He shows off a bunch of Gibsons then busts out a few of his Music Man guitars about 2 minutes in. He had great things to say about his MM axes:

They really are the nicest stuff

- Joe Bonamassa

I’ve had the Joan Jett Signature Melody Maker for about 5 days… so, obviously, it’s time to start modifying & upgradng the lil bastards.

First up the Burstbucker 3 pickup has to go. Out with you devil! Actually, it’s not a horrible pickup but I don’t quite like it. With some overdrive and gain it sounds decent but after a certain point all note clarity goes away. With a touch of OD open chords sounds pretty nice; they ring and you can make out each note but palm muted, power chords are lifeless. Add a touch more gain and we’ve got nice palm muted chunk but the open chords lose a lot; you can’t hear the separate notes too well and they just all jumbled together.

Also – I haven’t opened her up yet to check out the wiring but I hate the tone knob’s response. It gets pretty useless when then tone is cut all the way (ya, i know that’s an extreme setting) & the taper doesn’t feel/sound right to me. There seems to be a dramatic dip when you inch past somewhere around “5″ on the tone. I gotta have my dad listen to it to see what he thinks of the capacitor in there but I’m sure it’s junk.

With all that said I just (11pm-ish on June 25) ordered an “Unbucker” from Lindy Fralin. “What the fuck is an unbucker?” you ask. Here’s what Lindy’s gotta say about it:

In our Unbucker, we wind the screw coil stronger than the slug coil. This makes the pickup sound a little more single coil, but the best reason to do this is for coil tapping. When tapped the stronger coil is active as opposed to half a pickup.

from Fralin’s site

The jist is the pickup’s built for splitting in mind and makes sure that, when split, it doesn’t lose 1/2 the output (like when you normally coil-split by, essentially, cutting a humbucker in half). Of the 2 coils in the pickup one is the “stronger” coil and is the one that remains active when the pickup is split, matching (or getting close to) the output of a single coil.

“That cool but he said it ‘sound(s) a little more single coil’.” Great – that gets us to the P90ish realm???… maybe? probably not quite, but closer than any other standard humbucker. Given my current LP Junior fetish this sounds good (at least in theory).

The Jett’s gota kill switch on it: flip the switch and there’s no output from the guitar. This is a nice feature if you’re a super hot front woman and need the guitar to shut up while you sing some stuff – but to me it’s worthless. So, I’ll use the switch to do the coil splitting on the Fralin.

The final piece that led me to choose this pickup is a snip from a PAF pickup shootout I read. In this shootout the Unbucker came in 2^nd, beating out other high quality pups like Lollars, Fralin PAFs, 57 Classics, Burstbucker. The only pickup that it didn’t “beat” was a Tom Holmes PAF. Here’s what they said about the Unbucker:

Lindy Fralin – Unbuckers Running a close Second, Very Smooooth, Great Jimmy Page Bridge Sound, Great Harmonic’s Clean up nicely, Killer Overall Tone.
We were all very Surprised by the sound of this Pickup. Considering the Fralin PAF did not test so well.

So theoretically this pickup’s gonna be great for what I want: It’s a hair closer to a single coil, (hopefully) P90-ish tone & when split the pickup’s output doesn’t dip as much as splitting a standard bucker.

Up next will be the tuners. This thing’s not too good at staying in tune; not as bad as some POS guitars but it’s nowhere near the tuning stability I’ve grown accustomed to on my MM guitars. The guitar comes with mini Grovers so I’ll find some mini, locking Grovers and slap those fuckers on pretty soon.

Should be fun.

A couple weeks ago I had Dan’s SG Junior at my house and since then I’ve been wanting a P90 equipped guitar… and all of a sudden I’ve had a new found “thing” for the look of the SG.

Go figure huh. I actually think I want an SG w/ P90′s. Gonna have to keep my eyes open on the forums and eBay.

That’s right, I did what I swore I’d never do: I just bought a new Gibson… a Les Paul in Desert Burst which sports a 60′s style neck.

Here I am looking retarded with my new axe:

I’ll follow up with full view and more details later on… right now, I gotta get some work done.

