Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. This month, we will start our custom-shop experiment with a very cheap electric guitar and see how far we can push it, customizing each and every little detail to see if the wood is really important regarding the amplified tone of an electric guitar.
Basically, we will be putting high-quality parts into an extremely cheap guitar to see what will happen. The idea behind it is very simple: If the wood plays a major role in the amplified tone of an electric guitar, our cheap guinea pig can’t sound any good, no matter what we do. However, if it’s really all about the pickups, electronics, internal wires, guitar cable, strings, and, of course, the individual playing style, the cheap guitar has the potential to sound fantastic. (Another interesting experiment would be to put cheap pickups, electronics, wires, etcetera, into a high-end custom shop electric guitar, and see what happens!)
“This is the perfect guinea pig for our experiment because it sports a lot of features that are considered ‘bad’ for the tone of a guitar.”
You may remember the thesis from the last issue: The more solid an electric guitar is built, the less influence its primary structure has on the amplified tone. So to get this challenge started, I decided to use a Telecaster-style guitar, thanks to its very solid construction. I got a Harley Benton TE-62CC model from Thomann for $148 including shipping. It was delivered in a nice vintage seafoam green color. That’s a complete guitar for less than the price of a good pickup set, so what can we expect from it? It was important for me that the guitar wasn’t pre-selected, so I asked for a randomly picked instrument out of the pile, with the stipulation to not open the box and send it directly to someone else rather than to me so you can be sure I had no chance to do any work on this guitar. A big shout-out to Benedikt from Harley Benton to make all this happen.
The guitar was shipped directly to my friend and colleague Haiko Heinz, who is not only a professional guitarist and teacher but also a renowned gear tester and columnist for the German online mag Bonedo. Haiko runs his own gear-review channel and has made countless gear-testing videos, so you can be sure that over the years he’s had his hands on virtually everything with 6 strings. I asked Haiko if he would make a “before video” of the guitar and he agreed; you can watch Haiko playing the guitar here. (After my work is done, I will ship the guitar back to Haiko and he will make another video to compare it with the stock factory condition.)
After finishing the first video, Haiko sent the guitar to me, and I have to say that, considering the price, I was really impressed with the quality. It’s a standard vintage-flavored Telecaster, and the plan is to completely take it apart down to the last screw, analyse each and every little detail, and transform it into a much better guitar in terms of playability, comfortability, longevity, appearance, and, of course, tone. My goal is to keep the budget under $500, including the guitar, so I’ll be using a mix of new and used parts for our remaining $352. Let’s see how far we can get with this.
The entire procedure is not set in stone. It’s just one possible way to do such a project, and certainly not the only way. I want to keep it as transparent and easy as possible so you can follow along, step-by-step, if you have a guitar you want to spruce up.
So what can we expect from a guitar at this price? We can be sure that we’ll find some flaws and signs of cost-cutting under the high-gloss hood. This is the perfect guinea pig for our experiment because it sports a lot of features that are considered “bad” for the tone of a guitar. Here are the most prominent of them; we will talk about all of these in detail during this series.
• The body is made out of basswood, which is not a classic tonewood.
• The body is made out of multiple pieces of wood.
• The body is not nitro lacquered but has an ultra-thick polyurethane finish, which we all know is killing tone because the wood of the guitar can’t breathe and resonate freely.
• The “1-piece” maple neck is not one piece and has a glued-on maple fretboard, which is not vintage correct, and lessens high-end and attack.
• The guitar is really lightweight so it’s not very loud and doesn’t sustain well.
• It comes with thin strings which have less sustain and thinner tone.
We can’t change the primary construction of the guitar (i.e. the wood used for its body and neck), so through the course of our mods we’ll see how much these things matter to a guitar’s tone. I’ll even install some lighter-gauge strings to really start from the lowest possible point tonewise—at least, according to Common Internet Guitar Knowledge (CIGK).
After playing the guitar for a while and thinking about what to do with it, I decided to transform it into a single-pickup Esquire-style model, because less is often more. We will talk about the differences between a 2-pickup Telecaster and a single-pickup Esquire in detail and you will see it’s not the same tonewise.
If you’re following along with one of your own guitars, your exercise for this month is to completely take it apart. I will do the same with my Harley Benton so we have the same starting point.
Next month, we will start to work on the guitar, defining what to do and making some plans on how to proceed. The custom-shop game is open now, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
