Upgrades & Modifications: How have you "personalized" your guitars?

[GAR]

The Kramer does seem to be solid, and has a USA serial number.

[jhale667]

...Too bad stickers don't count as upgrades. Once again you FAIL.

[Diamondjimi]

[Diamondjimi]

Dupe post...

[GAR]

The most effective modification in the shortest amount of time, is getting all polepieces flush with the top of the bobbin, then "de-emphasizing" those strings you want less of in the output by driving them a little lower than flush.

I've done this on a few guitars where changing string gauges or brands totally throws my ear out of whack with my intended output, particularly with the larger wound strings and not so much with plain strings.

One trick I have done with interesting results, was taking a staggered-pole middle pickup out of a strat, then flipped it upside down in a "single-hum" pickups configuration, by driving P-bass pickup screws thru a length of surgical tubing using that as the backing spring as the screw drives down in to the wood.

I liked the evenness of that, because this made all the unadjustable alnico poles all flush across because the bottom bobbin plate becomes the top that way, which brought proximity of the entire coil up to the strings that much closer (.06 - .080"?)

However it was an odd thing, with the solder connnections and leadwire right there under the strings.. so the gain in evenness I thought I had in doing that was offset by a fucked-up look.

I switched it back to what I had before, standard.

[GAR]

BTW as I mentioned long ago, if you have an Epiphone, adjusting the pickups is a thing you do not want to do.

The polescrews are kinda held in by the overload of wax inside the screws' bores. And if you try removing the screws to scrape out the wax that prevents you from driving the screw lower, the subsequent replacing of said screw will slip and fall below the pickup cover with little hope of retracting it without complete disassembly.

Epiphone humbucker pickps are a tar-baby for adjustability.