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PlayItLoud4u

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About PlayItLoud4u

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  • Location
    North Carolina
  • Interests
    Recording original music, customizing guitars
  1. I’ve heard it said that stainless steel frets can screech when fretting notes and not advisable to use on an electric guitar when recording but don’t know if it’s true? One of the many cool things about guitars is you can pick the material component combinations you like and set up all your different guitars types so they have their own unique tone that you can enjoy hearing when you play. That is the icing on the cake. Guitars sound awesome and the tone they make is what makes playing fun. I like fixing up cheap guitars to have great tone just to prove you don’t have to buy a $10,000 guitar to sound good. You can make a $2,300 Les Paul sound like a $10,000 Les Paul for a lot less money. Technique and some thoughtful guitar parts modifications can go a long way. If you can afford a $10,000 custom guitar then hey, more power to you, they do look quite stunning but it won’t make you a better guitar player. Experience and your own style can coax that magical tone out a guitar “If you just get your mind together and come across to me. Who in your measly little world are you trying to prove that your made out of gold and you can’t be sold. But have you ever been experienced, well I have. Not necessarily stoned but beautiful”- Jimi Hendrix
  2. I have removed the majority of wax from pickups and made some material changes to them and my turned cheapo epiphone pickups that sounded absolutely horrible into that pickups that sounded better than my Gibson 57 classic & classic plus pickups. For around $25 per pickup. You have to be extremely careful though pickup wire is like a strand of hair and will break so easily (learned that one the hardway on the first pick I ever tried to modify). I disassembled the pick and carefully used an exacto model kit knife and carved the wax away from the bobbins and wiring. I then disassembled the bobbin mounting screws and continued removing wax with my exacto knife when I could start seeing the black pickup tape through the wax I used one of the plastic bobbin spacers to scrape wax off the black tape and stopped. I removed the pole screws, slugs, metal pole spacer, desoldered the ground wire from the base plate (use a heat sink). Removed the bar magnet. I did not remove the pick up tape and was very careful not to disturb the wiring at all. I then reinstalled all the parts on a new nickel/silver base plate, installed new nickel plated 1214L steel slugs and 1214L nickel plated pole screws. I installed an Alnico 5 magnet. I replaced the pickup cover with a nickel/silver cover. Bought the parts from mojotone on some that I did and Philedelphia Luthers on the others. I did this process on six Epiphone pickups and saved about $450-$500 from not buying high dollar gibson pickups. The wax that remained was just enough to not have microphonic distortion but let me have some feedback for some Hendrix type tunes. No BS here it really did improve the sound quality in a very noticeable way. Also you can remove the junktronics in the epiphones with some CTS pots, and orange drop caps as well. My Epiphone Dot, Epiphone Olympic and Epiphone Wilshire 1966 reissue guitars sound great now. Before hand the pickups sounded like mud and the wilshire pickups sounded glassy. Most likely the material changes I made played a big part and the wax removal did some good as well. The electronics changes after the pickup mods was icing on the cake. When you can't afford $2500-$10,000 guitars you learn to improvise.
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