Keegan

The direction it passes through won't change the sound if it's the only pickup selected, it just reverses the magnetic field(and the phase of the signal you generate when you play). To your ears, a 180 degree phase shift doesn't make a difference. This only matters when you have more than one pickup selected, because if you have one pickup's field going one way and the other pickup going another way, in effect you get a "negative" signal from one pickup when the other one is putting out a "positive" signal, so they cancel(or come close to cancelling if they're wound differently), thus killing a lot of the sound. If one pickup has more output in a certain frequency range than the other pickup, that range is all that you'll hear. This usually winds up being some treble frequencies, since the pickup closer to the bridge is getting more high order harmonics, and you wind up with a weaker output and only in that trebly range, kind of a "tinny" sound.

It's going to have a pickguard, just not yet.

Stew-mac doesn't sell any push-push pots...

Odd. How long have you been trying to contact them? You might look into paypal's buyer protection if it's been longer than a week, and at least open a case. If they don't respond to that, you can send the case to Paypal and they'll look into it and refund your money if they find something's up. I've had this problem before(with another company), but then the item appeared in the mail without me ever receiving word from the company so I closed the case.

EMGs are fine unless you really lay into strings or play music with fine nuance, when the compression pulls out your dynamics. To be fair, a lot of this is due to the reputations of the 85 and 81, whereas I very much disagree on this tack when it comes to the qualities of the 60 and the S/SA/SV models. EMGs are great if you're recording digitally since they give the computer a really "clean" signal and without any noise. Their lesser known models are the best, the 60 for clean, and the 58 for dirty blues/alt rock/metal stuff(it's really p90ish sounding, but with tons more gain). They're also great if you want your sound to be consistent and predictable. EMGs suck if you play live and with a lot of dynamics, or if you crave a really warm sound(ie without so many overtones) because the preamp levels the playing field a bit and brings out way more harmonics than your average passive pups. Personally, I prefer active systems for playing clean(because each note is so defined) or with lots of effects into an amp that doesn't like being overdriven(solid state), but passive pups kick ass into a tube amp with the volume cranked. But there's yet another alternative: passive pups into a preamp. Oh boy, the cleans are soo clean, and the dirty makes the pickups you thought were already wild into fire-breathing demons. The trade-off is that you get extra noise, since the preamp comes after miles of wire, but it's still managable compared to the signal level, especially if your guitar is well shielded.

My favorite guitarists don't have amp walls or play solos =P

So I just discovered that if I play the low E with the guitar hanging on the wall, with my chorus set all on 5, and the volume of my amp on at least 5, the low E will play itself infinitely. Sounds like a giant didgeridoo. It gets louder and louder until the string hits the fretboard, then it sort of resets. It's really cool, cause the whole room resonates with it. Recording from my crappy mic Just thought it was interesting and worth sharing =P

Just be careful with that thing. You might impale your bassist if you turn around too fast.

Hmm, I got 220 inches for .05uF. You might be better off just imitating one. They're about 1 inch long and 3/8" wide. A Mallory 150 would probably work, since it's axial like a bumblebee, or you could use a vitamin Q if you want the same sound and just paint it like a bumblebee. AP Vitamin Q($13.50): Mallory 150($2):

Haha. Yeah, I wasn't really concerned with making it match either. I used padouk and stained it with the only stain we have(which just happened to be satin cherry, a satin cherry close to the satin cherry of the guitar). It's a little less red and a little more orange in person, but it ended up pretty good. Edit- Got this fine piece of metal in the mail today from Germany:

If you're trying to make a cap yourself, isn't getting the capacitance right more important than having the same dimensions as a bumblebee?

It's awesome whatever it is.

Avenger has successfully begun work on the first guitar that will actually DECREASE your chances of getting laid.

I like it. Lose the switch ring though. Once you get some stain on the body the blue will look nicer against it. The top wood needs to be darker, a lot darker for the blue and gold to work.

More progress. Put on locking steel bridge studs and made a pickup cover out of aluminum. Also replaced the pickup pole screws with alloy steel hex cap screws and put some bolts in the soapbar mounting holes to attach the cover. The studs increased sustain quite a bit, and the aluminum cover cut down on noise.

