What brought me to do all of those upgrades was a dilemma; GAS, Guitar Acquisition syndrome. There are a lot of companies out there, making great strat style guitars. Danocaster does some great vintage-ish stuff, and Suhr has so many flavors of the rainbow. G&L still does a new-meets-modern with pretty much any option you can think of for the money. Of course the original, Fender always comes up some great versions. All of these companies give me GAS after every NAMM show.
So in preventing GAS I decided to modify this guitar and give it a lot of the options I would want in a new or custom strat style guitar. In recent years I’ve had a lot of discussions with gear nerds, and one thing came up a lot to improve a guitar’s tone is the bridge.
The standard Strat bridge isn’t bad, it’s good enough for all those classic recordings from Hendrix, Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton (you get the picture), and despite its flaws, we still enjoy the music created on them. I looked into the option way back into putting a fishman power bridge on this guitar. It would have given me acoustic sound options in this guitar. I’d need to do something externally for an acoustic preamp, as well as re-thinking the knobs and electronic controls to be able to use this in an optimal fashion. Taking all that into consideration, as well as the added cost, I passed on this option. I’d still love a guitar with this feature, but that might be a way off in the future for me.
I thought of putting graphtech bridges on the existing strat bridge. I had some on a different strat back in the day, and I had no problems with them. The string breakage factor was really good, and sound wise I was happy.
But anything worth doing, is worth overdoing. So after talking to John Mann I decided to go with one of his Mann Made bridges. John was a big part in designing the PRS tremolo, and now he offers versions of them as upgrades for PRS Guitars, like S2 & SE’s, as well as core models. Strats being one of the most popular guitars out there, he also does a version for pretty much every variation of strat ever made.
Since I picked up my CE24 in 1995, the PRS tremolo is one of the best non locking tremolo I’ve come across. The saddles sit in a nice walled in area, meaning there’s no side to side movement. The tremolo arm is a push in style, having a delrin bushing with a set screw for adjusting tension. The idea of bringing this bridge to my strat wasn’t a real hard decision
With my strat having a vintage style bridge, I never floated the tremolo. I loved the sound but the tuning issues would come around, especially with new strings, when the tremolo was used. I used 3 springs, and had it mounted hard to the body to compensate for these tuning issues. On my PRS I have mine set even, so the bottom of the bridge is set with a little float, but not a lot. For the most part it can handle pretty aggressive use, I don’t do dive bombs and such, but for a non locking system it works fantastically.
So with this new bridge, I have the feel of my PRS in a strat. It stays in tune a lot better as well, with it set up as a floating bridge. Tonality wise, it’s kind of enhanced things. I still have that strat sound, but it’s like an out of focus image has been dramatically sharpened up. I love the feel of the push in arm, although I have to bend the angle of it a bit more to my tastes. That’s not a big deal, as I used to do it on other strats.
The final cost was $255, parts and labor. The pickup and electronics upgrades were about $350, so I’m at about $600 of mods in a guitar that I paid $325 for in the mid 1990’s. So is it a $925 guitar now? No, it’s only what someone is willing to pay for it, and since it’s been modified to MY tastes, I doubt there are a lot of other players that would want all these mods on one of their guitars.
However I’d be hard pressed to find even a custom guitar that would be under this cost, and I doubt could offer these options.
I still have some other things to get sorted out; I’ve recently found some vintage looking locking tuners, which I’m very interested in. Electronics wise, I’d like to make the tone control for the bridge pickup have a bit more range (yes my bridge pickup has a tone control), right now it really doesn’t to a lot, until it’s rolled back to 2, then it just goes dark. Fender also just came up with a volume control that doesn’t lose top end when it’s rolled back. I’d like to also see if I could incorporate this.
I recently acquired one of Gruv Gear’s gig bags, and I’m thinking of making it my strat’s main bag. A nice Couch strap is also on my list to finish off everything.
My to do list on this is still pretty long, but I finally got over the hump, it’s all downhill from here!
Of course I still have some things on my Tele, and my PRS CE to do..It never ends. These little projects satisfy my GAS, as well as tinkering tendencies. The big problem is what to do after I have all my guitars brought up to where I want them..Ugh
No comments:
Post a Comment