Rather than spending a cool grand or two on a new Custom Shop or topline American Stratocaster, many guitarists opt to find a solid Mexican or Japanese Fender Strat and trick it out. Often my clients ask me how they can upgrade one of these instruments to make it gig-worthy. There are several ways to customize a budget Strat without spending a fortune. Replacing key components—such as the pickups, string nut, and tuners—can turn a workhorse guitar into a killer axe!
The Project
To illustrate this process, we'll use a 2004 Fender Mexican (MIM) Strat. When it landed on my bench, it was in great structural condition, but I knew some mods and a good setup could make it a pro-level instrument.
My first step was to sonically evaluate the guitar. Though it played well, it didn't have a lot of sustain and the stock tuners tended to drift out of tune. The single-coil pickups sounded weak and too bright, and I decided to begin the transformation by upgrading them.
Install new pickups.
The owner wanted to stick to a traditional single-coil configuration. There are dozens of great options made by independent pickup makers, as well as excellent upgrades from Fender. Based on feedback from other clients, I chose a set of Seymour Duncan Five-Two single-coils, which employ a combination of alnico 2 and alnico 5 magnets. The three treble pole pieces are made from alnico 2, which produces a warmer sound. This reduces that "ice-pick-in-the-ear" tone when you play a solo. Conversely, the three bass pole pieces are alnico 5, a magnet known for producing a bright, clear tone. This is perfect for adding clarity to rhythm parts and chord voicings. Duncan Five-Twos sound louder than traditional Strat pickups, but when adjusted properly, they offer excellent tone and balance.
Whenever I replace a trio of single-coil Strat pickups, I use a reverse-wound/reverse-polarity (RW/RP) middle pickup. In position 2 or 4 (the combined neck/middle and middle/bridge settings) of a 5-way switch, the paired pickups become humbuckers. The benefit? You cancel the 60-cycle hum that plagues single-coils, but still get that traditional Strat tone we all love.
Adjust pickup height.
Fig. 1: Measuring the gap between the pole piece and the 6th string on a Strat.
This is commonly overlooked during a setup. It's important to set the pickups at the right distance from the strings. If the pickups are adjusted too close, you can lose sustain and run into intonation problems because the magnets are pulling on the vibrating strings. But if the pickups are too low, you'll end up with a weak signal.
To adjust the pickups, I fret the 1st and 6th strings at the last fret. Then, using a 6" metal machinist ruler, I measure the gap between the top of the pole pieces to the bottom of the 1st and 6th strings (Fig. 1) Carefully turning the screws on either side of the pickup lets me raise or lower its height to my preferred measurements:
- Bridge pickup: 2/64" 1st string, 3/64" 6th string
- Middle pickup: 3/64" 1st string, 4/64" 6th string
- Neck pickup: 3/64" 1st string, 4/64" 6th string
These measurements are starting points, but I wouldn't recommend adjusting Strat pickups any higher. If a pickup is too loud relative to its mates, lower it to balance its volume. Don't bring the quieter ones closer to the strings.
Upgrade the tuners.
Fig. 2: Replacing vintage-style tuners with a set that has a higher turning ratio, like these 16:1 keys, can make it easier to tune a string quickly and accurately.
Upgrading your guitar's tuning keys requires some research. There are many excellent brands available that will retrofit a Strat, and it's important to explore all the options before you drop cash on a set that doesn't fit.
In the case of our Fender MIM Strat, I had to find a quality set that would retrofit the existing holes in the neck. The owner and I decided to use sealed Gotoh keys with a 16:1 turning ratio (Fig. 2) This ratio determines how many times you have to completely turn the button in order for the post to make one full revolution. The higher the ratio (i.e., 16:1, 18:1), the finer the tuning. Most vintage keys have a 12:1 or 14:1 turning ratio. Keys with lower turning ratios can make it frustrating to tune a string because it's so easy to jump past the desired pitch as you approach it.
Replace the string nut.
Fig. 3: The string nut plays an important role in a guitar's sound and performance. Most guitars sport a stock plastic nut, and replacing it with a bone nut can yield sonic benefits and improve tuning stability.
