Frenetically Modified
Before You ALTER Your GUITAR, IT’S WISE To PUT FEELINGS To one SIDE for a MOMENT and ADOPT an ANALYTICAL APPROACH To Tone
Car analogies seem to do the job well when it comes to discussing guitars. We all need to maintain our cars, from pumping up tyres to checking oil and water. In a guitar sense this maintenance covers an awful lot – your strings, set-up, replacing broken parts, cleaning, re-frets. So, maintenance is the basic knowledge that will get your guitar playing correctly, to its optimum.
modding? Well, that’s about fiddling with the performance of your engine, adding bigger types and wheel arches, resprays and let’s not forget those fluffy dice hanging from your mirror. It alters and – hopefully – improves the car’s performance but also changes its appearance.
By learning how to fix and maintain your instrument you’ll realise that most are pretty basic tools. a Stratocaster can be completely disassembled with a couple of screwdrivers and a soldering iron. “I don’t touch the electrics,” say many, but the vast majority of electric guitars employ 1940s-era radio technology with simple components, variable resistors, a capacitor or two and maybe a fixed resistor. pickups, of course, have become a dark art, but the designs that form the majority used today still date back to the 40s and 50s.
So why all this interest in modding? Throughout the history of guitars, players have always enjoyed having a tinker. Back in the 50s and 60s you had little choice but to maintain or alter things unless you were lucky to find an expert repairer or guitar-maker who was willing to help. Spare parts and pickups? good luck. Things like that were only available to dealers (and not us oiks), but that all began to change in the 70s, when replacement pickups and things such as brass parts became available to the end user and, with them, more discussion about the whys and wherefores of the electric guitar.
fast forward to the internet age and all these aftermarket parts – from a dizzying number of pickup makers, parts suppliers and luthier supplies – are just a click away. players aren’t just fixing up or restoring old, used guitars anymore, many are happy to buy new and before they’ve even got the guitar, let alone gigged it, have ordered up ‘better’ hardware, pickups and pots.
our mod Squad mantra of ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’ is not meant to put you off modifying. But, as we’ll see, mods can involve considerable cost – often beyond the initial value of the instrument – and don’t always improve your guitar, so knowing your stuff is key!