Hello from the Guitar Nerd Corner! 🎸

Hello from the Guitar Nerd Corner

It's Victor here to tell you a bit about my latest guitar modding adventure, so get yourself a beverage of your choice and prepare for some hardcore guitar geekery ☕️This guitar started out as a budget super strat style guitar from 1990 that I got a few years back to possibly be the basis of some fun mods. At some point I found some used EMG pickups that got put in this guitar (89 SA SA set for those interested). I had, from the beginning, intended to replace the cheap crap bridge that was on it. In part to see how it would affected sound of the guitar (spoilers: it didn't change that much) but mostly to turn it into a more useable guitar, and with those EMGs I kinda wanted this guitar to turn into something inspired by Steve Lukather and Janne Schaffer. So I ended up getting a Gotoh locking tremolo and a locking nut that I asked my dad to put on it.

First step was to put new strings on it to do a quick reference recording with the old bridge. Then the old bridge got removed. It was a good thing that I never got the tremolo arm for that thing because not only would it have been a tuning nightmare, from the looks of things that bridge would have fallen apart if I'd try to dive bomb with it, haha!

Next step was masking tape (at this point my dad had pretty much taken over the work with me just assisting). In part just to cover electronics and the pickup cavities while it was being worked on but also to easily mark where the studs for the new bridge goes without drawing marks on the guitar itself. Since the rough intonation is set from the factory on this Gotoh bridge we could get the placement by measuring between the nut and the bridge saddle for the high e string (about 648mm, or 25.5 inches) and checking the string alignment of the two outer strings and checking that everything is straight.

After this we removed the neck and I left the body of the guitar in the hands of my dad who drilled holes for the studs. Once he had done that we put the bridge in place, the neck was put back on (more on this later) and first bit of this operation was done.

But we still had work left to do before we were done with the guitar. A locking trem needs a locking nut so it stays in tune when you do dive bombs and what not. So we removed the old nut and started figuring out how to best fit the new one. This turned out to be a surprisingly challenging part of this whole thing since the string height at this end needs to be right for it to be playable and it requires a fairly high degree of precision (the strings should be just under a millimetre above the fretwire of the first fret). At first it looked like it would be a bit too low so we placed a thin piece of wood under it which we then filed down until it was just right (at which point that extra piece of wood was almost completely gone). The truss rod cover was put in place and also filed down to give the nut a bigger stable surface area to sit on before it was screwed in place and the guitar was properly stringed up again.

Now it was time for the exciting part: testing the guitar. Played a bit, tweaked the setup of the bridge and did a new recording to see if the new bridge had an impact on the sound. The sound difference was fairly minimal but it doesn't matter much as it sounds like it should. But I did notice a couple of problems when testing it. First, the action (string height that's adjusted at the bridge) was too high. Second, and way worse, it didn't stay in tune at all!!!

The problem of the action was a fairly easy fix. Normally that's adjusted on the bridge but since it's laying against the body it can't go lower. However, this was anticipated, and there's an easy fix for that by placing something in the neck pocket which will change the angle of the neck. This is a somewhat common thing to do on guitars with bolt-on necks and since we knew this would be a thing we had already placed a bit of folded masking tape there for that exact purpose. But more was needed. So we placed another folded bit of masking tape which turned out to be way too much. Unscrewed the neck again, unfolded the second piece of tape, put the neck back on and... perfect!

The second problem was harder because first the cause of the tuning issue had to be found. It was quite obvious that the bridge wasn't returning to the same position when it was used but what would cause that? Well, when we fitted the bridge we noticed that the cavity for it was quite tight on one side (which was worked on a bit before installing the bridge) so maybe that's the problem? Sure enough, a tiny bit of the bridge was touching the side of the cavity. So my dad took one of his fancy power tools and went to work to make that side of the bridge cavity ever so slightly bigger.

While we were doing all this I also decided to flip the bridge pickup around to get a better split sound out of it by moving the active coil further from the bridge (a humbucker pickup consists of two coils and if you "split" it and only use one coil you can get a single coil sound out of a humbucker, meaning you get more sounds out of one pickup. While EMG's works slightly different from this the basic principle is the same)

After all this the guitar was put together again and it was time to test it once more. Now everything was right! Turned out to be a quite fun guitar, too! Now all that is left is getting some knobs that fits. The ones on it at the moment are borrowed from another guitar. But then I need to decide what knobs I want so that'll be something for another time.I hope you enjoyed the insight in this! With love, Victor