Fender ST72-80SC Yngwie Malmsteen Stratocaster | Part 3

I mentioned in Part 2 of this series that I wanted to completely rewire my Japanese Fender ST72-80SC Stratocaster from Ishibashi. This guitar is an unofficial Malmsteen model from 1992 or 1993, for sale in the Japanese market-only, so just for kicks, I decided to up the Yngwie pedigree and change the front and bridge pickups to DiMarzio HS3's.

So off I went to Singapore's Haven For All Things Guitar (Peninsula Shopping Centre to you readers from these parts) in search of supplies for the big rewire.

I managed to procure a CRL 5-way switch, two .047 Russian military-grade paper-in-oil capacitors, and of course the two DiMarzio HS3 pickups. In addition, I also bought three Seymour Duncan YJM 250k potetiometers. The pots are made by Bourns and are probably the smoothest, fastest pots you can buy. Great for quick volume swells but one must be careful when using these puppies in a performance setting. It's really easy to accidentally turn a tone pot down to zero.

Duncan YJM volume pots

But why two capacitors you might ask? I wanted to get the guitar wired so that the centre tone knob controlled the neck and middle pickups, while the second tone knob controlled  the bridge pickup. That bridge pickup can be a beast sometimes, especially through a bright-sounding amp like a Twin Reverb.

Russian paper-in-oil .047mf caps

The stock Stratocaster wiring never made sense to me. In the stock layout, the first tone pot was wired to the neck pickup while the second tone pot controlled the middle pickup. The bridge pickup, the brightest and potentially most brittle sounding of the the three was tonally always wide open.

I found that I had to constantly compromise on the amp settings when using a stock Strat. When I got the bridge pickup sounding warm and full, the neck pickup sounded muddy. When I dialed in a bright, twangy, ballsy tone on the neck pickup, the bridge pickup became a raging banshee -- absolute shrillsville.

What to do? Take a cue from tone guru Eric Johnson and dedicate the second tone pot to the bridge pickup.

In this very early article, I mentioned how Joe Bonamassa is also a fan of this mod. Although I'm not sure if his suspiciously overly simple description in the video of moving one wire on the 5-way switch to the left (or was that the right) would actually work.

I'll leave wiring my guitars to the pros.

Luckily for me, my go-to guy for guitar electronics, our good buddy and film location sound recordist Arnold San Juan, had just wrapped on a TV series he was working on and was on a two-day break before his next project. Arnold, if you remember, also rewired my Gibson BFG Les Paul, replacing the pots and caps, reconfiguring everything to traditional Les Paul wiring -- killswitch be damned.

After unsoldering the old Gotoh pots from the stock pickups, Arnold proceeded with installing the Duncan YJM pots. As expected, the shafts of the Duncan pots were a tad larger than the Gotohs which meant that the holes in the pickguard had to be enlarged. Good thing there was a circular file lying about.

Unsoldering the Gotoh pots and 5-way switch

After seating the new pots in the pickguard, it was time to break out the DiMarzio HS-3's from their packaging.

Duncan pots installed. Time to unleash the DiMarzios!

The store I bought the HS-3's from only had them in black and white. White would have looked fine, but a single black pickup would really have looked out of place. Fortunately, the store a few doors down had a set of three DiMarzio pickup covers in cream. And they weren't too expensive at 15 bucks.

The original owner of this guitar had replaced the front pickup with a generic Fender single-coil, so rather than buying three HS-3's, I decided to switch this pickup to the centre position, with the two HS-3's bringing up the front and the rear.

Original Japanese Fender single-coil pickup. Note additional magnet below

'Bringing up the front and the rear'. Bet you've never heard that phrase applied to guitar pickups before.

The cream pickup covers slipped over the HS-3's without a hitch, but the Fender pickup's coil was too short for the DiMarzio covers. The polepieces were just buried underneath, so I chose the best looking of the three original pickup covers and used that for the lone Fender pickup instead.

Using the supplied DiMarzio pickup screws and springs, Arnold mounted the two HS-3's in the neck and bridge positions. Oddly enough, we found that none of the original screws fit the mounting holes of the Fender pickup. All of them simply slid through the mounting holes without engaging the threads. Very strange, considering that the neck pickup was securely mounted with the old screws. Arnold managed to dig up a pair of pickup screws from his tool box that fit nicely although they were a little rusty.

Okay, very rusty, but they'll do for now.

Installing CRL 5-way switch

So why not the new Seymour Duncan Yngwie pickups, the ones that Malmsteen has been swearing are the best ones he's ever heard? Believe me, I was tempted.