Believe it or not, the nut material makes a noticeable sonic difference. Most guitars come from the factory with a plastic string nut (Fig. 3) Plastic is easy (and cheap) to install, but it insulates the guitar from string vibration and thus negatively impacts tone and sustain.
Other materials I've seen used are graphite, bone, ivory, brass, and aluminum. Each has specific tonal properties and varying sustain, and based on years of working with guitars, here's my take on these materials: Graphite is great for keeping your guitar in tune (especially if you use a tremolo) because strings slide easily through the nut slots, but it sounds rather dead. Bone has excellent sustain and broadens the dynamic range of virtually any guitar. Ivory has good sustain and produces a warmer tone. (Of course, there are serious conservation and even legal issues surrounding the use of ivory, but that's beyond the scope of this column.) Brass and aluminum produce a bright tone but have little sustain.
Bone is always a good choice for string nuts—it's very hard, it lasts longer than plastic and graphite, and produces a sweeter tone than metal.
For this project, we decided to carve a new string nut from bone. Bone is always a good choice for string nuts—it's very hard, it lasts longer than plastic and graphite, and produces a sweeter tone than metal. You can buy pre-slotted string nuts, but I find the spacing is never quite right. I prefer to use a "Stratcut" bone blank from Allparts or Stewart-MacDonald.
Caution! When replacing a string nut, be aware that they're often glued into the nut slot from the bottom or they may be lacquered in. You want to avoid damaging the end of the fretboard facing the tuning keys when removing the nut. If you're not sure how to safely remove a nut, take your guitar to a qualified repair tech or luthier.
Carve a bone nut.
Fig. 4: Carving a new nut is an art. You need to consider string spacing, slot width and depth, and the string angle over the headstock.
Carving a string nut requires skill and patience (Fig. 4) One cut too far and you'll have to start all over again with a new nut blank. If you don't have the proper experience, training, and tools, turn this part of the project over to someone who does.
Fig. 5: The saying "measure twice, cut once" certainly applies to getting the correct string spacing on a new nut.
To see photos and read a detailed explanation of the process I use to cut a bone nut and what tools are required, read the March 2012 feature "How to Convert Your Axe to a Baritone."
Fig. 6: A nut slot needs to angle down toward the tuner, and its highest point must be right at the leading edge where the nut meets the fretboard.
Step 4 in that article explains how to carve a nut, measure string spacing (Fig. 5), and cut the string slots (Fig. 6).
Consider your moves before you make them.
Fig. 7: Gig worthy! Tricked out with 16:1 tuners, a new bone nut, and a rockin' set of replacement pickups, this imported Strat is now ready for prime time.
When upgrading the parts on your guitar, always buy quality hardware that can be installed without any major modification to your instrument. In other words, if you have to route out the body or drill new holes, it's best not to do it. The more holes, routing, or finish work you do, the less your instrument is worth. Keep the upgrades clean, simple, and reversible.
[Updated 10/13/21]
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One of Summers’ still-ongoing projects is a multimedia show entitled “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” which he started touring before the pandemic.
Summers, who rose to fame in the late 1970s as one third of the new-wave phenomenon the Police, told many stories and landed many punchlines. There was the episode in which he and John Belushi partook of psychedelics in Bali, and the time he got kind of hustled by a striking, guitar-playing Long Neck Karen villager in Thailand. He recounted a gut-busting tale of taking a few too many sleeping pills on a trip to South America. With perfectly British dryness and timing, he improvised an aside about living near Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles, and how he just had to kick the Terminator’s ass.
Out of the Shadows
“I think it’s turning into a standup routine, basically,” Summers said recently over Zoom. He was being self-effacing. Mostly, this one-man multimedia show, entitled “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” allows Summers to reflect on enduring passions with sincerity, by “integrating these two media I’ve been working on for so long”: music, of course, and art photography, where his work combines painterly composition with street-level intimacy and the global-citizen mission of Nat Geo.
Behind projections of his photos, and between the storytelling and odd video clip, he gave a two-hour recital of solo guitar music. Summers played a new yellow Powers Electric A-Type guitar, and began his show by telling his audience how thrilled he was with it. (Summers has accrued around 200 guitars, many of them given to him, and maintains that he’s “definitely a player,” not a collector.)
