Loud, Bad Guitar

If you are a beginning guitarist, then picking an electric guitar (or bass) to get started should be a pretty easy prospect. All you really have to do is pick something that comes close to fitting the type of style you will start off trying to play. Hopefully that's something of decent quality from an established brand so you don't end up spending playing time trying to get the instrument to work the way that it should. But even assuming it is not, and you spend a lot of time frustrated by quirks, flaws, and limitations, the most important thing about that first instrument is going to be playing it enough to get to where you know what you are doing and understand how you interact with the instrument. My Hagstrom Swede is a quality instrument, limited a bit by the quality of the original wiring and cheap pots that caused some hum issues and a nut that was cut in a way that made the G string bind a bit. Oh, and the bridge pickup had a coil demagnetize not too long after I got ...

I've recently come back to playing more electric guitar again after having mostly bounced back-and-forth between my Seagull acoustic and my Yamaha bass. I found a local luthier/guitar tech that was well recommended and had been in business forever to take a look at my Hagstrom Swede. I'd gotten it into my head to rewire it after the bridge pickup stopped working. I'd ripped out all the old wiring and bought new pots and caps, but then left the whole project untouched for a year for lack of workspace. The new wiring that The Guitar Doctor put in was flawless and completely knocked out the annoying ground hum that the crappy stock solder job had caused, but in the course of fixing it, Doc also discovered that one of the coils of the bridge pickup had demagnetized, which was the cause of the original problem. I love heavy metal (Enslaved, Opeth, Amorphis, etc.), so I had been spending a lot of time over the last couple years thinking about what pickup I might get if the non-...