ilovefuzz.com

i used to be a bridge pickup all the time guy...that developed because the only guitar i had was a 335 but i was playing Strat-based music much of the time. back then i used a Twin Reverb with the bass on 4 and the bright switch on. (this also resulted in me having what i call "treble-y hands"...everything i do was designed to maximize treble on a treble-deficient axe so now i can't really play e.g. regular Telecasters because they're too shrill). as i got less into rock bands and more into abstract effects shit i found the neck pickup more useful, especially with dirt which almost always acts as a high-pass filter. what really got me was when i got a couple of guitars--a Guild M-75 Aristocrat and a Gretsch Special Jet with DeArmond 2000 pickups--with absolutely gorgeous neck PU sounds. i literally set those up differently from most of my guitars which get the bridge PU optimized and the neck PU adjusted to match levels...i didn't want to do anything to mess up the neck pickups' sounds. i still play over 50% of the time on the treble pickup, but that's less than it was back in the day.

NGD! Love it so far! SO tiny and light! <6lbs lol

I got a set of Wilde (Bill Lawrence) Micro-coils for Christmas so I swapped those into my Tele. LOVE them and definitely keeping them in. Funny this thing has ended up back to more or less a standard tele after years of various pickup mods lol.

backwardsvoyager wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2024 11:52 am New favourite guitar is this '81 Lead II I picked up a little while ago on a whim.
Someone took out the phase switch and changed the pickguard at some point, but the rest is orig.
It's simple and rugged and loud and allows me to do guitar things without thinking too much, which is nice.

that Lead II is super rad. Passed up an 80's red/rosewood neck version at guitar center years ago and have never forgiven myself.
Picked up this japanese cort "electric guitar" copy a while ago for almost nothing. Neck is whoopped and haven't come up on a decent replacement neck yet.

IMG_1341 by J B, on Flickr

Aquietcabin1978 wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2025 10:22 pm Picked up this japanese cort "electric guitar" copy a while ago for almost nothing. Neck is whoopped and haven't come up on a decent replacement neck yet.

neat! hope you get it built up.
i'm partial to the narrow nut width/vintage radius/somewhat hefty profile of the necks on the 80s ones, but I guess near any small headstock strat neck would look right.

agreed.

Checked off a bucket list guitar get last year completely by accident. Better I got it now then after society collapsed amirite?



INNNN: Gibson SG Gothic

I've recently fallen in love with SGs thanks to my trust Korean made one. I'm a smol girl, so the short scale and light body feels good to handle and easy to play. So I've had my eye on SGs with the intent of getting another one (still want a black one with p90s or a black single pickup JR).

I was chopping it up with waltdogg randomly and he mentioned having found a SG Gothic in rough shape that he was having restored, it was just missing a bridge pickup. I had a Burstbucker 3 sitting in a drawer, so I gave it to him to complete the project and he offered me a deal on it.

So yea, its blacked out, beat up, plays fast and sounds fucking G R E A T. I've wanted one of these ever since I first saw them online as a teenager, and its everything I ever hoped it would be. Fucking nice to have a guitar that matches my personality.

SGs are great. it’s hard to fuck up making a guitar from a simple mahogany slab. i love the less elaborate Gibson-oid styles; i have a Tokai singlecut Les Paul Special and a Epiphone ‘61 SG with the Maestro vibrola as well as a Gretsch Special Jet which is essentially a LPS with DeArmond 2000 pickups that are close to Dynasonics. the simplicity of the LP Junior is very appealing, but i don’t play the kind of music they excel at. that’s what i love about the Special Jet: one volume, one tone, no waiting.

Damn straight. My other SG was a single pickup jawn for a minute and it fucked. One of these days I wanna get a real deal SG junior with the p90 and everything. Can't see this being overtaken anytime soon.

i just finished putting this together...it's a West German guitar from the 60s called the Hopf Twisty. i bought the body with electronics way back in 2012 or 13 off eBay. i put a Höfner Galaxie neck on it but it didn't work well because the Höfner neck is 22 frets and the Hopf neck is only 20. i found the correct neck on an obscure German parts seller's site (my Google Fu is strong) as well as the loaded pickguard from a later Hopf, the Jupiter 62. they're the same as the ones in the extremely groovy and rare Saturn 62, which you might remember Boz Boorer playing with Morrisey early in his solo career. they're quite snappy, way more aggressive than the primitive and rather delicate sound of the original pickups (for a look inside the old ones see the early pages of my Project Guitars thread). the bridge is model correct and came from eBay. i haven't really gotten into it yet because i'm still setting it up, but i'm really happy with it. and it's another cool blue guitar, which would only be better if it was green. the world needs more green guitars.

more offset than the typical offset...it makes the Duo Sonic and Jazzmaster look symmetrical LOL.

That came out looking pretty sweet

What a cool guitar! I love the racing stripes on the headstock. No inlay necks look also very cool. Hopf electrics are super rare, even here in Germany.

I worked a bit on my Casino: Swapped the stock pickups for a less hot set of inexpensive Artecs and put black vinyl foil on the pickguard to make it look more evil.



I hope I can now use it at band practice without having it squeal like a pig.

Zork wrote: ↑Fri Feb 21, 2025 4:13 pm I hope I can now use it at band practice without having it squeal like a pig.

It works!!!!

i don't know what the heck Epiphone was thinking with the P-90s they used in the 00s-10s. the ones in the orange Wildkat i used to have were 11.5/12.25 kΩ per specs, which is crazy. after i saw that i understood better why the 'Kat didn't work for me. there were other issues--the tension-roller Bigsby made the break angle over the bridge far too steep, and the spring-retainer tunomatic's saddles would waggle back and forth because the spring couldn't handle the break angle/tension--but the pickups were the biggest ones. i guess if i was a harder rocker they would have been good. i could probably make it work now if i used the technique the previous owner did on my DeArmond M-75T, using a half-inch or so stack of washers between the body of the Bigsby and the top of the guitar to raise it enough to make the break angle decent, but i already have the Tokai Les Paul Special and the Guild Aristocrat so i'm kind of covered for P-90s.

what i really like was one of the descendents of the Wildkat, the Uptown Kat ES. it's a semi-hollow Kat-sized body with a 335-style center block (thus, the "ES" suffix) with minihums and a trapeze tailpiece. i played one awhile back at Sam Ash (RIP) and it cooked. apparently the pickups as analyzed online are hotter-than-normal Firebird pickups which explains why i liked them so much. the contrast between appearance and firepower would make that a weapon. add a Bigsby B3 and Bob's your uncle. they go for $400-450 used which would be an economical solution to getting an actual Firebird and honestly they're probably more comfortable to play as well.

TDPRI thread on Uptown Kat minihums:

https://www.tdpri.com/threads/the-epiph ... r.1141131/