Summers spent a significant part of his 20s studying classical music, originally inspired by Julian Bream. Now, onstage in his one-man show, it's clearly time to reflect on his past.
Summers began touring “The Cracked Lens” before the pandemic—the final show prior to shutdown took place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in 2019—and picked it up last year. It’s evolved, he says, through improvisation and trial and error, following a process much like one he’d put into motion for any band or project.
In D.C., the setlist was both surprising and deeply satisfying. Newer solo music like “Metal Dog” came off as delightfully arch and abstract, a reminder that Summers hit the Billboard albums chart with Robert Fripp, with 1982’s I Advance Masked. A sterling chord-melody arrangement of Thelonious Monk’s “’Round Midnight” spoke to the lifelong impact American jazz has had on the guitarist. A winsome mini-set of bossa nova, including “Manhã de Carnaval,” Luiz Bonfá’s theme to the film Black Orpheus, illustrated Summers’ devotion to both the cinema and the music of Brazil.
And yes, there was Police material, too, which Summers reharmonized and rearranged and used as vessels for longform improvisation. Atop programmed backing tracks, he treated songs like “Tea in the Sahara,” “Roxanne,” “Spirits in the Material World,” and “Message in a Bottle” as if they were his beloved jazz standards, drawing agile lines in and around the harmony, using pop hits as a launch pad for wending single-note narratives. In a small theater, it felt as if you were eavesdropping on Summers, whiling away an afternoon in his home studio. An excitable woman behind me couldn’t help but try and banter with him as he stalked the stage; the guy to my right played air drums. This was thrilling—especially if you were a Police fan whose context for these songs was sold-out arenas.
A New Installment
To combine music and imagery was also the impetus for Vertiginous Canyons, Summers’ recent solo EP. Commissioned as an accent to the guitarist’s fifth photo book, A Series of Glances, the project features eight spontaneously composed instrumental pieces of pop-song length. Its sparkling, layered, and looped soundscapes serve as Zen-like mood music for viewing the photographs. By design, Summers improvised Vertiginous Canyons in a single afternoon without too much fuss, using mostly his early ’60s Strat. “This was drone-like, ambient, atmosphere stuff that I thought was enough,” Summers explains. “Because I suppose you could get into a place, let’s say, where the photography and the music are fighting each other.
“One of the cardinal rules of scoring films, which I’ve done many,” he adds, “is don’t get in the way of the movie.”
On Vertiginous Canyons, listeners will hear influences from Eno to Hendrix to Bill Frisell.
As with Summers’ solo show, the music can stand alone. In many ways, Vertiginous Canyons also comes off like Eno or classical minimalism or the edgiest strain of what can be called “new age”—an engaging yet accessible entryway to experimental music. And as with any effective musical abstraction, what you’ve heard in your life is what you’ll hear in Vertiginous Canyons. The twinkling, fluttering phrases of “Blossom” bring to mind Bill Frisell. “Translucent” and “Village” summon up Glenn Branca’s guitar armies in their quietest moments, ramping up toward euphoria. “Blur” is a far-out exercise in Hendrix-style backwards soloing; “Into the Blue” is Pink Floyd meets Popol Vuh.
Greatly moved by Julian Bream as a young man, Summers spent a sizable chunk of his 20s immersed in classical guitar in California, as hard rock and the singer-songwriters ascended. When I ask him if those studies informed Vertiginous Canyons, his response is rapid-fire. “Definitely. I mean, I spent years doing nothing but classical music, classical guitar,” he says. “It’s very important information that I took in … and it stayed with me the rest of my life.
“So my ears are wide open.... I’m a sophisticated harmonic player, and it’s also informed by classical music. I’m sort of all-’round educated in the ways you can do music.”
