Best Guitar Mods? - hope it's okay I post it here

[Neta]

Hey guys!

Firstly, I hope it's fine I posted it in a stompbox forum.
One thing I noticed when I started building pedals is that everything is related, guitar, amp & pedals, so once you learn one you can do all.

To the point, I'm thinking about buying my friend's unused 100$ electric guitar and moding (modding?) it.

What guitar mods do you find are the most important in turning a cheap, bad guitar into a decent one?
Drilling and adding knobs possible and even desirable!

It's a standard strat style guitar (squire, I believe).

As always, thanks for any help!

[THOMMO]

Hey Neta! What I'd do and have done in the past, is totally dismantle it and strip the finish. Cheap guitars usually have super-thick finishes on them. I've found this really opens up the sound. Then just a light refinish with a colour or clear. Whatever you like. Good quality hardware is probably also a must.

As for the electronics, you can go the fast and efficient way of just replacing it all with good quality components and a set of your favourite pickups. Proper shielding is a must. Or you can take a bit more time and check all the pots and see how well they work. I've had pots on cheap guitars that worked smoother and had a better taper, than ones I have on $1000 axes. The same goes for the pickup selector.

Then you can go nuts!! Take out a tone control and add a fuzz circuit, add a switch for the bridge pickup so you can turn it on regardless of the selector position. It's only limited by your imagination!!
Here's a video I made of my 'strat'. http://youtu.be/WMPt6Q4WsXM   . I put a bazz fuss in it, added individual switches for the pickups. Most likely strip the finish when I get a chance. Never ending project!!

Cheers, Thommo.

[amptramp]

I picked up a Cort guitar that started off as a piece of sh1t. The controls were noisy, the sound wasn't great but it came with a Univox U65G transistor amplifier (even worse piece of sh1t). But the price was right - $20 for both at a garage sale!

I modified the amplifier without much luck - replacing the capacitors did not improve things although it got the tremolo to work properly. I took the guitar internal electronics out and did a proper job of grounding. All grounding had previously been done by connection to a piece of aluminum shielding foil that runs under the controls, a certain recipe for increasing noise as corrosion and contamination increases the ground resistance. I added the yellow 18-gauge grounding wire to the left of the controls and shot the controls with tape head cleaner. The controls are quiet now and he guitar was played by a friend who works at a guitar store and is a good guitarist and he thought it would be a great blues guitar.





It actually looks pretty good with the unit assembled. Cort makes guitars under their own name and also makes some private-label entry-level guitars for some of the better manufacturers. You won't mistake it for a top-end guitar with the flat whammy bar and cheesy pitch-bend mechanism, but it is OK for playing just for yourself.





The head looks like this, with the strings attached just enough for testing:

[Buzz]

A company called Tonerider makes some damn fine strat pups at very good prices.

I put a set of their 'pure vintage' pups into a chinese squire strat and I'm very pleased with them.

I chucked the stock pots, switch, jack and cap and replaced them with better quality components. The stuff in there functioned, but frankly was crap.

I also whacked a stratoblaster circuit in there, which really lets the guitar 'rock out' when I need it to.

Have fun, guitars are great projects to work on.

[ashcat_lt]

In a strat the first thing I would do (pickup swaps notwithstanding) is find a way to get the B+M sound.  There are several ways to accomplish it.  Next is to add a series combination or two.  Then maybe a phase switch for one of the pickups.

My main guitar is HHH with a rotary switch for each pickup to select Single/parallel/Series for the HB coils, toggles for series/parallel between pickups, a phase switch for the N, and a Tele style 3-way switch for on/kill/tone kill.  But I'm kinda nutz...

[Mark Hammer]

I picked up a Cort guitar that started off as a piece of sh1t. The controls were noisy, the sound wasn't great but it came with a Univox U65G transistor amplifier (even worse piece of sh1t). But the price was right - $20 for both at a garage sale!

I modified the amplifier without much luck - replacing the capacitors did not improve things although it got the tremolo to work properly. I took the guitar internal electronics out and did a proper job of grounding. All grounding had previously been done by connection to a piece of aluminum shielding foil that runs under the controls, a certain recipe for increasing noise as corrosion and contamination increases the ground resistance. I added the yellow 18-gauge grounding wire to the left of the controls and shot the controls with tape head cleaner. The controls are quiet now and he guitar was played by a friend who works at a guitar store and is a good guitarist and he thought it would be a great blues guitar.

..........It actually looks pretty good with the unit assembled. Cort makes guitars under their own name and also makes some private-label entry-level guitars for some of the better manufacturers. You won't mistake it for a top-end guitar with the flat whammy bar and cheesy pitch-bend mechanism, but it is OK for playing just for yourself.

