is not engaged (up), the whole circuit uses the Novo stock .022 tone capacitor, and when the resistor is engaged (down), the whole circuit uses a 0.0015 capacitor, for completely different and more usable sounds with the tone pot rolled all the way off. The Novo uses 500k for both volume and tone pots.
KRISTOFFER HAGEN: THE “PG’S FAULT” MOD
Kristoffer Hagen says, “I fell deep in a rabbit hole of Premier Guitar mod articles.” In particular, “Bass Bench: Cheap and Easy Bass Mods,” from 2012, and “Three Must-Try Guitar Wiring Mods,” from 2014, inspired his project. It started with a B-stock Warwick RockBass that played well, but its active electronics didn’t provide the tones Hagen wanted. “The finish concept was stolen from a YouTube video,” he relates. “The color was supposed to be dark blue but turned out a little green. I settled on Nordstrand pickups because they looked unique.” The “Bass Bench” article fueled his idea for a series/parallel switch. And in the wiring article, he discovered the Stellartone ToneStyler rotary cap switch. “Those pickups and wiring turned an uninteresting bass into a complete monster,” he attests. In the photo for Hagen’s mod project, you’ll see: 1) the original bass, 2) the striped wood grain, 3) the routing for soapbar pickups, 4) the “dark blue” staining, 5) the silver finishing wax to fill the grain, 6) the surface wax, 7) the new passive electronics, and 8) the Nordstrand Big Single pickups in place along with a black bridge.
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Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Pedal
The Maxon OD-9 Overdrive Effects Pedal may look like your old favorite but that's where the similarity ends. Improved circuitry with a new chip yields the ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive guitarists crave. Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume while the Hi-Boost/Hi-Cut tone controls adjust brightness. Features true bypass switching, a die-cast zinc case, and 3-year warranty. From subtle cries to shattering screams, the Maxon OD-9 delivers a huge range of tones.
Features
Improved circuitry with a new chip yields ultra-smooth dynamic overdrive
Drive and Level controls tweak the intensity and volume
Hi Boost/Hi Cut tone controls adjust brightness
True bypass switching
Die-cast zinc case
AC/DC operation (order optional Maxon AC210N adapter)
Product Specs
Input: 1/4" mono jack
Output: 1/4" mono jack
Power: 9V DC, 6 mA, center pin minus (not included)
Dimensions: (WxDxH) 74 mm x 124 mm x 54 mm
Weight: 580g
Fender’s Greasebucket system is part of Cory Wong’s sonic strategy.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!