December 08, 2008
Over a year ago I was offered a fantastic deal on a Peavey Classic 30 guitar amplifier, for $60. It needed extensive clean-up work at the time, and new tubes, but I bought it. This purchase basically launched me into the world of electric guitars, and a tone chaser was born.
I decided to start upgrading an older Washburn stratocaster style guitar that I'd traded for a low end banjo several years ago. I wanted to try improve the sound of the guitar, at the same time as becoming more comfortable with playing the electric guitar.
Several things bugged me about this guitar, and in general about most electric guitars. It had constant tuning problems, binding, tremolo problems, very thin sounding pickups, inconsistent intonation, crappy controls, and the biggest one of all was that like all classic strats and copies the volume pot is located exactly where I like to put my hand, not to mention the toggle switch which constantly got knocked down to the bridge pickup by my fingers when playing rhythm.
The first thing I did to this guitar was change pickups. I bought a two Seymour Duncan stacked humbuckers, one being the classic strat stack, and the other being the classic tele chrome stack. Both pickups use two coils to cancel hum, while not emphasizing mid-range the way Gibson style humbuckers do.
I settled on controls at the time consisting of the 5 way switch with only 3 positions used and one pot for volume. I found the best tonal configuration was the tele stack in the middle and the strat stack in the bridge position, which I plan to go back to at some point by adding a second tele stack in the middle position.
I used fairly heavy gauge strings back then, which this cheaper guitar wasn't designed for. Somewhere along the line the truss rod broke, leaving me in need of a neck. $300 bought me an all-parts strat neck, and all needed hardware.
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