Newbie Wants To Start Modding

[joshofalltrades]

Hey everybody! I'm Josh, and I live (if it can be called living) in Abilene, TX. I'm a fairly experienced guitarist, 25 years old, and have never done any electronic modding before.

I have a Fender American Series Fat Strat, the kind that came with a Seymour Duncan Pearly Gates humbucker in the bridge position. The axe isn't swimming pool routed, so I don't know if that would limit my room to work. I'm not wanting to route any more of the wood out of it. The guitar sounds great and does everything I absolutely need it to, but why should I be satisfied with that?

Anyway, I checked out www.alexplorer.net and some of the nifty mod ideas there. The things I want to start with are fairly simple, I think...

1. Make it shock-proof. Seems fairly easy.

2. Solder a cap to my volume knob so I don't lose highs disproportionately.

3. Change one of my knobs to a push-pull. Pulled, the bridge and neck pickups would activate, meaning positions 1 & 5 on my pickup selector would be neck + bridge and 2-4 would be all neck+mid+bridge.

4. Add a momentary kill switch so I can get hard tremolo in time with the music (or just change the tempo however I feel like it ).

I guess the question here is... is it possible to do all of these? What ingredients do I need, and is there a cheap place to get them? With a humbucker in the bridge, will the schematics look different than what is shown on alexplorer? And, as previously stated, I have no personal experience with any electronic work. I guess I would like to talk to some patient souls who will walk a newbie idiot through his first guitar mods.

Also, and kind of off-topic... my buddy has a Spector bass with active electronics, and found that when he left it plugged in for days at a time *rolls eyes* the battery would drain. So he's looking into an on/off killswitch, but while at the local electronics store the other day I saw a key lock component. I told him about it and he seemed to think it was an awesome idea. Has anybody ever tried to key-lock an instrument before?

Thanks for your help! Hope to hear back from you...

[Maiden69]

I don't know about that site, but this one http://www.guitarnuts.com/wiring/index.php has been up for a while and explain a lot better than the one you posted. He does explain the "shock-proof" issue, and the caps that you need, I would read this before going and start modding your guitar.