The head looks like this, with the strings attached just enough for testing:

That's an old one, innit?  The tremolo style is rather 60's/70's.  Nice work.

I'm thinking about buying my friend's unused 100$ electric guitar and moding (modding?) it.

What guitar mods do you find are the most important in turning a cheap, bad guitar into a decent one?
Drilling and adding knobs possible and even desirable!

It's a standard strat style guitar (squire, I believe).

As always, thanks for any help!

There are electronic mods, and physical ones.  A big part of what allows manufacturers to turn out very inexpensive instruments is cutting corners on the physical aspects.  So, the frets may not be level or properly dressed and crowned.  They may also put in 3rd rate pickups, but quite honestly, people can get some awesome tones from electronics that, on the surface, appear 3rd rate.  You WILL want pots that feel smooth to you and that provide a useful taper.  Many Tone pots, for example, will seem to do nothing until the last little bit and then they go from bright to mute.

People can go nuts with pickup switching options, and to my mind, that can be wasted effort.  NO guitar should ever feel like a combination lock, where you have to go through all sorts of flicking and turning to get from sound A to sound B.  Your mind should be on your playing, not on remembering "the code" for changing settings.

I know many people here are gung-ho about building effects into their guitar,  I'm not, and here are my reasons:

1) Changing batteries in a guitar is a pain.  If it is a Strat-type cheapie, an even bigger pain to get the pickguard off.
2) You'll have very limited space to install controls and switches.
3) You won't be able to change the order of anything.  Whatever is in the guitar will always be first.

In short, as cool as it may seem, effects are generally done better outside the guitar than in it.  I suppose the one exception might be if you have a bunch of guitars and you have one reserved for some particular effect or use of that effect.

That said, it is a good thing to have a buffer built into a guitar or close to the start of your cable.  It is also good to have a tone control  that provides the changes YOU want.  That might involve changing the tone cap.  I'm a big fan of the "bi-directional" tone control, where full treble is in the middle of the control setting, and each direction from there produces a different sort of tonal change.  I normally use a 500k-1meg linear pot, a standard value (,01-.022uf) cap on one side, and something about 1/5-1/4 that value on the other (e.g., 2200-3900pf).  In the one direction you get a nice "rounding off" of the tone, while you get the standard dulling in the other.  Or, a person could use a cap/inductor combon on one side to produce a variable midscoop.

[Jdansti]

Along the lines of what Mark said, in my opinion, the most important thing to do first is make sure the guitar is set up properly. If it's not, after all of the mods you do, you'll still have a crappy playing and sounding guitar.

Once it's setup properly, the next thing for me would be to install some nice pickups if necessary. Following that, I'd look at an onboard buffer or preamp, playing with the pickup wiring (in phase/out of phase, split humbucker switches, etc) and possibly an onboard fuzz.

I've got a cheapo Squire Tele that I modded and turned into a really nice guitar.  I did the setup myself including leveling and crowning the frets and replacing the nut.  Here's what I did after the setup:

Installed rail humbuckers with push pull pots/switches to switch between single coil and humbucker, installed a nice bridge (which required some adjustment to the setup), installed a Tillman preamp with a bypass switch, exchanged the pickup selector switch for a better one, and replace the cheapo jack plate for a nice one.

Oh, and I removed the sticker on the neck bolt plate that said not to dispose of the guitar in the trash. 

[Ben N]

If the neck can't be made straight and to play cleanly, nothing else is worth the effort (unless you can find a better neck to salvage). However, as noted by Mark, often even a cheapo can be made playable with a setup and some fret levelling. If you can get to that point, though, it may well be worth your trouble to upgrade the rest. I don't have much to add to things said above, except that depending on what is already there and how much modding it would take, you might also consider a bridge and/or nut upgrade. As or pickups, I have had good-to-great results with GFS and Bill Lawrence pups, both of which are relatively inexpensive.

[Jdansti]

+1 on the GFS pickups. That's where I got mine for the Squire.

[Quackzed]

  that was my first electric guitar!!! well, mine was red and didnt have the trem thing, just a stop tail but other than that...
fwiw. i still use the pickups, in a different guitar, they measured @ 3.5k - 3.8k   but have a really fat p90ish sound... like 1/2 strat 1/2 p90 tone.
seriously dig 'em.  
i actually took 'em apart once, 2 big ceramic mags on either side of the coil,they're a little wider than a standard strat pickup and needed pickguard hole widening to fit, figured the odd arragement might be the reason for the unique tone...
i musta got it when i was 12 or so... 1984ish? mine had the 'pointy cort' headstock so yours might be a bit older than mine was...
decent guitar, great/weird pickups!!!

[Mark Hammer]

I don't know how I missed this, but I think your first "mod" ought to be installing what seems to have not been there in the first place: a pickup selector switch! 

