The seed is planted… uh-oh
No, I’m not growing anything illegal, I’m talking about the seed of an idea for a new guitar. After frittering away most of Friday and Saturday afternoons poking around many of the guitar stores within a 40 mile radius of my house, I’m starting to come up with what would be a great Private Stock guitar. But since I don’t have private stock money, the idea fermented into a roll-yer-own project.
The inspiration for this guitar is, to some extent, the discontinued PRS Custom 22 Soapbar. Take a basic PRS body, routed for three P-90 soapbar pickups, glue in a maple neck with either maple or rosewood fingerboard, a five-way blade switch and you’re now into some very cool sonic territory—Strat on steroids. But finding a Cu22 Soapy is getting tough since they’re snapped up by collectors very quickly, especially those with rosewood fingerboards with I prefer. And, now that I think about it, I tend to prefer stop tails rather than tremolos. And, while we’re at it, how ‘bout rosewood for the neck rather than maple? Sounds like Private Stock, right? Seriously… who am I kidding??? I can’t afford a Private Stock guitar and even if I had that much disposable income I would be on the phone with David Thomas McNaught and not PRS. But still….
Enter the McCarty Soapbar. It has most of what I’m looking for—the same basic body style, but a bit thicker, with a pair of soapbar pickups and simple three-way switching. No maple neck, but a wide-fat rosewood is an option. Yummy. And just the thing to balance the guitar out. Now we just need to add a third soapbar and change the electronics. This is where things get a big scary since most sane people don’t route the tops of their $2k guitars. Wimps. Just get a router guide from Stewart MacDonald and crank up the old plunge router and you’re good-to-go. Or get in touch with your favorite luthier, one you trust with the aforementioned $2k instrument and have them fire up their plunge router.
Next up: switching. It’s gotta be five-way:
- Neck pickup only
- Neck + Middle
- Neck + Bridge (stock center position on a McSoapy)
- Bridge + Middle
- Bridge only
This should give plenty of versatility and some pretty cool “in-between” tones. Get a reverse-wound P-90 for the center position and it will even be hum canceling.
But let’s go a step further and add a blend control a laDon Grosh. Huh, why? After comparing my Yamaha Weddington Custom to my PRS Custom 24, I found that I really liked the ability to use the volume controls to blend pickups much more than I like having a tone control. So ditch the stock tone control and put in a dual-gang audio taper 500k ohm pot to blend the middle pickup into with the neck or bridge pickups. The wiring might be a little tricky, but it should be possible. I think there are even two ways of doing it without hacking the face of the guitar up. One way would be to keep the exiting volume control, but replace the tone control with the blend control and replace the stock three-way toggle switch with a five-way rotary switch. That would work, but I think the rotary switches are more difficult to use. So the second way would be to replace the existing volume control pot with one that sports a push/pull DPST switch and wire it to the middle pickup so it could be engaged/disengaged simply by pulling the knob; replace the tone control with the blend control, leave the three-way toggle switch in place and you’re golden. Pull the volume control to engage the center P-90 and adjust the flavor to suit using the blend control. Heck, you could even do away with the push/pull pot and use the blend control to dial the middle pickup in or out of the circuit as necessary. Pretty cool, huh?
Toss in one of PRS’ uber-cool anodized aluminum stoptails and a set of Sperzel or similar high-quality locking tuners (‘cause I hate the way Kluson-style tuners look) and you’re on the road to sonic nirvana. So what do you think? Should I give it a go? I just might if I can find the right IRW McSoapy. I just might….
Why do I think the madness is now unstoppable? Love you!