Epiphone Les Paul: a Mod Story

My Les Paul hasn't seen much action since I bought it. A cheap guitar that I never had professionally setup.
Playing it was like fighting it. The action was all wrong, the intonation was impossible and the neck was bowed.
I hadn't had the confidence to have a crack at it myself as getting information from the net isn't always reliable.
A couple of months ago I bought a book on setting up guitars. It explained clearly and with pictures what needed to be done. Also a few tools that were recommended that I hadn't considered.
One of them being an 18" straight edge. I'd looked around online and they weren't cheap.
I wasn't about to spend $40 on what is essentially an 18" ruler.

From one of my other projects, I had some leftover U shaped aluminium rail, which was a little longer than needed. After testing how straight it was against a known surface, I trimmed the excess and set to work on the Les Paul.

I loosened it off before tightening, using the DIY straight edge to ensure that I was on track.
Gradually tightening the truss rod and checking with the straight edge, I could see that the bow of the neck was becoming less pronounced. At each adjustment I'd play each string along the neck and double checking the trouble spots that I'd known about from before.

Pretty quickly it was obvious that the playability was improving. I'd adjusted the bridge for a fairly low action, so when I hit the strings hard there's a bit of buzz on the neck, but it's not audible through the pickups. I need the low action on this guitar as the neck is quite fat and I have fairly small hands.

The next thing that needed attention was the intonation. I'd had a lot of trouble with intonation on this guitar, to the point where the saddles would not travel far enough in either direction to compensate. Some of this was no doubt due to the action and lack of setup, but it was also a common problem with the cheap bridge used on a lot of Epiphone guitars. I'd added a Bigsby recently and figured that having a roller bridge wouldn't hurt any, so I picked up a Wilkinson clone for around $20 online, which turned out to be the best thing I could have done.
The design of the bridge is such that there is a lot of room backward and forward to adjust, as well as being able to flip its saddles without much effort. Intonation was breeze and the guitar was setup in maybe half an hour.

When I installed the Bigsby, I used a Vibramate to mount it in the existing post holes. The posts came out with little effort (I only needed to use my fingers), which I thought might be a problem later on. during the setup, one side of the Vibramate had lifted out of the body. I wedged it back in, but this doesn't seem like its going to be the end of that issue. I left it overnight, so it's holding for the time being.

The Bigsby design has two design flaws in my opinion. One, the way that the strings are mounted and the other is the limited movement of the vibrato bar. It doesn't allow the bar to move over the strings and sits just next to the high E. This means an adjustment of technique, by either grabbing it with my pinky, or pausing on a chord to move the bar. On my other guitars I usually have the bar centered over the strings and Hold it with three fingers while playing. I'm probably going to grind the stopper off the Bigsby to retain that freedom of movement.

You might recall that I scored some pickups from my friend's Gretsch. One of these I modified to fit in the neck position of the Les Paul. The biggest delay in putting this guitar back together was that I had not been lucky with trying to make a pickup ring to suit. It's not a standard sized mini humbucker, so there aren't any off the shelf solutions going around. What I ended up doing was modifying a standard humbucker ring to hold it on place. Now I have the same problem with this pickup as I do with the Filtertron on my Surfcaster. The string width is different. On Gretsch guitars the spacing is a little wider than Gibson spacing (which the Les Paul and Surfcaster use). This is no big deal on the center strings, but the E strings fall inside of the pole pieces and not directly over the op of them as intended.

I never thought it would make much of a difference. But it does. It makes a huge difference. The inner strings have great clarity and impact, where the outer strings are dull and lackluster. The pole pieces can be adjusted, but it only makes the string louder without the characteristic tone of the pickup.

One way of compensating for this is to put the pickup on an angle, so that the string almost sits in middle of the pair of poles. At this point I haven't managed to get quite enough of an angle and will need to extract the pickup and trim some more metal off the pickup casing.

The Gretsch pickup has a nice piano like tone, which really changes the character of the guitar. Coupled with the Semour Duncan P-Rail and the active EQ, I really do have a lot of tone options available on this guitar.
It's not quite finished, but I'm happy with the sound and feel, so it will likely be some time before I attend to the remaining issues.


So many guitars. So little time!

Works in progress

I've got the parts for my next upgrade projects.
Well most of them.
Waiting on a roller bridge for the Les Paul and an adjustable wrap tail for the Surfcaster.

The Bigsby and Vibramate were easy to fit to the Les Paul, though the strap button wasn't quite in the right spot, so had to be re positioned.  Haven't got strings on there yet as I want to mess with the pickups again.\

I did a quick and dirty job of rigging up the Filtertron on the Surfcaster.
So far I'm quite happy with the sound of this guitar/pickup combo. It's now got the right kind of bottom end and bite. Very nice cleans, very "alive" sounding.

Both guitars will probably end up being setup for flat wound 12's.

Who knows, it might be awesome?

Am leaning toward Filtertrons on the Les Paul now too.
At least one in the neck and the P-Rail in the bridge.

Jackson surfcaster update.

Not my guitar, but the same config,
but with the TV Jones in the bridge.

Since I got my Fender Princeton, the Surfcaster doesn't sound all that great.
Acoustically it's got a nice tone, but the pickup combo isn't quite right.
I'm not getting the richness of the wood and it's all sounding a bit mid scooped and dull.


The Neck pickup has scooped mids and the bridge has no top end when it's set to series humbucking mode.
Overall the tone of the guitar with these pickups seems a little flat and without the dynamics and definition I have become accustomed to from my other guitars. So I've decided on trying completely different pickups.


Recently I was impressed y the sound of Grestch humbuckers with a Fender amp and have decided to order a Filtertron for the bridge position, my inclination was reinforced by a post by TV Jones himself about using one of his TV Classic pickups in a Surfcaster. I can't really justify spending $170 on a pickup when I haven't heard it, so I did the next best thing and ordered a $50 Gretsch filtertron reissue (I know they're not the same, but I can't afford more at the moment). Anyway the pickup is a few weeks away from arriving in the post so I decided to do a little experimenting.


You may recall from my earlier post, that I had placed the Seymour Duncan P-Rail in the reverse configuration.
Well this morning I decided to put it the "proper" way around. This did have an effect on the tone, but it's still not quite what I'm trying to achieve. One thing that I did notice, is that when the bridge pickup is set to the single coil rail mode and it's selected in parallel with the neck pickup, it becomes a hum bucking pickup of sorts.


Since the rail pickup is very low output, the neck's tone dominates. I get that bathtub sound from the neck pickup, but without the buzz. the P90 coil on the bridge doesn't do this unfortunately, and when in the humucking  mode, the buzz remains with the neck pickup selected.


The P90 coil being slightly closer to the bridge seems to suit it a little better. So I may keep it in there after all.
When the Filtertron arrives, I'm still going to try it out, just to see if it's the perfect pickup for the Surfcaster.


I'm also working on a design for a Vibramate type device to allow me to have a vibrato on the Surfcaster, but be completely reversible.

Custom Charvel® Surfcaster with TV Jones® Pickups