GuitaRasmus
Well-known member
Hi guys - just wanted to show off my project. I bought an Axis last september, and it has become my absolute number one guitar - I own a very nice Prs, and a couple of other great guitars, but this guitar has the edge. Anyway, the bridge humbucker is probably the single greatest humbucker for distortion I've ever played - it has amazing clarity and punch, but I use a lot of clean sounds as well, and even though I've modded it to have a push pull pot to split the pickups, split humbuckers never really touch the clarity and harmonic richness of a good single coil. I tried buying a great HSS strat, but nothing really compares to my Axis, playability or soundwise.
I've toyed with this idea for about 6 months and yesterday I took a deep breath, went to the workshop, and got out my routing template. I've worked as a tech, and built about 10 guitars, so I'm pretty experienced in this kind of stuff, but I must admit that I was a bit nervous, because with this kind of stuff, you're tampering with voodoo - I own another axis, and while it is a very nice guitar, this one is something special - it has mojo. This made me a bit nervous, because I didn't want to alter the acoustical voice, but I figured that removing such a small amount of wood would't matter too much. Luckily, I was right - once it was put back together, it sounded just like it always did - freakin' awesome, and rings out played acoustically.
I used a router template, and measured very carefully, so I can still remove the pickguard (it's put on with doublesided tape) and use it as HSH configuration - I didn't alter the neck pickup cavity, I modified the single coil instead, cutting the normal mounting brackets into the triangular Dimarzio shaped "ears". The switching is accomplished by sending the two singlecoils to the 3 way miniswitch, and the output from this switch is then sent to the large 3 way switch, which switches between the single coils that are selected and the bridge humbucker. The bridge humbucker is split with a push pull pot.
This way, any combination of pickups are available, and it gives me easy access to the sounds I use most of the time - either the bridge humbucker solo, or the neck + middle combination. I also managed to get the phase/polarity correct, so that it is humcancelling in both the neck + middle pos. and the middle + bridge split - very neat.
The single coils are Suhr Fletcher Landaus by the way - definitely my favourite single coils.
It sounds so amazing, and I'm so glad that I dared to do this, because it has made my number one guitar even more amazing than I thought it could be - This guitar does everything from sparkly cleans to full on metal. Absolutely amazing.
Enough with the talking - pictures:
I've toyed with this idea for about 6 months and yesterday I took a deep breath, went to the workshop, and got out my routing template. I've worked as a tech, and built about 10 guitars, so I'm pretty experienced in this kind of stuff, but I must admit that I was a bit nervous, because with this kind of stuff, you're tampering with voodoo - I own another axis, and while it is a very nice guitar, this one is something special - it has mojo. This made me a bit nervous, because I didn't want to alter the acoustical voice, but I figured that removing such a small amount of wood would't matter too much. Luckily, I was right - once it was put back together, it sounded just like it always did - freakin' awesome, and rings out played acoustically.
I used a router template, and measured very carefully, so I can still remove the pickguard (it's put on with doublesided tape) and use it as HSH configuration - I didn't alter the neck pickup cavity, I modified the single coil instead, cutting the normal mounting brackets into the triangular Dimarzio shaped "ears". The switching is accomplished by sending the two singlecoils to the 3 way miniswitch, and the output from this switch is then sent to the large 3 way switch, which switches between the single coils that are selected and the bridge humbucker. The bridge humbucker is split with a push pull pot.
This way, any combination of pickups are available, and it gives me easy access to the sounds I use most of the time - either the bridge humbucker solo, or the neck + middle combination. I also managed to get the phase/polarity correct, so that it is humcancelling in both the neck + middle pos. and the middle + bridge split - very neat.
The single coils are Suhr Fletcher Landaus by the way - definitely my favourite single coils. It sounds so amazing, and I'm so glad that I dared to do this, because it has made my number one guitar even more amazing than I thought it could be - This guitar does everything from sparkly cleans to full on metal. Absolutely amazing.
Enough with the talking - pictures:
