How we turned three affordable Squier, Ibanez, and Yamaha axes into custom instruments like no other.
From YouTube to Instagram to myriad DIY forums, the internet is filled with modders showing off their latest projects. Name your flavor of guitar gluttony—from Gibsons to Fenders, offsets, and shred machines—and there's a virtual place you can go to both feed your craving and feel better about how much time you spend obsessing over how to make your axe sound and play more to your liking. "You think my tweaking tendencies are out of control? Check out this guy…."
Because there are so many places to get each other's take on which pickups or nut material will yield such-and-such sound, this year's No-Brainer Mods outing (our fourth so far) takes the same tack as last year's. As with all past NBMs, we've purchased a handful of quality affordable axes, but rather than just upgrading them with one of the innumerable sets of great pickups on the market, and maybe a fancier bridge or set of tuners, we're taking a more adventurous approach. Guitar shops the world over are full of well-made instruments you can get brand-new for $300–$500 and then turn into something you'd never be able to buy off the rack simply by investing a little more time and money. In the process, you'll have a whole lot of fun and hopefully end up with an inspiring new "custom" instrument. If something goes a little haywire or the experiment's end result isn't quite as mind-blowing as you'd hoped, at least you haven't lost a ton of dough—and unless you've really botched things, you can always try out your next great idea on the same "canvas."
Considering how many cool, well-made affordable guitars there are, what's a "no-brainer" about all this isn't so much what we do in our No-Brainer Mods series—it's that you take advantage of the waiting gold mine of possibilities to do the weird stuff that occurs to you. We're just here to stoke your imagination a little.
Last year, we had a blast walking the mod path less taken. We turned a T-style into a 12-string, gave a Squier Starcaster the Jazzmaster trem so many offset aficionados feel it needs, and made a semi-hollow Ibanez's dreams of sounding more orchestral a reality. This year, we're taking on a couple of mods that are roughly as ambitious as those, but we've also thrown in one for folks who need something a little less invasive to chew on during pandemic downtime. We've again enlisted guitar-repair guru Dave Helmer, a two-time Red Wing lutherie graduate based in Iowa City, Iowa, to carry out these glorious transformations. —Shawn Hammond
Before and After Mods Video Demo
Squier Semi-Fretless “Cabronitar”
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Squier instruments have long been a staple for modders looking for an affordable, solid-playing axe to put their own personal touch to. Beyond the brand's usual classic looks and respectable build, the Paranormal Cabronita Telecaster Thinline ($399 street) we've chosen for our first mod has a couple of additional neat things going for it. First, it's lighter than virtually any thinline/semi-hollow guitar we've encountered in this price range. Second, the fiesta red finish is so upscale looking it's easy to almost overlook the Fender-designed alnico Jazzmaster pickups. We thought about swapping them with a set of Seymour Duncan Antiquity or Curtis Novak pickups, but then we remembered our "more adventurous" MO. Besides, the pickups sound pretty good (astute JM fans are bound to note the unusual inclusion of adjustable pole pieces).
As I pondered what sort of specialized sonics might be cool to add to the Cab, I hit on the idea of turning this familiar-feeling guitar into a fretless sitar.Having done fretless conversions before, Dave called me a little after starting the project to make what ended up being a fantastic suggestion: Why not keep the frets on the lower half of the neck and ditch 'em on the upper portion? That way the "Cabronitar" could be used as both a chordal and a lead instrument. Genius! In the end, we decided on fretless past the 10th fret.
At first we thought we'd just buy one of those Gotoh sitar bridges that Danelectro uses on its Sitar and Baby Sitar instruments. However, as of publishing time, it appears Gotoh is no longer making them. This actually turned out to be a boon, though, as the Gotoh wouldn't have fit in the space between the Cabronita's bridge and bridge pickup, and would have required more drastic measures with the bridge and/or other hardware.
Even so, keep in mind that—at a quick glance—the ebony "buzz bridge" portion of this mod looks deceptively simple. Like us, you'll likely end up needing to fashion two or three bridges before you've got all the minute cuts and surface angles right. This fine-tuning by trial and error is why you'll notice successive photos below sometimes show the guitar with strings on, then unstrung with protective tape on the surface, then strung-up again. That's because the only way to know for sure if you're getting things right is to string the guitar and see how it sounds at various points throughout the process. So you'll want to have a few sets of your chosen strings on hand. Luckily, Dave did a lot of great research and built a few prototypes himself, and the lessons he learned should help you get the nuances right, regardless of the guitar model you're modding. —SH
Ibanez JEMJRSP with “Monkey Grip-u-Lator”
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Steve Vai's innovative, aesthetically vibrant signature guitars have been turning heads since his 1987 debut as Ibanez's most prominent and influential artist. The JEM777 started it all. But while Vai—then fresh off both his first tour with David Lee Roth and filming scenes as the Devil's flamboyant guitarist, Jack Butler, in Crossroads—has always put the guitar's unusual "monkey grip" feature to good use, few mortals seem to be able to pull it off with similar aplomb. So we thought we'd take advantage of the grip anatomy on the JEMJRSP ($499 street) to facilitate something more practical—yet weird enough to hopefully still meet with Vai's approval. Taking inspiration from another virtuosic experimentalist, avant dreamscapist/sound mangler /former Bowie sideman David Torn, we've decided to use the space already carved out for the monkey grip to house a circuit similar to the "Tornipulator" he's had installed in guitars by luthiers Uli Teuffel, Saul Koll, and Izzy Lugo at Ronin Stringed Instruments.
