Fantasy Studio, James, and his mid size amp collection, Great or Greatest amps.

Gary, James and his flock.

     I recently went on a house call to the beautiful Fantasy Recording Studio to do some guitar work.   I always enjoy stopping there for work.  While I was there I spent some time visiting my old pal James.  Not only does he keep all that cool recording gear in tip-top shape he has a little collection of amps the studio keeps around for artists to rent.  Here is a not so good photo of a few of the amps....and us.
     There was a serious case of amp envy going on.

Upgrading a Floyd Rose Bridge

     Our friend Adam at Floyd Upgrades has made a great go of it building and selling custom made components to upgrade your Floyd Rose Tremolo.   He makes things like trem sustain blocks made of brass and titanium,  titanium stringlock inserts, custom trem arms, saddles and more.
     Here we are swapping out the stock trem block with one of the brass sustain blocks.  Some things make more of a tonal difference than others.  We defiantly got a thicker fuller sound with this brass block.  Check out his website Floyd Upgrades and see if you get inspired.  We can help you decide and put it all together.

Here you can see the difference of the 2 blocks

Bits and Pieces

All ready to go!

Hopping up a Humbucking Pickups by Adding Wire 7.7K up to 9K

Here is a early patten # Gibson Humbucking Pickup, very similar 

if not exactly the same as an actual  PAF.  

Typical DC resistance on something like this is between 7K and 8K.

In short, the larger the resistance the more output, Midrange and Fatter the tone.

In exchange for that you have less clarity and high end.

I will get into winding and magnetics in a later post.

We wanted to turn this average 7.4k pickup into one of those rare higher output 9K's

Maybe a little muddy for the neck but a great fat sounding bridge pickup.

Taking the pickup apart and getting the tape off without damaging the coil is the tricky part.

Then splice on some of the same type of magnetic wire and wind it up.

Oddly enough on neck pickups we have removed coil wire to make the pickup cleaner and brighter.

Adding a 22nd Fret to a 21 Fret Strat, Getting to "D" on the high E

This is a trick we used to do a-lot more back in the days before the 22 fret strat became more the norm.

The hard part is matching the finish on a maple neck.  On a rosewood fingerboard you can hide it even better.

Here is a basic 21 fret vintage style Strat neck.

Removing the 21st fret and adding the wood for the extra fret.

Here is the finished 22nd fret addition.