Is Yamaha SE200 worth upgrading?

[jayK]

This strat clone is 20 years old, but in very good condition. Has a very nice metallic blue finish with a black pickguard. The guitar itself has a lot of heft for a strat style guitar, its at least as heavy as my MIM fat strat. The tuners are excellent, this thing stays in tune for months. It's a cheap string thru bridge with "T" style saddles, not string thru body. Not sure what type of wood it's made from.

Anyway, I bought it 20 years ago and it was basically gathering dust until last year when I all of a sudden decided that playing guitar might be fun!

The main problem is that the pickups are very weak, they have lame output and no punch, which makes it hard to evaluate the potential of this guitar. Would it be worth it to throw some high output pickups in this thing. GFS has a great deal on overwound strat pickups for $15 dollars on their website. I could have my guitar guy throw them in for 30 bucks so for $50 I can give this guitar a chance to sound decent.

If anybody is familiar with this guitar and think its not worth it because of some "suck factor" let me know!

Thanks.

 

[stevie_bees]

Re: Is Yamaha SE200 worth upgrading?

I've often found with Yammies that the pickups are their only weak link. I'd be tempted to replace the pups, give it a setup and try it out.

 

[jayK]

Re: Is Yamaha SE200 worth upgrading?

I'm updating this post because I thought it might be of interest to some of you who like strats.

I did decide to take a chance and bought those "closeout" pickups for $15 on an internet site. They were described as "hot overwound", which is what I wanted because the existing pickups were low output & had no punch to them, just very bland.

Anyway, my local guitar guy threw these in, put on new strings and set up the guitar for $45. I figured it cant sound any worse than it did, and if it worked I'd have a cool guitar for $60.

This thing is now hotter than hell, it's got serious punch, a real classic "rock & roll" sound. It sounds so good that I now understand why people love single coil strats so much, this thing can compete on an equal footing with any humbucker guitar I own. Before I swapped out the pups, I couldn't play this guitar for more than 5 minutes before I got disgusted and put it down. Now, I cant put this guitar down, it is amazing how much different it sounds.

This was one of those experiments that turned out great. I've got a "brand new guitar", and I've discovered the magic of the true single coil strat.

The only problem is that now I'm gassing for more single coil strats!