This is a classic GP column from Gary Brawer.
To me, the idea of hot rodding your guitar encompasses anything you do to make the instrument special for you. People come into my shop every day looking for ideas to take their guitar to the next level. Hot rodding comes in many forms, and any one of them will hopefully inspire you to explore, play more, have fun, and sound more like yourself.
Let’s say you get a great deal on a cool guitar that, for some reason, doesn’t play or sound quite right. Or, maybe you have an old guitar laying around that you’re not playing, and you want to experiment with it. These are great candidates for mods.
Pickups
Let’s start with the electronics. While the wood of the guitar has a tone of its own, you can completely change the sound with pickups. Loads of high-quality designs are available from Seymour Duncan, DiMarzio, EMG, Lollar, Lindy Fralin, and many others. And no longer does the shape of your pickup determine its sound. You can get a large humbucker with single-coil tone, a P-90 sound out of smaller single-coil size, and so on, and all tones come in hum-canceling versions these days. A lot of companies (Duncan, Kinman, Acme, and Mojo to name a few) sell pre-wired pickguards—many with plug in terminals you can install yourself with no soldering required. Go with high-output for more gain and sustain, low output for vintage twang, or anything in between. Swapping out your pickups is the quickest and easiest way to upgrade the sound of your guitar.
Control Knobs
If you’re happy with your pickups, but still want more tonal flexibility, you can add some controls to modify what you have. Changing out one of your stock tone knob for