Our "monkey grip-u-lator" circuit has three momentary pushbuttons for engaging 1) a lo-fi "sampling" microphone (a Shaker-brand harmonica mic) that's been added under the guitar's pickguard, 2) a 60-cycle hum (great for conjuring anarchic/deconstructionist vibes), and 3) a 1/4" auxiliary input you can use to connect, say, your phone, an old cassette player, or another outboard device to aid in your havoc-wreaking sonic adventures.
Yamaha Revstar Mojo Pickups Dual Foil Mod
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For those of you who've been shaking your heads at the two previous mods, first—in the immortal words of King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail—"You make me sad." Second, thank you for sticking with us anyway. We're rewarding you for your valiance with this straightforward mod. Although the Yamaha Revstar RS320 ($399 street) comes stock with pretty respectable pickups, we've been intrigued for the last little bit by U.K. outfit Mojo Pickups' recent Dual Foil designs—which are humbucking interpretations of the unique gold-foil pickups found on old Teisco and Harmony guitars. As we can attest, the Mojos sound delicious—which is why luthiers at boutique outfits such as Abernethy Guitars, Uma Guitars, and Deimel Guitarworks have recently been gravitating toward them.
What we can learn from the woeful, adorable cluelessness of our intergalactic friends the Thermians.
Sappy, upbeat, feel-good drivel from yours truly used to be a lot more rare before all this pandemic lockdown bullshit. Much as I've tried to maintain a steady flow of the silly/snarky crap you're used to—and even though we seem to be seeing a little bit of light at the end of the COVID tunnel, at least in terms of vaccine availability (and summer being right around the corner—wuhoo!)—I am, unfortunately, falling into the saccharine word trap more than I can say I'm proud of. For that, I ask your forgiveness.
Like most of you, not really being able to go anywhere or do anything "normal" sometimes makes me feel I've gone batty—especially during times of extra stress. Like right now. The PG staff has recently been working on migrating our thousands upon thousands of articles and videos to a new web host and completely different content-management system. On top of that, we've been putting the final touches on what inevitably ends up being one of our most complicated content projects of the year—our annual No-Brainer Mods DIY projects. Factor in other extraneous headaches and circumstances I won't bore you with, and it's all added up to an exceptionally stressful couple of weeks for the crew here.
As for how it's affected me and my somewhat pulverized brain, I'll put it this way: I didn't really know what I was going to write in this space till I woke at 5 a.m. this morning worrying about all this and more. What's weird is that, in the still of the not-quite-wakey-wakey time, the humming, monotonal voice of Mathesar the Thermian came into my head unbidden. "Never give up. Never surrender."
Like you, I sometimes just want to say, "fuck it." Screw this shit—whatever it might be.
Played with aplomb by Enrico Colantoni, Mathesar is actually quoting a worn-out line usually uttered by the stereotypically macho and overconfident Commander Peter Quincy Taggart (Tim Allen), but it means more coming from lovable ol' Mathy. (Sidenote: If you have no idea what I'm talking about, that means you haven't seen the hilariously witty and affectionate sci-fi send-up that is Galaxy Quest. Put it in your watch list, pronto.)
But back to me—the sarcastic, jaded curmudgeon you've come to love and loathe—awake at an ungodly hour and somehow feeling inexplicably optimistic. I won't try to understand the positivity that crept into my pitch-black bedroom, but I'm gonna roll with it.
Like you, I sometimes just want to say, "fuck it." Screw this shit—whatever it might be in your life or mine. Your hairstyle. Your job. Living where you live. Putting up with that bandmate who can't seem to communicate about a songwriting issue without coming across like a tool. That cool riff you can't seem to get out of your head—but also can't seem to get quite right. It can be anything, really. We're so "used to" the malaise/misery of this past year's worldwide predicament that it's really easy to just want to hit the nuke button without stepping back, taking a breath, and trying to assess the situation from a pre- or post-pandemic perspective.
That's not to say some aspects of our lives shouldn't be detonated and walked away from like the swaggering protagonist in a clichéd action flick. For our own growth, happiness, and/or sanity, sometimes it's a must. Just don't do it on a whim. Don't let the myriad weasels of annoyance popping up all over the place in our lives keep you seeing red too often. Sure, some of 'em really are rabid, disease-carrying rodents screaming out for nothing less than a bop on the head with a large sledgehammer … but others are just little creepers that have innocently wandered onto our life's weird "set."
Never give up. Never surrender.
Seriously, though. Put Galaxy Quest into your queue.