What are your favorite guitar mods?

pauliusmm

pauliusmm

Fractal Fanatic
Looking for ideas here. What are some useful wiring/tone pot mods for guitar? I could sacrifice secondary tone knob on a strat for something cool.

I personally like to have bridge+neck on push/pull pot for strats. Gives a funky tele kinda sound.
 
My Strat has a blender knob in the bottom position. Depending on where the 5-way switch is, it will let you blend a variable amount of neck pickup into the bridge pickup or vice versa. Adds some cool sounds, and was a lot more useful than a treble knob I never touched.
 
A blower switch/button to switch from any pickup to a bridge humbucker. Great on strats with a HSS setup or something similar.
Bypasses the 5 way and the tone knob. One of my favorite mods for strat like setups. Leave it in the neck and press the button/switch for chugga chugga. :)
 
Funeral said:
A blower switch/button to switch from any pickup to a bridge humbucker. Great on strats with a HSS setup or something similar.
Bypasses the 5 way and the tone knob. One of my favorite mods for strat like setups. Leave it in the neck and press the button/switch for chugga chugga. :)
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I have a blower switch in my Suhr but somehow i never use it. Its easier for me to swype the 5-way than to push that blower button.
 
i've modded one of my strats by adding two switches allowing me to add the bridge pickup to any combinations in either parallel or series.
i removed the second tone knob to allow space for the switches.
StratsDec.jpg

here's the link to the wiring diagram i used.
Bridge Pickup Series/Parallel Add-in Wiring Mod
say you're in the neck pickup only, you can add the bridge to the neck to get two telecaster tones (parallel/series).
if you are in neck+middle position, you can then have a three pickup combo
if you are in the middle position, you can add the bridge pickup in series to get a beefier tone.
this really opened up a lot more tones.
something for you to consider..
 
I have a similar setup using a push/push on the first tone knob, and like you I replaced the 2nd tone pot w/ a 3-way coil tap for the bridge pu. The push pot gives me bridge + neck if I'm in 1 or 5, and all three pu's if I'm in 2 or 4, the middle position is still the same.

I've been planning to add the neck+middle combo too, just haven't gotten around to it.
 
If this is for a Strat, get another pickguard and wire it up with some different pickups. Figure out a way to have a quick disconnect for the 1/4" jack and you can have a "new guitar sound" when you feel like changing strings.
 
Tone ,push - pull ,coil tap and volume, push - pull ,treble bleed with a 3 way switch and 2 humbuckers
 
Longhair said:
If this is for a Strat, get another pickguard and wire it up with some different pickups. Figure out a way to have a quick disconnect for the 1/4" jack and you can have a "new guitar sound" when you feel like changing strings.
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I was thinking about this. What woud be the ways to make a quick connect system? No soldering preferred.
 
pauliusmm said:
I was thinking about this. What woud be the ways to make a quick connect system? No soldering preferred.
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Ernie Ball did this for a while- maybe they still do.
EMG have a quick connect config as well- it is quite complex if you want to do anything beyond the norm.

IMHO it is quicker to just solder them.
 
This is my '78 USA Strat..
had her from new - she's from "The Sins" family of my collection and her name is Pride

mods:
flattened neck radius
jumbo frets
Seymour Duncan Hotrail at the bridge
Floyd Rose
22nd fret added via a small maple 'tail'

29902_445745879815_7359081_n.jpg
 
A lot of it depends on what pickups you have (H/H, H/S/H, S/S/S, etc).

My main guitar has two humbuckers and a 3 way strat style switch - so it's very Gibson like, which works for me. I also have a push/pull pot on the tone control which acts as a coil tap on both pickups. When it's engaged, the guitar is somewhat Tele like. This also works for me, especially for clean tones.

So I can get 6 sounds, as opposed to 5 with a Strat style 5 way. Of course, I don't get those "in-between" Strat sounds, but that's OK.

Something maybe to look into is the ToneStyler. It's an analog replacement for your tone control, that shifts the pickup’s resonant frequency and adjusts the treble rolloff point. It has, I believe 16 increments. I've seen some demos of it, and it makes a huge difference in the sound in a very usable and musical way. And it's a drop-in replacement and not very expensive, if I recall correctly.

That might be a cheap and easy way to change it up if your not using your tone control anyway!
 
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My fave ( for now ) ..., is James Tyler Studio Elite pickup switching ....

Series/Split/Parallel on each pickup, the on board mid-boost with volume control ( & Bypass ), plus the rhythm/lead mini-switch ... !

More tonal options than I can handle ..., but it's still ....

AWESOME !
 
I wired my knobs as independent volumes (no tone knob) and they are push/pull pots for coil taps. Love it.
 
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