Well, no, I’m lying. It’s not really a Les Paul Junior. Here’s the story:

I went by the San Francisco Guitar Center on President’s Day to check out the sale with a buddy from work. He was amp shopping and I figured I’d tag along to see if I could find one of those amazing deals I keep reading about. Nope – I didn’t see any of the $400 USA Jazz Basses that I read about, nor did I run accross any screaming, $600 deals on Music Man Bongo’s. What I did spot was this little, piece of shit, Epiphone, Les Paul Junior for $80. I played the little guy for a few minutes and figured $80 was a no-brainer.

I don’t know if I even bothered plugging the guitar in. Obviously, I was going to mod the thing so no use wasting time hunting down a sales guy to grab me a cable. What I did do was swing by the accessories department and pick up a Duncan JB humbucker. My goal: get this guy playing decent and have it put some good punk rock tones like what Green Day’s Billie Joe got on Basket Case.

Back in the Dookie days Billie played a Fernandez, Strat clone that he called Blue. Blue was modded with a Duncan JB in the bridge so that’s how I decided to let go of my DiMarizo kick and go with the JB.

Alright – so, I got the JB but there were a few more things to take care of:

1. An Epiphone isn’t cool.
2. The tuners are crap.
3. I assumed the bridge was crap.
4. The black pickguard was boring.
5. The creme pickup rings looked stupid.
6. I didn’t like the black knobs.
7. The guitar was just too clean. It had no soul – well, it didn’t look like it did. I had to give him a soul.

So, what do we do? The knobs, pickup ring and pickguard were no brainers. They had to go and replacements are easy to come by. A couple mouse clicks later those details were all taken care of.

Now, the bridge. I order a Wilkinson Adjustable bridge from Stew Mac. The description said that this bridge is like the ones used on PRS McCartys. I had one of those once and I figured it would be a nice addition to the guitar. Actually – turns out it sucked. LOL. The stock, shitty, bridge that came with it sounded better to me. The Wilkinson had this magical ability to suck the life out of the guitar. The tone got warmer and lost the top end zing. Some people are into that but that’s not the goal for this project so the stock bridge went back on.

The rest of the cosmetic changes required a few basic tools: A screwdriver, a drill, a lighter, a Dremel, sandpaper and a hammer. Yup, I was going to beat this shit out of this guitar and make it look like it was an old road dog. I couldn’t imagine having a clean and shiny Epiphone. There’s just no character to that look. I mean – it would look like an $80 guitar with new pickups. Fuck that! So, I beat the bastard senseless to give it a relic look.

The last piece of the puzzle was the tuners. I’m a fan of the Schaller Mini Locking Tuners but there’s a couple problems with those:

1. I’d have to order them and wait a whole week.
2. I was worried they wouldn’t fit the holes in the Epiphone’s peghead.
3. They wouldn’t fit the relic look I was going for.

So, out went the Schallers and in came some Gibson Historic Tuners. These tuners look just right. Quick tangent: These “to historic spec” Gibson parts are made in Japan… Ya, I’m sure that’s where they made ‘em in 1952. Fucking, stupid Gibson. Anyways – I got the tuners today and they didn’t fit either. Out came the Dremel and a hammer and 15 minutes later, voila, they fit just fine

So, what’s the little fucker look like now?

Not too shabby huh? Personally, I’m into it.

[flickr]set:72157604017995522[/flickr]

Some of you may recognize the look. It pretty much looks like the Billie Joe Armstrong Signature Les Paul Junior.

Was this on purpose? Not really, but, sure, kindof. I’m a pretty big Green Day fan and I have wanted Billie’s signature guitar. I’ve always wanted an LP Junior and figured BJ’s signature would be a good one to get. So, ya, I’ve admired his signature but I didn’t set out to copy it’s look. If I ever do get his signature I’d actually opt for the white one. Right off the bat I knew I wanted a tort pickguard for this project and pretty quickly after that it clicked that I was cloning the sig. model. I figured “fuck it” and went for it and I’m pretty stoked.

The main lesson I learned here was pretty big: The bridge has a huge impact on a guitar’s tone. I was shocked at how different the guitar sounded with the 2 different bridges.

Anyways, there’s the long and short of this little project. All in all it wasn’t much work at all and I’m very happy with how it turned out. I got the guitar playing great and it definitely cops that tone I was going for.

I chalk this one up as a win