Took me a bit to digest it all
I've got the "following directions" part down pretty good, but I'm still learning "why" things work as they do, which is crucial to taking an idea (or ideas) and making it work. Every time I attempt something new, I learn that much more about "why."
It's kind of neat to see a schematic or diagram now and go "Oh, yeah, I see how that works!"
That's exactly what I got out of the information you guys pointed me at. VERY neat!!
And just for info purposes (and so you'll know that someone somewhere out there did something potentially cool with your information) here's what I'm applying this to:
I found an oddly shaped guitar that I just dug. It was a cheap-o, but the wood is good and solid, the neck actually feels great on it, and it's got a nice blue/black burst.
I stripped everything down to just the neck and body. I've never been a big fan of gold hardware, but a buddy of mine, during one of my "what should I do?" moments, suggested gold hardware... I did a mock up in photoshop and was amazed at how nice it looked together. So I decided to go with Gold hardware and Cream other-stuff.
It was routed for 2 humbuckers, but I'm a little bit bored with humbuckers at the moment. I have about 4 strat-type builds planned, and 4 P-90 equipped guitars. so I wanted soemthing a little different. I Was thinking "Hmm.. gold" and happened to be on a well known website for a well known pickup supplier and I saw gold lipstick tube pickups. Had to have em.
I was trying to decide which 2 to get out of a set of three. I went with reverse wound middle pickup for the bridge and the neck pickup for the neck. This was an arbitrary not-well-thought-out decision.
I made a pickguard for it, extended over the pickup routing area with them both at an angle. It looks amazing, but the sound is painful. WAY too bright, even for lipstick tubes. I'm using 250k pots and .047 caps. I know I can go darker, but I'm concerned about losing more than just the ice-pick edge if I got something like .1 caps or lower than 250k on the pots.
I added an 9v EXP control to try to boost mids and pull back bass and treble and it definitely helps, but it's still shrieky.
So I've now decided to route a sc sized middle pickup route, move the middle lipstick tube pickup there and install a Seymour Duncan SSL52 in the bridge. I'm thinking that combining a normal strat single coil (especially with the SSL52 using AlNiCo 2 magnets for the GBE strings for a warmer sweeter tone) with the lipstick tubes, I can get glassy without shattery ( i hope, anyway).
It really is an experiment and I'm not sure how it's going to sound when I'm done, but I figure I might as well build some tonal options into such an odd guitar so that I can, hopefully, coax a beautiful noise out of it.
I also thought that busting those lipstick tubes out in series might warm them up a little, like humbuckers. At any rate, the thought of lipstick/lipstick/SC in series makes me grin... and that alone makes it worth the effort to try it out
Here's what it looked like when I got it:
Here's what it currently looks like:
(BTW, that slightly wonky-spot on the pickguard at the lower bout is going to be "recontoured" when I remove it to add another pickup cut-out, etc.)
Here's the photo process on this guitar build so far, if anyone wants to see more:
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