Summer Reflections
To let an artist’s age guide your judgment of them is unfair. But in Summers’ case, it’s essential to understanding how and why he became such a fascinating guitarist, one whose whip-smart, cross-cultural approach overhauled the prevailing notion of what rock-guitar heroics could be in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
He was born on the last day of 1942, “a kid from the English countryside,” he says. His father was in the Royal Air Force; his mother supported the war effort working in a bomb factory. Alongside Django Reinhardt, he’s on the short list of guitar idols who spent their earliest days in a Romani caravan, which his father bought in the face of a housing shortage. In terms of rock generations, think about it: Jimi Hendrix was born in November of ’42, Keith Richards in ’43, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in ’44, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton in ’45. Summers debuted the cinematic, reggae-soaked sound that made him famous on the Police’s Outlandos d’Amour, in 1978, as the punk explosion gave way to post-punk and new wave. But his contemporaries are the British bluesmen who were architects of the psychedelic era and won over the baby boomers.
Andy Summers' Gear
When Summers, pictured here performing with the Police in 1982, began developing his blues chops, he blended in complex chords and jazz phrasing.
Photo by Frank White
Guitars
For touring:
- Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster
- Powers Electric A-Type
Amps
- Fender Twin with Fender Special Design Speakers
- Fractal Axe-Fx III
- Bob Bradshaw 100-watt head
- Roland JC-120
- Various Mesa/Boogie heads, cabinets and power amps
Effects
Current Pedaltrain pedalboard includes these effects, among many others:
- TC Electronic SCF Gold
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- DigiTech Whammy
- Klon Centaur
- TC Electronic Brainwaves
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Electro-Harmonix Freeze
- Paul Trombetta Design Rotobone
- TC Electronic Dark Matter
- Mad Professor Golden Cello
Picks & Strings
- Dunlop Andy Summers Custom 2.0 mm Picks
- D’Addario Strings, mostly .010–.046
The electric-blues revivalism that his peers favored was a scene with which Summers engaged mostly by circumstance. In some capacity he was immersed in it, gigging and recording with hot R&B acts of Swinging Sixties London. But as a developing guitarist, he also transcended its stylistic boundaries, and he ultimately missed out on the wildly lucrative parts of it, after it’d evolved from nightclub entertainment to chart-topping, festival-headlining pop.
“[We’re talking about] real modern electric-guitar history,” Summers says, “because I was really pretty close with Clapton. We all knew each other. There were about five or six of us, and we all played at one club [the Flamingo, in London].
“I watched Eric develop, and he had this mission to play the blues … and he ripped off some great blues solos,” Summers adds, with a mischievous chuckle. “I had grown up with different kinds of music in those formative [teenage] years, when you’re taking it all in and trying to be able to do it.”
So much has been written about how the ’60s British-guitar titans tapped into early rock ’n’ roll influences and Chicago blues, rescuing the latter from obscurity in its country of origin. But it’s important to remember the profound impact that midcentury modern jazz had on culturally curious young Brits; in fact, the moniker “mods”—that clothes-obsessed cult that gave us the Who—began as “modernists,” as in devotees of modern jazz, R&B, soul, and ska.
Before meeting Sting (left) and forming the Police, Andy Summers (right) was close friends with Eric Clapton and once jammed with Jimi Hendrix.
Photo by Ebet Roberts
Summers was hooked. Guitarists Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Raney, Kenny Burrell and Grant Green ranked among his favorites, alongside Sonny Rollins. Rather than sticking to 12-bar patterns, Summers shedded on complex chord sequences and jazz phrasing, logging “thousands of hours of listening, trying to get it. But that’s where the feel of the time comes from, which is the most important element.”
“Eric and I talked about it,” he continues, “and I was in a different place. I don’t think we really had arguments about it, but he was absolutely a disciple of the blues, where I was more into other things.” Summers loved the fleet, chromatic lines of bop, and classical guitar, and African and Indian music. He recalls transcribing Ravi Shankar.
“So I felt like I very much had my own path, and it wasn’t the Eric Clapton path. I was aware of all that, but Eric was deeply into B.B. King — gave me his B.B. King record, actually—Live at the Regal, told me to check it out. So I did listen to it, and yeah, okay, I get it. But my head was elsewhere.” (During that period, Summers also sold Clapton a ’58 Les Paul, after Slowhand’s 1960 model was stolen. “It was guitar craziness,” Summers says. “I really anguished over selling my Les Paul, but I just wasn’t into it. I think there was something wrong with the pickup—at least I thought there was, in my sort of naivety at that time.”)
