Any Guitar Boffins?

[phil white]

hi,

i just recently bought an epiphone g400 custom 3 pickup on the cheap!random pic

i'm looking to overhaul the setup i'm after a kyuss/qotsa type stoner tone and have been looking at the dimarzio super 2's aswell as the classic gibson ones 57 etc from the sg's!

i've never tampered with a guitar before so is it gonna be a ball ache of a job, if i was to put a super2, 57 and something else special will it be poo. i have no real understanding so any help would be appreciated!

thanks.

[benno]

You can't really go far wrong with Dimarzio in my experience, I've got an Evo 2 and a PAF Joe at the moment and I love them to bits You definitely won't do your tone any harm by switching to Dimarzios. But you say you're mainly after the 'stoner' tone, which I think you'd probably be able to get with a fuzz pedal like a Big Muff, most of your tone comes from the amp and effects, the 'quality' of the tone (you get me?) comes from the pickups. (That's a pretty messy generalisation, but it should give you an idea)

Also, I've changed pickups in one of my guitars before and adjusted truss-rods and such like and it's really not rocket science, but you'll probably want to practice on a shit guitar before you set about your main axe. Doing the adjustments yourself is a really good way of getting exactly what you want, but make sure you take your time and do everything in little increments or you'll screw something up (for instance, over tightening your truss rod by a quarter of a turn will crack your neck )

Search around for some tutorials on changing pickups if you want to, but it's pretty self explanatory. just make sure that you take good notice of where everything is and should be before you take out your soldering iron and just put the new pickups in the same way (unless you want to include fancy switching options I guess, but why would you?).

Failing that, if you haven't got a cheap guitar to try things out on first (like taking the pickups out and putting them back in just to make sure you can! Well worth doing!) I'd just take it to your nearest repair/technician/whatever

Hope that helps