I’ve Lost That Modding Feeling…Whoa…That Modding Feeling…

smitty_p said:
Don’t know what’s happened, y’all.

I used to rip things apart; swap parts; literally cut, drill, and route into my guitars and other stuff … and call it fun.

Now… I’m contemplating a minor pickup swap in my Jackson. I have the parts. I don’t need to buy a single thing. Just need to do it.

But, whereas I want the change…I just don’t feel like doing it.

Weird, huh?
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I think what I learned over time was:
No matter what you mod a guitar with, you never really change the sound of it.
You get some variations of the same basic core sound, but that's all.
It doesn't matter what pickups, or nut or anything else.

If a guitar sounds dead, then you can't change it with hardware or electronics.
What I learned was -- that it's better to start with a better body, than forever trying to make a body sound the way you "imagine" it should. No matter how much you hope for it...it's imaginary.

Pickup makers want to make you--- think that you need to buy pickups...for a miracle cure.
Nut salesmen want you to buy more nuts for the magic sustain !

But what I really leaned from all that,
it turned out to be the wood of the guitar forming the core sound that can't be altered.
Some certain wood just works a lot better.
The magic (if you are looking for it) is the wood.
 
smitty_p said:
Weird, huh?
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It's all mental, man! The wife always says: "Whatever floats your boat!"

Many times I've contemplated a theory that if I only had one electric guitar, one acoustic guitar, one amp, and no more than five pedals, I would be by 1000x a better and more skilled musician. Would this keep me happy? I'll never know, ha ha!!

But for the last 15 to 20 years, tinkering and F'ing with stuff "floats my boat".
 
Except for building stuff from scratch (or restoring something like my '62 SG Special), I think that for the most part I only repair stuff as needed.

My mods have been few. Make a stable tailpiece for my '69 SG that looks like it's original. Get rid of some nasty sounding distortion style or high output pickups, and replace them with truer PAF or OEM style pickups. Pot upgrade on a Les Paul with push/pull pots that I didn't like. More solid tailpiece posts on Jr. style guitars. Get something truer to OEM in my '62 mongrel Strat. Stuff like that. Otherwise, the majority of my guitars are stock.

Same with amps. Except for playing around with tubes.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
 
I have to modify stuff. When I was 8 years old I would fiddle around with the mixture on a Honda Mini Trail 50 to try and get more out of it. When I was in high school I started buying bare racing bicycle frames so I could build them the way I wanted. In college I was changing out parts on my 68 SG and built a kit version of a Hafler DH220 power amp. My nephew is still using it 35 years later. This hobby is great because of all the facets that are available. I like to build amps, but I won't ever mod my DSL100HR. I like it the way it is. I have the Metro kit to put a loop in my 800 clone. Might get around to it.
 
smitty_p said:
So…last night I decided to go ahead and do that pickup swap I mentioned…but I couldn’t find my soldering iron!

Moving can make ya lose stuff!

Foiled!
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I hate when that happens. I'm in the never ending state of boxing, move around, unbox, box, move stuff around some more as we're trying to do work on the house.

In the meantime, I can't find my two Blue en*Core 300 microphones. They're around here somewhere, and I'd like to try recording some stuff with them. Grrrrrr..........
 
Yay.

I found my soldering iron. It seems I had already unpacked it, along with my heat gun, and just put it on a shelf in the garage in the new house, but forgot about it.

Ahh, well…funny how that happens…
 
smitty_p said:
Yay.

I found my soldering iron. It seems I had already unpacked it, along with my heat gun, and just put it on a shelf in the garage in the new house, but forgot about it.

Ahh, well…funny how that happens…
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I still haven’t done that pickup swap, though…
 
smitty_p said:
Yay.

I found my soldering iron. It seems I had already unpacked it, along with my heat gun, and just put it on a shelf in the garage in the new house, but forgot about it.

Ahh, well…funny how that happens…
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There’s a few things we still haven’t found after moving to this new place in March of 20 :run:
 
Don O said:
There’s a few things we still haven’t found after moving to this new place in March of 20 :run:
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When moving, I've usually given away / thrown out a lot of the stuff that's still in the unpacked boxes from the previous move. If there are several years between the moves, chances are that stuff isn't needed...
 
Robert Herndon said:
I've learned a lot about live sound too.

What you hear in a quiet room you will never hear in a live mix, so most of that is just wasted time and money.
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Here's a random thought: how the rest of the band is playing, how the mix is, and the content / phrasing / timing of what you are playing matters a lot more than whether you have the right op-amp inside your tube screamer.

A bad rhythm section kills all music.
 
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