Transforming a special Les Paul Special II, Epiphone to Awesomephone!
I recently ended up with a few nice EMG HZ pickups and wanted to make something special... the thought of a BlackOut Epi Les Paul Special came to mind... I found one which started with all gold hardware, and dreamed it up from there... Here's a shot of the body just as I started to strip down the guitar for mods...
I think some of the best fun was making the guitar work with variable coil splitting. Since the overall design of the guitar and the pots is simple (one tone, one volume, 3-way toggle switch), I used two push-pull 500 kOhm pots and a nice switchcraft toggle (and a switchcraft jack, too...). These nice EMG HZ H3 pickups are splittable from the factory. Here's the neck:
Here's the bridge, but with all the black out hardware (the gold was donated to another project guitar - a black Vendetta XM... boy did it look nice in black and gold!)
Here's a shot of both the knobs pulled... The way I wired it, you could do the standard neck, neck-bridge, bridge configurations, but you could also choose to tap the bridge or the neck as you wish - lots of sounds... one very versatile, light, and great-playing instrument.
The headstock with its new wicked Wilkinson deluxe old-style (but black-widow black) tuners! Nice!
The guitar traded in one day. I didn't even have a chance to record with it... Too bad, really. It sounded FANTASTIC.
The neck on this particular LP was quite nice. I don't know why it struck me this way with a bolt-on neck on an Epi, but it was very nice. And the finish detail was very far above the $150 street price for the guitar I used as the donor instrument to my midnight mod-ness.
Cheers. See you again soon. The studio is full of works-in-progress!
I think some of the best fun was making the guitar work with variable coil splitting. Since the overall design of the guitar and the pots is simple (one tone, one volume, 3-way toggle switch), I used two push-pull 500 kOhm pots and a nice switchcraft toggle (and a switchcraft jack, too...). These nice EMG HZ H3 pickups are splittable from the factory. Here's the neck:
Here's the bridge, but with all the black out hardware (the gold was donated to another project guitar - a black Vendetta XM... boy did it look nice in black and gold!)
Here's a shot of both the knobs pulled... The way I wired it, you could do the standard neck, neck-bridge, bridge configurations, but you could also choose to tap the bridge or the neck as you wish - lots of sounds... one very versatile, light, and great-playing instrument.
The headstock with its new wicked Wilkinson deluxe old-style (but black-widow black) tuners! Nice!
The guitar traded in one day. I didn't even have a chance to record with it... Too bad, really. It sounded FANTASTIC.
The neck on this particular LP was quite nice. I don't know why it struck me this way with a bolt-on neck on an Epi, but it was very nice. And the finish detail was very far above the $150 street price for the guitar I used as the donor instrument to my midnight mod-ness.
Cheers. See you again soon. The studio is full of works-in-progress!
posted by Jim Pearson at
10:04 PM
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