Epiphone Wildkat overhaul.

I found this Wildkat Epiphone at Guitar Center, a store that I usually only get strings at, for $300 used.  It is in mint condition and when I tested it the action was incredibly high and strung with 13 gauge strings.  Not a players guitar for sure.  What I did find was a guitar with great potential for big tone and stunning looks.  It has P-90 pickups, something that was missing from my guitar lineup.  On the controls it has a Master volume, individual volume control for each pickup a shared tone control and a three way switch.  Most of which were already noisy when I got it.  The Gigsby vibrato combined with the tune-o-matic bridge is a recepie for disaster on this guitar.  The bridge is obviously a low quality specimen and it has very deep string grooves so they get stuck and don't let the vibrato function properly.  The tuners are standard gotoh tuners. The nut is a cheep plastic version of the gibson bone.  So all in all the only good thing about this guitar is the wood and maybe the pickups and vibrato.

In the next couple of months I will start to transform this instrument into a players guitar, and get it ready for recording.  I already ordered a tusq nut and a roller bridge replacement.  In the next couple of weeks, I will also buy all new electronics and replace the crackling pots and faulty switch. Later in the summer I will buy schaller locking tuners.  Once all the electronics, nut, bridge and tuners are in place I will do several tests recording with the guitar and evaluate the Gigsby and the pickups.  At which point I'll decide if either need replacement or modification.  

I'm very picky about what guitars I use to record with.  Intonation has to be as near to perfect as possible, using a strobe tuner.  All switches and pots have to be efficient and completely silent.  If there is a vibrato on the guitar it has to return to tune, and the arm cannot be wobbly as this gets transmitted into the amp as noise when you use the bar, rendering that take unusable no matter how good the performance was.

I will be keeping very good logs of the progress, including videos and sound samples before and after so you can appreciate the difference in the upgrades.

Dimarzio Area T Bridge & Seymour Duncan Jazz Neck

I have a G&L Asat Blues Boy that I bought about 9 months ago.  I got it without plugging it into an amp, because of how great it played and the sweet tone it had.  This is a chambered guitar and it has a beautiful flame maple top with binding. (No F Hole!!!! Sorry I hate the f hole on tele's.) Maple neck and rosewood fingerboard.  My other Asat is an all maple neck on swamp ash solidbody and it is amazingly punchy and the pickups translate that very well.  On the Blues Boy however, the stock pickups didn't cut it for me.  On the neck it came with a Seymour Duncan (SD) Seth Lover, and it was really muddy.  The bridge pup was G&L stock but it was piercing and lacked the dynamic response from the other Asat.  So after some research I decided to change them for a SD Jazz Neck and a Lindy Fralin Blues Special Bridge.  The SD hit the spot right away. It was a lot brighter than the Seth Lover and it cuts through better. The Lindy Fralin lacked a lot of output and was not snappy enough.  

So the search was on to find a great tele bridge pickup that would be better than the Lindy.  Not an easy feat.  Lindy hand builds all of it's pickups and the tone and sound are very true to the vintage originals it mimics.  One choice was to send the Lindy to get it re-wound to get rid of some of the brightness and increase the output.  Another option I was considering was SD Jerry Donahue Tele  Lead APTL-3JD, which really caught my eye.  Also looked at Suhr, of which I'm a big fan of his build quality.  In the end after reading as many reviews as I could on each pickup, I went with the Dimarzio Area T.  I was a little afraid that it wouldn't match well with the humbucker because of the stated DC resistance at 7.5 which was 0.23 less than the SD Jazz. I'm also skeptical about matching different pickup brands on the same guitar.    

The Area T Brigde is now on my guitar and I still can't believe how dynamic, snappy and how much growl it has.  Did I mention it's a humbucker. A feature that originally pushed me away to make the Lindy my first choice as a replacement.  I wanted "the" tele sound out of that bridge pickup.  You know the snap, the punch, notes jumping out of your amp.  The Lindy sounded great, but didn't cut it for this guitar.  The wood on this guitar is not as bright sounding as my other Tele.  Add to that the chambered body and the rosewood neck and you get a very sweet, round, and somewhat mellow sounding guitar.  So the Lindy was missing the edge and output that I was looking for.  The tone was there, but the punch was not all there.  The SD Jazz completely out powered it.  If I was playing through a distorted amp and set the OD level with the SD Jazz Neck, the tone would be clean when I switched down to the Fralin.  The Area T hit the spot.  

The Area T is a medium output, humbucking bridge replacement for the telecaster type guitars.

It has the character and footprint of a single coil but there is no hum!  It has the brightness that is usually characteristic of these kinds of pickups, but it is not piercing.  It has all the snap and growl that you might be looking for from a Tele.  It is very responsive and reacts impressively well to your playing dynamics.  To my ears, it is just what this guitar needed, and now there won't be that much difference in response when I use the other Tele(ASAT).  I have a great tone control on this guitar, it is a std CTS audio taper pot and it has an RS Guitarworks Jensen paper in oil tone capacitor rated at .047uf.  So I get all the shades of tone that I want, and can really shape the sound of this pickup with it.  I highly recommend this pickup to anyone who is searching for a Tele replacement.  It is much louder than the Fralin which was rated at the same DC resistance.