One of the biggest problems with being a guitarist who takes transit is having to lug your guitars on the subway, buses and streetcars of an urban centre. Add to that that I have a day job that I commute to and then head straight to practice from, that means my time spent on transit exactly coincides with the time of day during which these eco-friendly get-there machines are most ass-rammed. This is painful enough when you have to take a single guitar, but heaven forfend you decide that you need a second guitar at practice.
I’ve been toting my Esquire around in addition to my Les Paul, or leaving my Les Paul at the rehearsal space because I wanted to have that snappy spank of a maple-boarded Tele-style guitar for some of our material. I’ve also occasionally lugged a Strat along for the quacky tones only a Strat delivers. This is fine if I’m getting a ride, but is a huge pain in the poop chute otherwise.
Recently, I decided to see if I could convert my backup Les Paul – a 1982 Tokai Love Rock – into a do-it-all guitar. I wanted a guitar that could play the dirtiest of dirt and the cleanest of clean; one that could give me the full-bodied bloom of humbuckers and the thinner chime of single-coils. I decided to contact Jon Moore, a Canadian pickup winder to pick his brains about what I wanted to do. He recommended I use a series/parallel wiring scheme to switch my humbuckers from their traditional sound to a more single-coil flavoured sound. As an alternative to the coil-split method, series/parallel wiring also give you the added benefit of hum-cancelling in the single-coil mode, which is a huge bonus. I’ve had some guitars in the past with coil-splits, and yes, in the split mode, they can get very noisey, especially with higher-output pickups.
I decided on a slightly modified version of Jon’s Ultimate Rock Set, which combines a Hybrid Vintage-voiced pickup in the neck with a super-hot AlNiCo 8 pickup in the bridge. While I liked the sound of an AlNiCo 2 magnet in the neck, I was concerned about the output difference between the two pickups, so Jon suggested I go with an unoriented AlNiCo 5 magnet which will give a similar tone to an A2 magnet, but have a slightly higher output. I received a package with the pickups, 2 CTS 500k audio-taper pots, 2 Push/Pull 500k pots and a pair of .022 paper-in-oil NOS Russian capacitors.
Once everything was wired up and ready to go (many frustrating hours later), I gave the guitar a whirl and all I could say was...wow. I was hugely impressed with how well the modifications turned out. First of all, there really isn’t enough I can say about JS Moore’s pickups to show how much I like them. I’ve had a set of his Strat pickups before which I absolutely loved, so my expectations were high to begin with, but these humbuckers were an absolute home run. I’ve had high-output pickups before, but none of them captured the woody tone of a Les Paul so well before. There’s instant Clapton-Beano and VH Brown tones in here. Ditto the neck pickup; warm and organic sounds abound. You never get the sensation that you’re playing a pickup, you’re playing a guitar, with all its ancillary components contributing to the overall sound. The fat warmth and sustain of the mahogany body, the snap and spank of the maple top, everything is “picked-up” and sent to the amplifier, just as it’s supposed to be.
In terms of versatility, the 500k CTS pots give me the option of rolling the volume up or down slightly to increase or decrease the amount of overdrive created by my amp. This lets me constantly vary the amount of drive in a song to create louder and heavier passages to contrast the quieter cleaner passages much more than I would be able to with a channel-switching amp that has “clean” and “drive” settings. But the true stars here are the two Push/Pull pots in the tone position. In single-coil mode, with the volume rolled back to 5 or 6, I have a brilliant clean sound that I can overdrive slightly by strumming harder. Rolling up to 7 or 8 gives me a great bluesy drive and at 10, I’ve got a rich, sustained overdrive. In humbucking mode, I have to roll down to 3 or 4 before the pickups really clean up, but going up from there just adds more and more overdrive and compression, giving me a huge lead sound.
I’m able to now play everything from Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and the Rolling Stones to Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam and Buckcherry on one guitar. Sure, I’ll still take a backup to gigs, but for practices, the Love Rock has become my one and only. I’m sure the Gibson is unhappy about these developments, but I have some plans in mind for her too.