Nor was Summers’ path the Hendrix path. Because of his friendship with the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s drummer Mitch Mitchell, Summers once jammed in the late ’60s with Jimi. “A quiet guy with a very loud guitar. And he could play the shit out of the guitar,” Summers laughs. “He was definitely sort of a force of nature. You’d feel it.” At an L.A. studio where the Jimi Hendrix Experience was in session, Summers began playing with Mitchell on a break. But “Jimi just couldn’t stay away from the music,” Summers recalls. So Hendrix picked up a bass to anchor Summers’ guitar, until Jimi asked to trade.
“I think of it almost as a sort of a comic moment,” Summers reflects today. “Jimi had come into the scene and … didn’t really play like anyone else. I mean, he played Jimi Hendrix … incredible, but I didn’t really want to play like that. I’ve got to find my own thing. It was very imperative to me not to be yet another Hendrix copier. And I think it’s what he would have appreciated, too.”
Although the first album by the Police was released in late 1978, Summers already had an extensive catalog of recordings with Eric Burdon, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, and Joan Armatrading before “Roxanne” alerted the world that a new kind of pop group was arriving.
To hear Summers on pre-Police recordings is intriguing; even on straightforward forms, his good taste and sense of harmony present a shrewd, knowing alternative to his peers. Seek out the 1965 LP It Should’ve Been Me, by Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band: On a take of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” Summers applies the single-note harmonic finesse of Grant Green to barroom British R&B. (It was Green’s Gibson ES-330, a surprising instrument for a jazz picker at the time, that inspired Summers to pick up an ES-335 after his ES-175 was stolen.) A few years later, as part of Eric Burdon’s New Animals, Summers covered Traffic’s “Coloured Rain,” going long on a fuzztone solo that fits the psychedelic bill while also telling a story with precision and patience.
Summers’ ship came in nearly a decade later, after he’d returned to England from California and met drummer Stewart Copeland and a singer and bass player, Gordon Sumner, who went by “Sting.” They were bright, dexterous, and culturally well-versed, with backgrounds in prog and jazz. “I think we had a credo,” Summers says, “and it was spoken out loud: We don’t want to sound like anybody else.
“I found I could talk to Sting and say, ‘I want to play this kind of altered chord here. What do you think?’ He could sing right through anything. He had the ears to be able to sing it like a jazz singer. Not that we were trying to lay ‘We’re really jazzers’ on the public. We were trying to present ourselves as a rock band with songs. But the information that we were putting into those rock-song arrangements was different.”
Summers in a late ’80s promo photo, near the start of his solo-recording career.
For Summers, that meant matching the musicianship he’d started earning as a teenager on jazz bandstands with the au courant sounds of post-punk and reggae, filtered through emergent sonic technology. With his heavily modded 1961 Tele and custom Pete Cornish pedalboard, he offered chord sequences and lines that have challenged and educated generations of practicing guitarists brought up on blues-rock technique. Alongside his deft use of open space, he was that rarest rock guitarist who paid serious mind to chord voicings. “My job was to turn the chords into something more unusual,” Summers says, “to have more unusual guitar parts. For instance, something like ‘Walking on the Moon,’ I put in a Dm11 chord, with reverb and a beautiful chorus sound. So it’s got the 11th on top, and immediately it grasps your ear. It’s like the signature of the song was that chord.”
“So my ears are wide open.... I’m a sophisticated harmonic player, and it’s also informed by classical music. I’m sort of all-’round educated in the ways you can do music.”
Of course, no other Summers guitar part or Police song made bigger waves than 1983’s “Every Breath You Take.” Influenced by Bartók’s “44 Duos for Two Violins,” Summers crafted a repeating figure that underlined Sting’s standard pop-song structure while avoiding conventional triadic harmony. (Losing the third from tired rock chords was Summers’ not-so-secret weapon.) “It gave it that haunting quality that made the whole track come to life,” Summers says, “because otherwise, I think we would have dumped the song. It wasn’t one of our favorites at all.”
