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Photo courtesy of singlecoil.com

A second look at the considerations that go into combining pickups from different manufacturers in one guitar.

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In last month’s column, I introduced the potential issues you’ll face when combining pickups from different manufacturers, which comes down to understanding polarity and phase. Start there if you haven’t, because we’re about to get into the details of how to assess and understand these important facets of every pickup.
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We’ve reached the final step in this series on how to superficially age a guitar. Let’s add the finishing touches to complete our Harley Benton relic project.

Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This is the final installment of our DIY relic’ing series, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Today, in the last step, we’ll add some dings and dongs to the guitar. You can decide if you only want a slightly aged look or if you want to bash it up like hell for a heavy-used relic look. There are many ways of adding dings and dongs, and if you do a Google search, you’ll find a galore of pages and blogs about this. I will show you the way I do it in the shop, but this is only one way of doing it. In other words, I’m not saying you must do it exactly this way or that other ways won’t work. Many roads lead to Rome.

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Believe it or not, on eight out of 10 guitars with tuning problems, the culprit is usually bad strings or the exotic ways they were installed. Here are some ways to combat these issues.

Welcome back to Mod Garage. I’ve wanted to cover this topic for a long time, but to be honest, I didn’t dare because it seems so trivial. I’m sure a lot of you already have a natural routine to assess tuning, but I receive guitars daily for repairs, and enhancing tuning stability is something I hear about a lot—on electric as well as acoustic guitars. There are many reasons why a guitar has problems staying in tune, but today we’ll discuss the simplest one: the strings.

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