The Journey Of My Life

Pheww! i just done the modification on my guitar.
I replaced my three old-standard pickups….mmm btw, did you know what guitar pickup is?
It’s some electrical components (actually it was a coil with something that i don’t know) located on the main guitar body, under the guitar strings, to "pick up" the sound produced from the strings resonance.
You can barely see it in most of electrical guitars in the world, only the models were different.
It’s divided by "single" (S) pickups and "humbucker" (H) pickups. Normally, the "humbucker" pickups was bigger than "single" because there’s two coils instead of one, but with the current technology, there exist "single-sized-humbucker" pickups.
Okay, enough talking about the pickups, you’ll see what i’m talking later.

My old-standard guitar pickups cofiguration was "Single-Single-Single" or sometimes written "S-S-S".
This was the standard pickups configuration for "Stratocaster"-model guitar like mine. The old look was like this:

Well, actually not all in the pic were the same with mine, the diffrent was in the headstock, mine was wood-like color instead of black, but the rest were the same. I took this pic from the CARVIN website.

fyi, "Stratocaster" or "Strato" term was first used by one of the biggest guitar factory: Fender. I bet most of you know this name, if not, then you have to read more :p.
There’s also many other models, such as: "Telecaster", "Les Paul", "PRS", etc, but we won’t talk about it.

I want to change it to H-S-H configuration.
Why i change it?
Well, first reason:
After some years of playing, the sound produced by my old pickups was very weak and very thin, so if i lowered the volume, i can’t clearly hear the note, but when i turn up the volume, i got feedback from the speaker. Bah! That’s horrible.
Second reason: I can’t afford a new guitar..he..he..he

But to change the pickups was not a cheap and easy thing.
For the good sound sake, i ran a money saving from my income from few months ago (about 4-5 months ago)…… *** oh my income :`( hiks, hiks, sniff ***, and finally i can bought it. Yeah!
A humbucker pickup cost about USD$ 85-99 in the overseas (approximately Rp.700,000.- to 1,500,000.- in Indonesia), and for the single pickup was about USD$ 45-60 (approximately Rp.500,000.- to 800,000.- in Indonesia). Notice that the Indonesia price were more expensive.
I bought two humbucker and a single new pickups, so you can count it by yourself!
But thank’s God, i didn’t get the maximum price, i spend about Rp.2,100,000.- overall. But it wasn’t included the pickguards, potentiometers, switches, knobs, spotlight stickers, etc, so it cost nearly Rp.3,000,000-. Wow! Quite a price for me!
Oh, yeah, the brand was Dimarzio if you want to know.

I did the wiring by myself and it took me about 2 days to did that. Thank’s God, i got many informations from the internet.
If i only wired the pickups to work independently, it was just easy then, but i want every pickups to work in series, parallel, and even the humbuckers to work in single coil only instead of two and there’s more….the electricity flow can be in phase or out of phase, so i can get many sound combinations. What a work?! :p
I won’t explain the wiring here, because it’ll need very long explanations.
You can call me personally if you were interested, or you can search in the internet.
If you curious about it, then i gave you a sneak peek what it’s look like inside my guitar:

Complicated huh?!
But, don’t worry. The important thing is what’s look outside (see pic below) and how was the sound like :).

Hmmm…minimalist
Notice that i changed the pickguard and added two extra knobs, also there’s a little switch under the selector.

Well, that’s all. I must continue in my thesis proposal revision.
I hope i can serve Him more with my new modification.

GBU.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 11th, 2006 at 8:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.