But after hearing the Duncan Yngwie's and comparing the two, the DiMarzio HS-3's just sounded juicier to my ears. There was a slight compression to the tone of the Duncan's I didn't quite dig, and the overall tone was a little more scooped around the mid-range. But hey, Yngwie swears by them.

Our other good buddy, Sherman, recommended I give paper-in-oil capacitors a try when I wanted to rewire my Les Paul BFG. I liked how they sounded on the BFG so I decided to go with .047mf PIO caps for this rewire. So out went the stock dark green mylar capacitor along with the three Japanese Gotoh potentiometers.

Russian military-grade paper-in-oil capacitors

But does it all really make a difference? To be honest, with better pots and better quality capacitors you can expect a 10% improvement in tone. The pickups and the wood on the guitar itself make for the other 90%, player notwithstanding. But hey, we're replacing 20-something year old parts for a few bucks so why not?

It's like wearing a nice, clean pair of socks. No one can really see 'em, but at least you know they're there.

Wiring done!

When Arnold did the obligatory screwdriver tap-test on the pickups, we found that the Fender pickup, relocated to the middle position was the loudest of the three.

DiMarzio HS-3's are known to not be very hot, but I found it a little strange that they would have less output than a generic Fender single-coil. Setting the middle pickup low and flush to the pickguard a la Yngwie helped to even out the volume difference.

And I'm glad I didn't go with three HS-3's. The stock Fender is a nice contrast tone-wise and I often find myself playing off the middle pickup by itself, something I never used to do.

DiMarzio HS-3's installed in neck and bridge

The DiMarzio's by themselves do the job very nicely. They are smooth and creamy at high gain -- a very even sounding pickup with no surprising frequency spikes. But I do miss that typical ballsy Fender twang.

Leo Fender wasn't messing around, he certainly got it right way back when.

Bill Connors | "Never Say Goodbye, Variations on Layla"

This one brings back a lot of memories! 

The July 1985 issue of Guitar Player magazine was devoted almost entirely to Eric Clapton and this piece, "Never Say Goodbye -- Variations on Layla" was specially commissioned for the included Soundpage.



According to Bill Connors who composed 'Variations' and played all the guitar parts, "The session took place at Media Sound in New York.  I had trouble hearing the first part back in my headphones, and when I added the middle voice to bars 17 through 22, the chords turned out to be slightly out of tune, giving things an eerie quality.  I considered doing it over, but decided that it had a horn-like feel that I liked, so I kept it."

Connors used his Charvel Strat-copy equipped with prototype DiMarzio pickups through a Dean Markley tube amp and Marshall cabinets.

Readers old enough to remember the heady experience of peeling open the outer shrinkwrap cover of a newly purchased record album will also remember the wonderful aroma of the black record vinyl therein.  (Don't knock it til you've tried it). 

Back in the day, circa October '84 til Dec '89, GP's monthly addition of the free Soundpage -- a paper-thin playable record, manufactured by Eva-Tone -- always featured exciting and unique content, often unavailable anywhere else.   Replete with that black vinyl smell!

It was on the first of these Guitar Player magazine Soundpages that I heard 'The Attitude Song' by a guy called Steve Vai -- blowing my mind and causing me to bust more than a few strings in the process. 

Check out my earlier Bill Connors article here.

Pete Anderson and Reeves Gabrels Reverend Signature Models At NAMM 2010

Pete Anderson and Reeves Gabrels will be performing with their respective signature Reverend guitars at NAMM 2010.

The Pete Anderson Signature is a decidedly retro-hollowbody affair with Reverend P90 pickups, a Bigsby vibrato and a noticeable Gretsch guitars influence. 

The Pete Anderson also incorporates a unique feedback-reducing design called the Uni-Brace to adapt the hollowbody instrument to a wider variety of musical (and higher volume) situations.  The Uni-Brace, invented by Reverend Guitars founder Joe Naylor, is a 1/2" wide piece of wood that traverses the bass-side of the guitar underneath the laminated spruce top, from neck block to bridge and also adds sustain to the instrument. 

Unlike the Pete Anderson, the Reverend Reeves Gabrels is a more contemporary design with a bolt-on maple neck and solid korina body with a flamed maple top.  Featuring a Reverend humbucker in the bridge and a DiMarzio Fast Track 1 in the neck position, the tone control knob is also a push-pull phase switch for added tonal versatility.

Both the Pete Anderson and Reeves Gabrels models feature Reverend's proprietary Bass Contour Control which alters the bass frequency response of the pickup, allowing their humbuckers and P90 pickups to sound like single-coils depending on the amount of bass rolled-off.

