Reviews of Upgrades and Modifications

[wazkelly]

Having built a few Guitars and Basses over past 3 years most of them have been upgraded or modified in one way or another and felt that it would be a good idea for forum members to share their experiences and also the why, what and how so the broader community can benefit from some of these changes to standard kits.

My kit building journey began about 3 years ago and had been stalking the PBG site for a few months before ordering the 1st kit. At that stage I had no idea what were the essential upgrades, ie the must do items, compared to the higher end desirable but not so important things. Hoping that this part of the forum brings an insight into why some members have chosen to do things a particular way, combined with what they did and how things turned out, whether good, bad or indifferent, as let's face it, not all mods or experiments work out as planned.

By no means should this become a voice to trash the standard kits as they are built to a price and are a great place to start with to create a decent playable instrument at an affordable price. Hopefully this should offer an insight into some of the many optional extras and what to expect based on the reviewer's comments.

I will kick off with the most obvious upgrade and that is the standard guitar tuners which are functional and remain on 2 out of my 7 builds however Adam's special offer for the Grover locking units will be the best $45 - $60 spent on your guitar. Bass tuners are a different story and will create a separate thread with pictures.

Looking forward to seeing and hearing about all the mods & upgrades done by fellow forum members.

Cheers, Waz

[dave.king1]

I'll play.

On my PB-4H I swapped the pups for equivalent GFS items and GFS high mass bridge, all this happened at the build stage so I have no comparison to fall back on. It sounds great and plays well but it sits in the case because I don't play much bass these days and my office is just too tight to swing a 34" neck around, and I have a nice Yamaha 30" scale bass with a Fender Seth Lover 1970s HB ( pup is worth far more than the bass )

The Strat, I have only replaced the pups twice, I recorded with the kit pups and got a very credible Hank Marvin sound which is what I was looking for, not so good with James Wilsey ( Chris Isaak) sounds though but I had a set of Seymour Duncan Stacked Humbuckers that changed the sound into everything I wasn't looking for. Today I have Tonerider Vintage Classics and now have the sonic territory I was looking for well covered.

Next upgrade on the Strat will be a new 5 position switch because the kit item has become noisy.

My Tuff Dog Tele has a few mods all done from the get go to try and recreate the image of the Merle Haggard Custom Shop guitar, gold Tonerider Hot Classics because the CS has Texas Specials, gold 6 saddle bridge, gold oval jack plate and a white switch tip. The only thing I have to replace is the tuners to be gold with pearl buttons rather than all gold, still looks classy so may not bother.

The Strat and Tele have bone rather than plastic nut, bass yet to be replaced.

I also have a non PB Tele kit that has vintage Schaller Humbuckers in place of the single coils, Wilkinson compensated hardtail style bridge and bone nut. I rarely play this one and have put Elixer flatwounds on it for recording rhythm parts to get rid of string noise, will probably jack the action up and tune it open D or G for slide because the HBs really rock.

ps. On the subject of the Tuff Dog I saw Redd Volkaert at Penrith RSL in Feb this year who informed me that he had changed Merle's Texas Specials to Seymour Duncan's but couldn't remember which ones.

[Sonic Mountain]

Have to agree - Tuner upgrade is the best value for money improvement you can make. I also prefer a graphtech nut to the kit one.

The next best upgrade I think is the bridge. The kit ones are perfectly serviceable, but an upgrade really makes setup a lot nicer to do and easier to achieve. I've also found on the tunematic style bridges that they tend to rattle/buzz a bit - I'm planning on swapping them out eventually. So far I've found the stock pickups to be surprisingly good, it is fun to change and muck around with them, but I think that's the last thing I'd spend money on to change. My favourite combo so far is a stock neck humbucker and a vintage series Tonerider bridge pickup on the Sonicaster. The amount of tonal shade is amazing for such a simple setup.

[dave.king1]

Weird, I posted in this thread and now it's disappeared.

Talked about the changes I made to the PB, ST & TL kits

[Brendan]

Weird, I posted in this thread and now it's disappeared.

Looks like you'd accidentally deleted it. Good news - I could restore it.

[dave.king1]

Thanks Brendan, the edit function when posting from my phone does strange things.

Now that I am on the PC I have redone the edits in the post that disappeared

[wazkelly]

Thanks Brendan, Sonic & Dave, all good contributions.

What I envisaged was for us to create some sort of catalogue of the individual mods & upgrades, and specifically reviews on any branded parts used so that others can gain an insight into whether that would be a good option for them too.

Case in point was my recent search for information and feedback on GFS Bass pickups before diving in the deep end to try them out for myself.

I reckon it would be handy if the search function could pick up on keywords used throughout the many forum threads to help find such information, but if that is too hard maybe this corner of the forum could be a good place to drop various reviews for others to discover and help them make better informed decisions on what might work for themselves.

Really keen to see this grow and become a vast source of useful information to share with our fellow kit builders and forum members.

[Andyxlh]

Ok here's my list off the top of my head...
For me, I have 2 guitars with Gibson style bridges on them. It is very cheap to replace the knife edge bridge with a roller saddle one from eBay, they're come in all colours, and this solved a string breakage issue.
Again from eBay, the 42mm bone nuts are great if u take the time to fit them well.
The knock off Schaller strap locks, at about $1.50 each, eBay, are outstanding value. I remember paying about 30 quid for a set of real ones over 25 years ago (funny the things you remember).
I have had a fair few tonerider pickups in the guitars and found all of them superbly made and nice sounding
I have an Artist Bullbucker in the Frankenstrat which is amazing for about 30dollars
The locking nut on my SV1 has stripped the threads, and the replacement I got on the cheap did the same. I need to invest in an all steel nut to solve this which I did when I fitted the floyd rose special to the Frankenstrat.

[DarkMark]

Everyone seems to talk up upgrading the tuning machines, what is advantage? My guitar is still young but I can’t say I have any issue with the stock tuners. This question has been on my mind for quite some time.

[Simon Barden]

There are four different reasons to upgrade that I can see.

1) For looks. If you are trying to recreate a vintage style guitar/bass, then the stock generic kit tuners aren't going to do it.

2) For operation (1). If you are a heavy trem user, then you'd probably benefit from locking tuners.

3) For operation (2). The stock kit tuners are often quite low geared, some with a 12:1 ratio (though the only set of kit tuners I have handy are 15:1). The higher the ratio, the easier it is to get the guitar tuned, as each turn means a smaller movement of the string. As you can now get guitar tuners with 18:1 ratios, then you may want to upgrade for that reason. There is also less backlash in the gears. Once you get to 12:1 and above, there's enough resistance to stop the string tension pulling the posts round, so there's no need to upgrade for that reason.

4) For operation (3). The stock tuners are of varying quality. You may get a set where they are all fine, or you may get some where either they are very hard to turn or the peg is very loose so an upgrade is a good idea. A good set of tuners should have a consistent smooth feel with no graunchy bits and minimal backlash in the gears.

With the cost of upgrade Grover tuners from Pitbull being so cheap (for guitars at least), as long as you can get a set of tuners that fit the looks you want, then for me it would be an easy decision to upgrade them each time.