Guys I've had a fun ride... Literally 40 years in the music industry and a lot of opportunities to mod guitars over the years and you guys have been a tremendous help.
But life has changed, I'm shutting down my workshop and I figured I'll pass along some of the cool stuff that I've acquired over the years in hopes that you can use it.
I call the first one the "Hyperquack Mod", it's been one of my most successful sellers, and it's actually the mod that got me into doing serious mods.
It came together as a planned design with a lucky accident.
The goal was to build an HSS "do everything" guitar, and you guys would probably do most of the same things that I originally did.. A beefy bridge to cover humbucker stuff, and two stratish noise canceling pickups to fight stage noise.
This mod has been successful with practically any mid to high gain bridge humbucker that splits well in the two position. JB and PG have been particularly successful, but you can go as powerful as you want as long as one coil quacks well in second position.
For the middle and neck positions, I got lucky with a great combination from the start.. A cool rail neck and a relatively low output cruiser in the middle encourages quack.
Combined with a piezo pickup, this was already a pretty good "do everything guitar" but the hyper quack mod ramps it up to 11.
So what's Hyperquack? It was a wiring mistake where I grounded out the end/start leads of the cool rail and the cruiser on the same spin a split
The spin a split was on a bypass and the first time I flipped it in something glorious happened... Positions two through five all shifted tones significantly in different ways... Some were thicker, however, the cool rail lost a whole bunch of its oomph but gained a wonderful, classic stratish character, even though no spinning was taking place.
And when you spin it, you can go down to almost ridiculous thin quack. Like cutting funk or chicken pickin and these are normally pretty thick pups.
The settings in the middle are glorious... It's just fun to turn that knob in different positions and even better to dial in what's working in a live environment. Definitely not your regular spin a split.
And when you bypass the spin a split you go back to the full-blown character of the pups and it's almost like you have a blower on the cool rail when it goes back to full blast.
So why is this such a complex sound? I actually had to ask lots of questions back when I first did this.. up to this point I had done simple mods, but the answer kind of blew my mind when I realized all of the complexities.
First of all, the pickup selector is no longer deselecting the second coil of the unselected pickup... The signal is running through the selected pickup into the spin a split and then running in series through the coil that would normally not be on.
So you end up with an extra coil in series and when you start spinning you kill off that coil as well as the coil that is actually selected. You've got some regular split combining with unusual coils and series so every turn of the knob is pretty effective. It's s far more extreme than your standard spin a split and you can get some ridiculously cool single coilish tones and great strat quack along with thicker tones.
And it's ridiculously simple to do.. I would suggest you grab any HSS that's sitting around , set up a spin a split pot that you can bypass and run any double rail pups together through that spin a split and something is guaranteed to happen.
The cruiser and cool rail appear to be optimal but you're going to get some kind of effect with any dual rails. I think the key to make this really effective is to maximize quack in the first place.. The more natural quack you've got going, the more powerful this mod seems to be.
And that leads to the question, is this something other folks are already doing and I just missed it?
Demo for cool rail follows that gets into a few of the hyperquack tones...
https://youtu.be/ckayhw3JPT4
Hope this might be useful for you guys.
But life has changed, I'm shutting down my workshop and I figured I'll pass along some of the cool stuff that I've acquired over the years in hopes that you can use it.
I call the first one the "Hyperquack Mod", it's been one of my most successful sellers, and it's actually the mod that got me into doing serious mods.
It came together as a planned design with a lucky accident.
The goal was to build an HSS "do everything" guitar, and you guys would probably do most of the same things that I originally did.. A beefy bridge to cover humbucker stuff, and two stratish noise canceling pickups to fight stage noise.
This mod has been successful with practically any mid to high gain bridge humbucker that splits well in the two position. JB and PG have been particularly successful, but you can go as powerful as you want as long as one coil quacks well in second position.
For the middle and neck positions, I got lucky with a great combination from the start.. A cool rail neck and a relatively low output cruiser in the middle encourages quack.
Combined with a piezo pickup, this was already a pretty good "do everything guitar" but the hyper quack mod ramps it up to 11.
So what's Hyperquack? It was a wiring mistake where I grounded out the end/start leads of the cool rail and the cruiser on the same spin a split
The spin a split was on a bypass and the first time I flipped it in something glorious happened... Positions two through five all shifted tones significantly in different ways... Some were thicker, however, the cool rail lost a whole bunch of its oomph but gained a wonderful, classic stratish character, even though no spinning was taking place.
And when you spin it, you can go down to almost ridiculous thin quack. Like cutting funk or chicken pickin and these are normally pretty thick pups.
The settings in the middle are glorious... It's just fun to turn that knob in different positions and even better to dial in what's working in a live environment. Definitely not your regular spin a split.
And when you bypass the spin a split you go back to the full-blown character of the pups and it's almost like you have a blower on the cool rail when it goes back to full blast.
So why is this such a complex sound? I actually had to ask lots of questions back when I first did this.. up to this point I had done simple mods, but the answer kind of blew my mind when I realized all of the complexities.
First of all, the pickup selector is no longer deselecting the second coil of the unselected pickup... The signal is running through the selected pickup into the spin a split and then running in series through the coil that would normally not be on.
So you end up with an extra coil in series and when you start spinning you kill off that coil as well as the coil that is actually selected. You've got some regular split combining with unusual coils and series so every turn of the knob is pretty effective. It's s far more extreme than your standard spin a split and you can get some ridiculously cool single coilish tones and great strat quack along with thicker tones.
And it's ridiculously simple to do.. I would suggest you grab any HSS that's sitting around , set up a spin a split pot that you can bypass and run any double rail pups together through that spin a split and something is guaranteed to happen.
The cruiser and cool rail appear to be optimal but you're going to get some kind of effect with any dual rails. I think the key to make this really effective is to maximize quack in the first place.. The more natural quack you've got going, the more powerful this mod seems to be.
And that leads to the question, is this something other folks are already doing and I just missed it?
Demo for cool rail follows that gets into a few of the hyperquack tones...
https://youtu.be/ckayhw3JPT4
Hope this might be useful for you guys.