(Pic Source: http://www.reverendguitars.com/)

PRS Al DiMeola Signature Model

Now this is a beautiful instrument -- almost too beautiful to play. It should come with its own glass-case, halogen spotlight and velvet rope.

Al DiMeola has been playing various PRS's since the late '80s, alternating them with his mainstay axe, his famous black '59 Les Paul Standard with cream DiMarzio pickups. But this is the first time PRS has come out with an 'Al D' signature axe.

The Al DiMeola Prism features PRS's standard 25" scale length, a custom-shaped Peruvian mahogany neck and black Mexican rosewood fingerboard with abalone bird outline inlays with paua centers. The carved curly maple '9' top is coupled to a mahogany back. (Why not a '10' top we wonder -- this is after all Al's signature guitar. I guess those are saved for the Private Stock series)

The standard tremelo bridge and pickup covers for the humbuckers are nickel-plated. The pickup covers, interestingly, have a brushed texture giving a satin-matt finish. And as anyone who has owned a guitar with nickel hardware will tell you, nickel ages to a similar dull lustre if not wiped regularly.

A 3-way toggle switch, and a single volume and push/pull tone control for humbucker/coil-tap selection complete the setup.

Al originally suggested a 'tie-dye' finish which eventually evolved into the breath-taking Prism of colors on the final version.

And if you look closely at the Prism's various tints, several of PRS's primary colors are represented -- Vintage Yellow, Amber, Vintage Cherry, Purple, Royal Blue, Whale Blue and Emerald Green -- each blending into the next. Wow.

Flash Review #1 -- Ibanez Andy Timmons AT100CLSB

My girlfriend took this video of me noodling on an Ibanez AT100 at a music store in Kuala Lumpur. Which gave me an idea for a new series for The Guitar Column -- the Flash Review. (And if I had known she was recording I would have put the guitar through its tonal paces more, from clean to dirty, and everything in between. Oh well, next time..)

Here's Flash Review #1 -- The Ibanez Andy Timmons AT100CLSB:

Featuring an alder body on a maple neck, the AT100 is a joy to play.

When I picked up the guitar, the neck immediately reminded of the limited-run Loch Ness green JEM 777's of the late 80's-- a neck shape which Ibanez didn't incorporate into subsequent editions of the JEM.

The AT100's fingerboard edges are slightly rounded off for that played-for-years, broken-in feel, and the jumbo frets were substantial without being overly high or wide -- they felt a little like Dunlop 6105's.

Hardware consists of Sperzel locking tuners and a Wilkinson vintage tremelo with bent steel saddles. This Wilkinson model is a six-screw mount design but on the AT100, the middle two screws are intentionally left out.

This was a common way to get a Strat's six-screw tremelo to behave more like a two-point fulcrum edge, increasing tremelo range and more accurate return to 'zero' thus stabilizing tuning. Some folks went so far as to remove the middle four screws, leaving only the outer two.

But there was a problem with this particular instrument -- the guitar totally fretted out from the 5th to the 7th frets. There was also a considerable bow in the neck -- a sure sign that somebody had spotted the fret-out, loosened the truss-rod thinking that that would fix the problem while leaving a little dent at the truss-rod nut channel at the headstock in the process. Ouch.

Fret-outs notwithstanding, the AT100 feels and sounds like a really nice, thoughtfully souped-up Strat. The imperceptibly slight 'V' shape on the back of neck makes for a very comfortable ride, with the thin finish giving it the texture of raw, unfinished wood.

The two DiMarzio Cruiser pickups blended very well with the DiMarzio AT1 custom humbucker at the bridge. There wasn't that unpleasant tonal jump when shifting from the neck pickups single-coil'ish tones to the full-blown humbucker at the bridge -- a typical problem with guitars with the single/single/humbucker configuration.

The tonal balance of this combination of pickups is nearly perfect.

Another feature I really liked was how the first tone pot controlled the neck and middle pickups, while the second tone pot was dedicated to the bridge humbucker. This is extremely useful for tempering the bridge pickup's tone when stick-shifting between pickups, so you don't sound like you 'just picked up a different guitar' when you shift from the neck to the bridge pickup -- as how Scott Henderson aptly puts it.

The AT100 is probably the nearest thing, in terms of tone and feel, to a Fender Stratocaster in Ibanez's current line. It captures the traditional vibe surprisingly well (never mind the pointy headstock) while breezing effortlessly into more modern territory at the flick of a switch.

Couple the AT100 with a Timmons-approved Xotic BB Preamp, for absolute tone heaven!