The Humbucker Sounds are really Rocking, Jazzy and Fat - depending if we are talking Neck or Bridge. Sound emphasis is on the higher strings. Still unforgivingly clear and clean, but not with a Single Coil signature. Just the Single Coil/Humbucker switching on both pickups gets me through the night. All I use as an effect now is distortion. Before the modification of the guitar I had a "Jazz solo" setting on my ME 33 to produce fat sounds for Jazz solos. Now I just use the neck pickup in Humbucker setting. And the solo is on top of everything. Perfect volume and sound. After the solo Neck SC and Bridge HB do the Rhythm work. The Bridge SC or HB are perfect for "That's the way I like it" type Disco tunes and similar sounds. Also the chorus and reverb infested sounds that I had programmed are out of commission. The guitar sounds so amazingly good that it would be a crime to alter the sounds with strong effects. And for good measure, I added metal knobs instead of the original plastic ones and had Andy DePaule, who is really an artist in his own right, create a truss rod cover from Paua Abalone with golden Mother of Pearl inlays. And voilà: The Guild S300 SD Alex Hast signature. |
The
Guild S300 is one of
the best Guitars ever built. My S300-SD used to be a S300-D.
The playability was and is divine, the sound was not what I needed
on stage with the
Bluebirds. To get snappy sounds from the lower strings of my S300-D, I needed serious single coils. Tired of dragging one of my Strats or one of my beloved Fairytale Guitars in addition to a Humbucker Guitar along to most of my about 100 Live-Gigs every year - or listening to my Band leader's complaints about the same old sound of the Guild, I was thinking about a modification of the S300. Shortly after that I read in GuitarPlayer Magazine (do they have ESP?) an article with wiring diagram about the Jimmy Page Les Paul and the special wiring/switching it had/has ("The mother of all wiring mods") to achieve all the amazing different sounds that Jimmy Page used with Led Zeppelin. And I just had the feeling that this could be the perfect solution for my sound problems. Click here to see the pdf file of this Guitar Player Magazine article "shop talk" from the June 2008 issue with the wiring diagram (subscription recommended, they have a lot more gimmicks like that one). And yes, it turned out to be
just that: the perfect combination of hardware that puts every
guitar sound ever invented at my fingertips. Each pickup is
switchable as Single Coil/Humbucker with the volume push-pull pots.
In addition to that the tone push-pull pots switch the pickups out of phase and in
series. Four push pull pots are enough to do the trick and no
drilling or irreversible modification is required. So I sent an email to Seymour
Duncan (where the article in Guitar Player actually originated),
explained my plans and they recommended the SH-3 Stag Mag for
vintage Stratocaster sound switchable to serious Humbucker sound.
But it was absolutely worth
it. This guitar - in my possession since the mid 80's - sounds
just amazing. Anything from Tele-ish and Strat sounds to
brutal Disco and fat Jazz (L5 like) sounds. The upgrade to the
Seymour Duncan PUs did not hurt that much, considering - as we found
out - that someone
soldered a weird DiMarzio in the Neck position, replacing the
original Guild pick up. Even though this S300-D should have had
What affected the sound significantly were the amazing Stag Mag SH-3 pickups. I was a bit afraid after I read a review from a "professional" on a website. It went a little bit like this: "Have a Gibson SG, put the SH-3 pickup in. Sound bad. The Humbucker sound is just like the Single Coil sound, just twice as loud. Took it off again..." Let me put BS like this to
sleep. The Single Coil sounds of the Seymour Duncan SH-3s
(click on the picture to visit the website) are really vintage Strat
sounding. The pickups are unbelievably clean and clear, piercing and when you think a note, it already rings out.
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| And here
an email from a fellow musician about this idea:
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Thanks again and keep rockin'! Matt
And right and left are the pictures of his gorgeous axe!
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They also suggested to take two to match the output of the Pickups.
So I bought two SH-3s, four push-pull pots and my friend Oscar
Garcia (picture) from Southgate offered to solder the project.
And he did it perfectly. What a crazy amount of work.
two
DiMarzios in it instead of two Guild Pick ups originally, it was
initially equipped with Guild Humbuckers. The GuitarTech who
replaced the Guild PU with the unauthorized and strange sounding DiMarzio
PU did this in the
early 80's and - for good measure - placed or forgot a condom (...this
is a sample - not
for sale...) in the rear compartment at the time. We replaced it with a
current model without affecting the sound significantly.
