DM-1S with 2 pickups?

[zipen]

The DM1S comes stock with a single P90. Is there any reason why it couldn’t be offered as a dual humbucker, or 2 P90s? Like a PRS Santana for example? Looks like only a little bit of routing would work. It would create a very versatile guitar, depending on the pickup choice and whether you wanted to throw your pickups out of phase etc... I just love this body style.

[Dedman]

shoot Adam an email, I'm pretty sure you could get it with any pick up routes you wanted on special order :D

[Simon Barden]

Looking at the neck detail, any neck pickup would probably have to be moved back from the neck by at least 1cm, rather than touching it as is normal. The body has a fairly thin supporting tenon at the bottom, nut otherwise the neck/body contact area is quite small. If you rout out a cavity that removes the back of the neck pocket, then you've lost a lot of glued contact area and the neck joint becomes a lot weaker. So you'd need to move any pickup rout back a bit so there was still a back to the pocket with enough thickness for structural integrity.

Of course you could make a different neck with a tenon that sticks into the rout, like a lot of the other glued necks do, but that would move away from using the kit 'as is' (though maybe another standard neck with a paddle headstock could be fitted which had such a tenon and there weren't any bridge/scale length issues).

[Dedman]

they are bolt on neck Simon.

[Simon Barden]

they are bolt on neck Simon.

D'oh! How could I miss that! My stupd mistake. Even so, I'd recommend that PBG or the factory tries a humbucker neck rout first to see if there is a serious weakening of the neck joint area. The joint is fairly far forwards and you'd be removing a lot of support for it by a neck rout, especially one that went right up to the neck. The neck might then become fairly flexible (it happened with the LP Jr double cut specials). It may not, but I'd suggest at least one test construction to check this before offering a dual pickup option as standard. And if the right against the neck rout was weak, then see what a rout 1cm further back did.