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GALLERY: Show Us Your Gear - #1 Guitars

In our inaugural Show Us Your Gear Gallery, we feature the go-to instruments of our readers.

"My main guitar is one that I built myself. It's an early-'80s Tokai AST '56 Strat body and the trem block that came with it. I replaced everything else. It has solid steel saddles, a Warmoth neck with ""extras"" (24 jumbo stainless steel frets, compound radius, graphite nut), and Sperzel locking tuners. The electronics consist of a very old Duncan JB4 in the bridge and a Duncan Seymourized Mini-Humbucker in the neck with a plain DiMarzio chrome cover. The one volume and one tone control are push/pull switches for series/parallel on each pickup. And the pickups are wired out of phase when selected together (so that's 8 different pickup options in all). Also, the volume control has a ""treble bleed"" capacitor/resistor on it so that when I roll it down a bit, it still retains some high end definition. And I have a capacitor on the tone control to roll off only some of the highs -- most tone controls roll off too much and get muddy. I have mine set so that all the way down on ""0"" I can get a ""half cocked"" wah type of sound -- very Michael Schenker -- and this way, the controls are actually very responsive and useful all the way around. I've had too many guitars with virtually useless tone and volume controls. Recently, I added a washer under the bridge to help stabilize the tremolo (it is set to only go down). All around, itуs an amazing guitar with tons of sustain, a very bright and articulate attack, and I can get so many different tones out of it that it just blows my mind. - Joe Hart"

Well-designed pickups. Extremely comfortable contours. Smooth, playable neck.

Middle position could use a bit more mids. Price could scare off some.

$2,999

Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay II

music-man.com

4.5
5
5
4

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