Thought I'd chronicle my work on my new LP so far. Original: Step 1- Removed the plastic crap Step 2- Replaced the electronics with a stacked vol/tone and a 25dB preamp Step 3- Made a back plate(out of some scrap padouk and some minwax poly/stain i found lying around) To come: Pickguard, truss rod cover, pickup cover, locking bridge studs, metal jack plate, and eventually a pigtail aluminum bridge.

But Fender puts the bridge single coil at an angle anyways...always putting the poles misaligned with the strings, and it doesn't seem to make a bit of difference. Besides, on a humbucker with adjustable polepieces, you can always just bring the outside poles up a little.

Hmm. You could try wiring a 27.7kohm resistor in parallel with a 250k pot(or 26.3kohm with a 500k pot). You'd be working with some pretty close tolerances though so you'd have to try a few different resistors until you get the taper you want. A 27kohm resistor with 5% tolerance will give you between 25.6kohms and 28.4kohms. Tweaking Pots (Project Guitar page)

*has nightmarish flashbacks back to trying to shield a strat*

I don't know about painting it, but custom ones are easy to get made. I like aluminum pickguards, so I get mine custom made from Sharp Concepts: www.sharp-concepts.com Those will probably run you around $60-70 if the pickguard is really big, like a P-bass. You can send them your old guard or just a tracing. If you want plastic, Pickguard Heaven does custom ones pretty cheap. I'm surprised they don't already have a wilshire, since they seem to have templates for nearly every guitar. www.pickguards.us I don't know how much they go for custom, but their ones on stock go for $75 max, $35 max for your basic black gloss one. They both accept drawings if you want something completely custom and both offer just about every color/finish imaginable. There are a few other places, but they're either really expensive or only do certain patterns. Pickguard Paradise will silkscreen any picture onto a guard, but that goes for $75+

Got an LP junior customization in progress: Originally- Now(this is true to color, it's a beautiful finish)- Control cavity, just for grins. Starting to move into pete's territory here, there's not even room for the battery, haha. But that's okay, I'm going to go with phantom power for this. I've tried plugging in the battery and just taping it to the side. The gain on this little unit is insane, 25dB, moves my little Blackheart into half stack territory with balls-out preamp and power amp distortion. Turned down to 3-6dB it gives a nice clean boost that gives it a lot of clarity. It's noisy, but still well below the signal volume, and I don't mind a little extra noise. The 500k tone/volume and .022uF cap is great with the p-90, I have tons of treble to go around, and usually only play around 4-5. 0 is dead sounding and 10 is like a squier tele with some cheap ceramic pups, so there's a huge range of sound I can get. This is just the first step. I'm currently selling off some parts from my old strat to fund parts for this one. Going to replace all of the original plastic parts with aluminum ones, get some locking studs(possibly an intonable bridge too), and maybe some locking tonepros/kluson tuners. Here's the pickguard I was looking at:

Maybe he said nuts Nope, nevermind

If you use a blend pot, you have to change your pot values to make the impedance right. I believe you'd have to use 250k blend/500k volume/500k tone for single coils and 500k blend/1Meg volume/1Meg tone for humbuckers. That would bring you into the neighborhood of what your pickups want to see(139k on single coils as opposed to the usual 125k, 278k on the humbuckers as opposed to the normal 250k). That's probably not even a noticable difference. Even doubling the impedance with single coils has only a very slight effect. 1 blend, 1 volume, and 1 tone would probably prove the most useful. Use the volume to set your level relative to the amp, then use the blend to select pickups and tone to take away any extra treble. Use a separate tone for each pickup if you want, I'm assuming you only want 3 knobs though. If you don't need a tone control(ie you always leave it on 10), use 250k blend/250k volume for single coils and 500k blend/500k volume for humbuckers.

With short scale and hair metal, I'm tempted to say maple or walnut if you're not concerned about the weight, swamp ash if you are. Shorter scale lengths lose treble, I think because the string is at a lower tension for a given gauge. Maple has tons of "bite" to make up for that. That's why they cap Les Pauls with it. Jaguars and Mustangs still have plenty of treble at 24" though, so any of the "Fender" woods like alder would also be fine. You may find the EMG selects to be too muddy no matter what wood you use simply because they're cheap pickups. If I were you, I'd save for some real EMGs or if you want to stay inexpensive, try something from GuitarHeads. They have sound samples for most of their pickups, too. If you use active pickups, wood choice will probably be completely insignificant because they pick up plenty of treble.

Erm, why did you finish it before you were done sanding?