Do More

Today we have a guest post by my good friend Adam. I gave him some advice and tips, but he did all of the work himself. I’ll let Adam take it from here: “I found this guitar at the bottom of my in-laws’ stairwell. It was being thrown out. When I touched the gig bag it was in, my fingers came away black with dust and grime yet inside was this near perfectly clean guitar. I did a bit of a quick clean and initial set up but now it’s time to get serious and get her playing and looking right. She’s an Epiphone Strat copy. I’d expect Scarlet to be getting on for 18-20 years old too. Further search reveals it to be an Epiphone S310 Batwing Stratocaster. This large cavity was what I was hoping for rather than the intricately routed ones on Fenders and Squires. It will make coating the cavity easier with copper sheeting. It also means I may be able to buy a Fender tortoiseshell guard. The pickups were set in different positions to a Fender and I was worried that if the cavity was shaped like a ...

The neck pickup on this Telecaster needs to be raised. However, as is the case on most Telecaster-style guitars, there are no height adjustment screws in sight. There is a way to adjust this, but it’s not entirely obvious. Although the following steps might seem like a lot of work, you can easily do this in 20 or 30 minutes. Before starting, you should really ask yourself why you want to adjust the pickup height. A common mistake is to think that if you move the pickup as close as possible to the strings, you can get a more powerful and better sound. However, as you move the pickup closer to the strings, the pickup magnets can start to influence the strings themselves, even dampening them and affecting the sound in a bad way. For this reason you need to be careful not to raise them by too much. The pickup on THIS guitar is noticeably low and the output is much quieter than the bridge pickup. I could lower the bridge pickup instead, but I already like how it sounds and don’t want to mes...