05/01/2022
New year, new gear!
..well, not quite. I've had this G&L ASAT Tele-style guitar for about five years now. It's always been my favourite electric guitar to play feel-wise. It's rock solid, rarely breaks strings, and is extremely reliable. But with a single coil pickup in the bridge and a humbucker in the neck, I found it wasn't very versatile in terms of tones.
That's where Shane Benjamin at Rumble Guitar Workshop comes in. I dreamed up a crazy pickup mod that involved routing out the guitar and coming up with a complex wiring schematic to make it happen, and Shane went above and beyond to put this guitar back in my hands with the exact spec that I outlined to him.
It's gone from a two-pickup configuration to a three-pickup configuration like a strat. It has a five-way switch, just like a strat, but the bridge and neck pickup are selectable as a combo via a small toggle switch on the control plate. The volume and tone k***s are push-pull pots that switch the neck and bridge pickups from being wired in series to parallel.
There's not a gig this guitar couldn't do now, not a genre it couldn't handle. The carefully selected DiMarzio humbucker pickups have a lot of the characteristic s***k of traditional single-coils, but without any of the noise. This is one of the best gear investments I've made in a long time, a true guitar for life, and I can't thank Shane enough for helping to turn my mad ideas into reality.
Finally, here's a video of it in action on a cover of J. J. Cale's "Magnolia". I've used a good few of the different pickup configurations, with some almost-clean solos in the middle and a heavily tube-overdriven sound at the end.