Hard for me to judge the depth, based on the pics posted, but it would appear your simplest option would be to reduce the number of pots from 3 to 2, and use one of the holes curently filled by a pot for a Gibson-style 3-position toggle.

[highwater]

What guitar or guitars do you have already? What do you like/dislike about them? Or do you just want to gain knowledge/experience by experimenting on a cheap guitar?



Mod-wise, I agree that a good setup is hands-down the absolute best thing you can do to a guitar. It doesn't matter how beautiful it looks and sounds, nor how many different tones you can get from it, unless the truss-rod, action, and intonation are set properly, it will be downright miserable to play. Luckily, it's very difficult (literally as well as figuratively) to break a guitar by fiddling with the setup - unless you manage to snap the truss-rod, or scratch the finish, the most that can happen is that you make the setup worse than it started... and that just means you have to turn the screw back the other way. There are sites out there that will tell you to set for a particular measurement here or there, or tell you that you can't intonate your guitar without a strobe tuner -- that stuff is for when you're working on a guitar for someone else's fingers and ears. If you're working on your own guitar, and aren't in a hurry, just turn those screws back-and-forth until it sounds and feels right. It never hurts to measure it once you've got it just right, of course - those notes might come-in handy someday - but just like anything else in the music world, the precise numbers are worth no more than a moose-turd-pie.

If your goal is experience by experimenting, you might want to pick-up (or borrow from a library) a copy of one of Dan Erlewine's excellent books. With that in hand, get a blank nut and some files from a place like StewMac and try your hand at fretwork and nut-cutting. At this level, you can certainly cause damage that you aren't qualified (yet) to fix, so don't go-about fixing improving anything that isn't broken. If you want to learn that, find something that's completely worn-out/butchered already, or buy a

If your goal is to try something new (or old!) that has already proven it's worth, Premier Guitar has many articles by Dirk Wacker about guitar wiring, covering mods as well as various vintage wiring schemes. Joe Gore also has a penchant for guitar mods, ranging from basic to esoteric to crazy to downright weird (he's also written many articles for Premier Guitar, but most of them aren't about guitar mods).

As for tuning-machines, don't bother unless (a) the ones you're replacing are proper %#&$-ed, or (b) you are willing to spring for locking tuners. The bridge saddles and nut have much more effect on tuning stability than the machine heads do. The cheap machine heads will have lower ratios, and you'll have to be more precise when tuning, but they won't wobble once string tension is pulling on them, and (banjo-style excluded) their mechanical design will prevent slippage no matter how crappy they are - the roughness of the worm-gear surface will likely more-than-counteract the reduction in ratio. That being said, a good set of pin-locking tuners is worth every penny... changing strings becomes ridiculously easy, and they're stable right off the bat. They won't make a floating tremolo any easier to tune-up, though, so change strings one at a time unless you need all of them off to pull the pickguard for something.



@amptramp - My first guitar was a Cort (a Randy Rhoads-type Vee) that seems to be from about the same era - the only thing worse than the stock pickups was the "tremolo". As cheesy as the design is on yours, it can't possibly be as bad as their Fender-style like mine had - the thing would go out-of-tune if you even thought about thinking about screwing the whammy-bar in, let alone using it. Many years ago, my dad blocked the tremolo, replaced the tuners, and put some new (GFS) pickups in, and now it's a pretty good axe, with a tone fully fit for shredding... it's just too bad my fingers aren't quite up to that task. The frets need some work from the 12th-or-so up (not my doing - the original owner clearly liked their upper-octave bends) but that actually lets it take a lower setup than it otherwise would (from the 15th fret, the neck is kind-of a ski-jump). Oh, and even though Mark (I believe he's objected to "Mr. Hammer" in the past) may have missed that you've got independent volume knobs, I still second his suggestion of a selector switch, and would add independent tone knobs to that, if there's room. Maybe put it where the jack is, and drill a hole for that on the lower bout?

Oh, and many thanks to everyone in this thread - I've finally gotten off my butt and gotten to work on the two guitar mods I've been "eventually doing" for ages now... both %^&*amamied schemes, of course - a PRS-inspired switching for my Cort with a pseudo-Tele bent (bridge HB, bridge SC, both SCs in series, both SCs paralleled, neck SC, neck HB - using the "inside" coil on the bridge pup to avoid magnet-flipping while maintaining the 24th-fret location of the neck pup), and a bridge-pickup switch for my HSS strat (second bridge coil off, in-series, or parallel with whatever coil the main pup selector is set for - haven't read/heard of anyone doing that, surprisingly). Just gotta wait for my paycheck to order the switches.

[garcho]

Best guitar mods: thick strings and a super hard pick.

[Jdansti]

^That's what she said...