I guess best place to start this whole journey is probably to give you a brief background on myself. I have been playing guitar for about 6 years now. I picked it up just after I graduated from law school and was studying for the bar exam. I am completely self taught, as I am in many of the topics that will be covered here, which probably means that if I actually took some guitar lessons I would be a bit better player than I am today. As I say to many people, I am not quitting my day job (as an attorney) but I can hold my own in a jam session. My current gear is as follows:

Guitar: Red DeArmond dual humbucker single cutaway .09 Gibson Les
Paul Strings

Effects (in the signal chain order): Dunlop Cry Baby Wah
Ibenez Tube Screamer 808 reissue
Boss DD-6 Digital Delay
DOD Analog Chorus
Accoustic Exciter & Big Bottom

Amp: Marshal AVT50 50 watt tube/solid state hybrid combo

This whole project came about for several reasons. First, my first (and to this point my only) electric guitar up to this point is the De Armond mentioned above. It is a great little guitar. It was actually made by Fender utilizing Guild bodies and necks. De Armond was actually and American pickup manufacturer that fender had bought a while back and decided to use it as the brand name for a single cutaway mahogany solid body dual humbucker guitar to compete with the Gibson Les Paul line. It’s a sweet little guitar. It has a very warm and full bodied sound with the right amount of punch and an insanely fast neck. However, it has the same drawbacks that all the other guitars of that style have. Namely, the fairly limited tonal options (only a 3 position toggle switch switching between the neck/neck&bridge/bridge pickup choices), the lack of a tremolo/whammy bar (actually it should be called a vibrato bar because tremolo is actually raising and lowering volume where as raising and lowering the pitch of a note is called vibrato), and last but not least the thing is freaking heavy. A strat style guitar basically addresses all of the short comings of the Les Paul. With 3 pickups the tonal options really start to open up. A standard strat pickup selector has 5 positions, and the ability to do some modifications that allow for all seven possible configurations. Additionally, the strat basically pioneered the Tremolo Bridge, which allows for dropping the pitch of a note or chord. Lastly, strats are typically made of Adler wood, which still is a very good tone wood, but is substantially lighter than mahogany.

Secondly, I have been working on a song on my digital 8 track and I couldn’t get a sound out of my De Armond that I had in my head for the solo. The main guitar track was laid down with my acoustic that has a nice warm rich tone by itself. When it was time for the solo I wanted to contrast the acoustic with an electric, but I found that my De Armond basically blended in to much with the acoustic and muddied the sound. It tried the bridge pickup, but it sounded too thin. I added some overdrive and distortion to the electric, but it just went straight into the heavy metal realm, which didn’t really mesh well with the acoustic aspect of the other instruments in the mix. I finally decided what I needed was a single coil start type guitar. The single coils would be bright enough to rise above the acoustic without having to crank the gain and going into the land of Metalica.

The last factor was that I stumbled onto a deal on a squire strat that I couldn’t pass up. Now I know that most guitar players think Squires are junk and for the most part they are correct. However, my plan was to replace all of the components that Fender skimps on and replace them with high quality parts. Then I will be able to create my own custom strat that was built the way I want it to be built. The guitar was $75.00, which is less than you can get a body for, which ironically enough is the only thing I am keeping on the guitar. After I brought it home and played it a bit I noticed a few things: 1) I was right that the tone of the guitar was just what I was looking for on the song, 2) that the different sounds you could get out of it far exceeded my De Armond, including the sounds you could get out of the effects such as the wah pedal; and 3) the thing was noisier than all get out, and was difficult to keep in tune whether when you are playing it or if its just sitting around. Additionally, I noticed that the noise got a little bit quieter when you touched the strings, which is a telltale sign you’re your ground wire had become detached. Obviously something needed to be done to make the guitar more than just a novelty.