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You know, it's kinda funny how you can change a guitar completely. Let's all share our experiences
Let me recount how I made a real Gem from a lump of coal with My Epiphone Les Paul Custom.
It was in september 2001 when I went to the vintage guitar fair in Veenendaal for the first time that I first encountered that epiphone which years later would capture my heart. Back then it was an off-the-shelf Alpine white Custom, nothing special. An Early nineties Epi, looking very much like the one pictured.
Epiphones Lesters from that era are notorious for having bad pickups and my Custom was no exeption, they hummed when I touched the covers and howled and screeched very badly with even the tiniest amount of distortion. I also hated the neck profile which for some reason never felt right. In an attempt to remedy the issues that I had with this guitar I replaced the pickups with Dimarzio Super 2's which solved the howling and screeching issues but I never liked the sound I got from them.
Finally after owning it for about six months I gave up on that guitar and put it up for sale. I ended up selling it to a church choir and I figured that that was the end of my business with the white Epi lester.
...But I was wrong.
Because only a few months later, I found myself staring at that very same Epi Lester at my boss' workshop. That guitar was in terrible shape, the neck was cracked open full length, it was a lost case.
Several years go by and our workshop went through several big renovations and we had a lot of orders we had to work off so there was little time to work on anything else. The guitar never left it's place, it always lay in a corner of the workshop gathering dust. The people I sold it to never came back to reclaim it, they probably bought a new one.
And then one day after we had finished our daily shift I decided to rescue the porr deteriorating lester. I took a chisel and chopped the broken neck from it. I then took a neck that came off an archtop Jazz guitar which was made with the wrong scale length and thus had to be replaced And gleud it in the place of the original neck. That replacement neck had a much fatter profile than the original, and it was made from very high grade mahogany with an ebony fingerboard.
So I took it home, and I wired it up with two Duncan P90 pickups. The first thing I noticed when I strung it up was how much better the guitar played and how much better the neck felt.
But the P90's failed to deliver the grunt I wanted to have and it ironically was something else I bought on that very same day I bought that Lester which made all the difference. I bought a Seymour Duncan 59 pickup that day and I loved the sound of those ever since that day. So I replaced them with those.
So all of a sudden I had a Les Paul in my posession that sounded and felt "Right". Throughout all the modifications I did, it somehow gathered a lot of MOJO but there was still one thing I needed to do with it.
The body was still a mess, replacing the neck chipped the finish in a couple of spots and the exposure to saw dust, moisture and what have you from having been stored for so long also didn't do it very good, it had really ugly brownish spots and the dark mahogany of the neck clashed with the alpine white (or what was left of it)
So I wet sanded the body smooth and refinished it dark wine red, a solid color. Matching the Red of my old Stratocaster (I actually walked into a paint shop with my Strat and said "Could you guys match this?") I then applied seven layers of coating and the result is a very good looking high gloss red. It goes great with the neck and I think it looks lovely.
The guitar during finishing.
Currently I swiped the golden hardware for black plated and it now looks really classy.
I bought a failure and it became a winner.
Let me recount how I made a real Gem from a lump of coal with My Epiphone Les Paul Custom.
It was in september 2001 when I went to the vintage guitar fair in Veenendaal for the first time that I first encountered that epiphone which years later would capture my heart. Back then it was an off-the-shelf Alpine white Custom, nothing special. An Early nineties Epi, looking very much like the one pictured.
Epiphones Lesters from that era are notorious for having bad pickups and my Custom was no exeption, they hummed when I touched the covers and howled and screeched very badly with even the tiniest amount of distortion. I also hated the neck profile which for some reason never felt right. In an attempt to remedy the issues that I had with this guitar I replaced the pickups with Dimarzio Super 2's which solved the howling and screeching issues but I never liked the sound I got from them.
Finally after owning it for about six months I gave up on that guitar and put it up for sale. I ended up selling it to a church choir and I figured that that was the end of my business with the white Epi lester.
...But I was wrong.
Because only a few months later, I found myself staring at that very same Epi Lester at my boss' workshop. That guitar was in terrible shape, the neck was cracked open full length, it was a lost case.
Several years go by and our workshop went through several big renovations and we had a lot of orders we had to work off so there was little time to work on anything else. The guitar never left it's place, it always lay in a corner of the workshop gathering dust. The people I sold it to never came back to reclaim it, they probably bought a new one.
And then one day after we had finished our daily shift I decided to rescue the porr deteriorating lester. I took a chisel and chopped the broken neck from it. I then took a neck that came off an archtop Jazz guitar which was made with the wrong scale length and thus had to be replaced And gleud it in the place of the original neck. That replacement neck had a much fatter profile than the original, and it was made from very high grade mahogany with an ebony fingerboard.
So I took it home, and I wired it up with two Duncan P90 pickups. The first thing I noticed when I strung it up was how much better the guitar played and how much better the neck felt.
But the P90's failed to deliver the grunt I wanted to have and it ironically was something else I bought on that very same day I bought that Lester which made all the difference. I bought a Seymour Duncan 59 pickup that day and I loved the sound of those ever since that day. So I replaced them with those.
So all of a sudden I had a Les Paul in my posession that sounded and felt "Right". Throughout all the modifications I did, it somehow gathered a lot of MOJO but there was still one thing I needed to do with it.
The body was still a mess, replacing the neck chipped the finish in a couple of spots and the exposure to saw dust, moisture and what have you from having been stored for so long also didn't do it very good, it had really ugly brownish spots and the dark mahogany of the neck clashed with the alpine white (or what was left of it)
So I wet sanded the body smooth and refinished it dark wine red, a solid color. Matching the Red of my old Stratocaster (I actually walked into a paint shop with my Strat and said "Could you guys match this?") I then applied seven layers of coating and the result is a very good looking high gloss red. It goes great with the neck and I think it looks lovely.
The guitar during finishing.
Currently I swiped the golden hardware for black plated and it now looks really classy.
I bought a failure and it became a winner.
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