Epiphone SG Overhaul - Finally Finished

It's evolution, baby... or are we actually moving backwards?

A bunch of pictures from the current status down to starting point of the overhaul.

I think I'm finally happy with the instrument now.

EMG pickups have been removed for good - I put some nice Epiphone pups in and wired them in a "vintage 50's Les Paul" scheme, which means that the tone control is wired after the volume control.

It is tuned in Dropped - D.

Aria MAC- 30 Finally Done

I got this one back in 2006 or 2007 and I love the slim neck.
But the original tone was pretty much unusable for me - loved the feel of guitar, couldn't stand the sound of it.

I always wanted to redo the pickups and pots and see if I could get some improvement.
Now I finally finished this project and I'm very happy how it turned out.

Original specs:

Alder body
Maple neck with rosewood fretboard
(Awful) black no name pickups with mini switch to coil - split the humbucker
Standard five way switching
Master volume and master tone
Hardware in brushed aluminium with a well - working vibrato which I set up quite stiff no up- bending

Changes:

New wiring and pots
DiMarzio DP184 "The Chopper" Humbucker in neck position
DiMarzio ISCV2 "Evolution" Single Coil in middle position
DiMarzio DP207 "D Sonic" Humbucker in bridge position


Changed the switching too:

• Neck humbucker alone
• Neck humbucker automatically split (north coil active) to work in conjunction with middle single coil
• Middle single coil alone
• Middle single coil and bridge pickup together
• Bridge pickup alone

There is a DiMArzio EP1108 mini switch which that allows parallel / single coil / series switching on the bridge pickup.

So in the "in between position" the middle pickup can work with the bridge humbucker in all threee variants.

Eventually I got a very usable and versatile instrument after all these years!

Now, should you buy this guitar if you're looking for a new one?

I guess it depends what you are looking for.

It's a well built beginner's axe (at least my specific model was) easily up there with all the "cheaper" series of the big name manufacturers.

Best of all, it's very playable so you don't have to fight the guitar whilst just learning your way around the instrument.

But if you want good sound coming out of it, you WILL have to perform some modifications.

By the way - the "Aria" - logo doesn't mean it has anything in common with the "Aria Pro" instruments, at least as far as I know.

I love the Aria Pro instruments of old but i quite distrust this new Aria labelling.


D'Addario Super Light Gauge on this one, .042 to .009, bright, round wound.

Johnson JLP - 50 WA Classic Series

Now I know, I posted this one before http://bartbowlesblog.blogspot.co.at/2010/03/mr-brown.html

I didn't post the details though, so here they are, mainly to help me recall all the (useless) information:

Built in 2010
Mahogany neck and body
Korina top
Walnut finish
Rosewood fingerboard
Three Tesla VR - 60 Classic Gold Pickups

So there you go - all the secrets of "Mr. Brown" revealed.

Fenix Les Paul

Sadly she's mute at the moment... pretty much everything inside needs to be redone - hope to find the time soon.

Höfner Club Solid

HCT - CS10 in nice glossy black.

Mahogany body, maple top, set neck with rosewood fingerboard.
Höfner Hi - Power Diamond Pickups that really deliver a great vintage - style tone (which means something different to everybody but I like the sounds of this one a lot).
Two volumes and one master tone.

Rather round neck shaping and the string spacing is quite tight - which I like but for players with huge hands the strings might be a little but too close together.

The building quality is even higher than I expected, definitely an instrument to consider if you don't expect it to be a high gain metal monster.