The Police last performed on their historic reunion tour of 2007 to ’08, and their relationship today is mostly business. “We’re not hanging out with each other,” Summers says. “We’re all in touch through headquarters.” One thing they’ve had to agree on this year is a Super Deluxe reissue, toasting the 40th anniversary of the Synchronicity album, which provides new context that might safely be called revelatory. Among the new box set’s many previously unreleased goodies is Sting’s original demo for “Every Breath You Take,” weighed down with synth keyboards that pile on the sentimentality and pin the track squarely to the 1980s. (Unlike so much ’80s pop-rock, the Police’s music has aged well.) “You can see the transformation,” says Summers.
“Every Breath You Take” became a global smash that ranks among pop’s most successful songs, a feather in the cap of the band that owned the late ’70s and ’80s. Consider this: At a time when his psych-era peers were considered middle-aged Flower Power relics, Summers was leaping around onstage like a bleached-blond atom and representing pop rock’s bleeding edge on MTV. Now, at 81, he’s found a way to forge ahead and, in some fashion, improve on the past.
Call The Police (Andy Summers / João Barone / Rodrigo Santos) - Synchronicity II (ensaio/rehearsal)
With bandmates João Barone and Rodrigo Santos, of Police tribute band Call the Police, Summers displays the adept riffage that brought him to the big stages and helped solidify his rock legacy.
Leveling Up
When we connect on a followup call in mid July, Summers is in Brazil, about to embark on a South American tour with his trio, Call the Police. This tribute project of a sort features two celebrated Brazilian rockers, bassist-vocalist Rodrigo Santos and drummer João Barone, and plays hits-filled live sets to packed houses. “It’s sort of enhanced, because it gets looser. It’s a bit uptight with those other guys I play with,” says Summers.
With regard to those other guys, that uptightness had much to do with the punk and new-wave era that bore the Police. The relationship between punk and the band was complicated. Somehow, they managed to use the movement’s greatest lessons—in energy, creative bravery, and concise songcraft—without pandering to its musical primitivism. Summers’ reputation amongst guitarists rested in the minimalist intelligence of his decision-making; you kind of understood he could play anything, but he was mature enough not to. “I didn’t feel the need to crush everybody with every guitar part,” he says.
“It was more like a guitar solo is supposed to be a mark of the old guard. You weren’t supposed to be able to play; it was really that dumb.”
Nevertheless, he believes that punk’s principle of non-musicianship kept him from exploring the songs to their fullest. “I think I should have played more solos than I was given the space to do,” he says. “It pisses me off actually, because this came more from Stewart. When we started the band in the thick of the hardcore-punk scene, it was more like a guitar solo is supposed to be a mark of the old guard. You weren’t supposed to be able to play; it was really that dumb.”
“I was a virtuoso player,” he adds, “so it was very frustrating for me. Later, when we did sort of open it up, it really got more exciting. The fact that I could play as well as I did, I found it was a bit threatening. Because the highlight in a performance of a song … would be the guitar solo.”
As in “The Cracked Lens + A Missing String,” Summers can stretch out in Call the Police to his heart’s content. At long last. “It’s very improvised,” he says, “and they’re up to the level where they can do that. They go with me. It’s how it should always have been.”
Electro-Harmonix’s Pico Rerun plays the character of tape echo very convincingly in this respect. It hangs with more expensive digital tape echoes at a $137 price tag that’s easy to stomach. Better still, this Pico version is petite and offers unexpected surprises and flexibility.
Beyond the Pico Rerun’s essential enveloping voice, the pedal enables a lot of fairly authentic tape-echo functionality. Manipulating the feedback, blend, and echo rate controls together (which is tricky given their small size) yields flying-saucer liftoff and “Dazed and Confused” time/space-mangling textures in copious measure. These tweaks betray some digital artifacts—mainly trebly peaks that don’t have the benefit of real tape-compression softening, but they hardly get in the way of the fun. Saturation lends welcome drive and haze. And the flutter button adds faux tape wobble in three degrees of intensity. At the most intense setting, long repeats take on a woozy sense of drift. At the fastest rates, however, the flutter function will generate chorus and flange effects that neither my Echoplex, nor my best tape echo simulators, can manufacture.
