i am a total geek and can NEVER leave my guitars alone. any suggestions for boosting tone on a mexican strat?

Need more info man. What is it lacking, and what are you looking for as an end result?

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well i play everything from blues to reggae to metal and i have already blocked the tail, changed the nut, changed the bridge and neck pups (duncan hotrails n duncan distortion b), sanded beneath the bridge, and im debating on mounting the bridge pickup to the body as well as changing the pots and lining the cavity with copper tape.

im just running out of things to do and i want to get the best sound from my baby

What end result are you looking for? Is it not doing something you would like it to?

Unless it's doing something you don't like, I would just start playing the heck out of it. I have guitars where I just changed the pickups and they're great. One of my favorite guitars is a stock Squier, pickups and all. No joke. I love it.

You know, for a long time I didn't understand the term "tone is in the fingers" until I met the guitar player I play with now. He can take the same guitar I'm playing right out of my hands and make it sustain longer with just his fingers. He can do things tone-wise with it that I can't just by his playing style. Make it sound completely different. I personally think he uses a death grip. Hahaha. I think he learned it from Spock.

At this point I would say, just see what you can do with it the way it is. Give it a chance. Use your fingers. There's also a term "If you can sing, you can sing anything". And I think that applies to the guitar as well. I get a kick out of picking up just about anything, and seeing if I can make it sound great. Somehow our other guitar player can just do it. It drives me crazy. He laughs at me all the time.

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yeah my cousin used to play one of those yamaha strat copies and made it sound great and i just could never understood. i tried to play it and it sounded like crap, but it was his first and only guitar so i guess thats why. i know that i can play my strat better than i can any other guitar.

on another post i asked about directly mounting my bridge pickup to the body and some dude said that it would have absolutely no effect on the sound.

what is your opinion on that?

I didn't say none.but distance between pickup and string is where the big difference is going to be, not in whether its mounted to the body or a guard, or a pickup ring.

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I'm not an expert, but I play one on the internet.

Yea, I would agree with that.

If your pickups aren't buzzing hard, no need for copper. Sanding under the bridge is considered subjective. I wouldn't do it to any of mine. The nut, block, things like that.. I don't know. I don't mess with a whole lot of that stuff.

I play out live more than I record. I've heard of so many things that people do that I swear only a dog would be able to hear the difference if at all. When I'm on stage, there are 6 people playing at once. I have the opinion that people just seem to focus on your performance and presentation at that point than they ever focus on whether you've changed your block for sustain, or whatever else we do as guitar players to mod our guitars for tone. For my style, I like a clear sounding pickup for clean, and I work on the distortions from there. But once I'm happy with the way my guitar sounds in the clean channel, I leave it alone at that point.

Don't get me wrong, I've done a lot of modding. And some I wish I'd never done. Especially to my '57RI and Strat Plus in my early days.

Just take some time to enjoy what you've already done to it. Give it some mileage. Break it in. That would be my advice.

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k thanks. my only problem is im always tinkering, but you have a good point about not messin with a good thing. one little mod i sort of regret is one night i had just taken some ambien and decided it was a great idea to make my guitar look thrashed. i took a knife and some sandpaper and a lighter to it and it turned out kinda cool but i do sort of regret it https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=2 ... isp=thd&zw


https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=2 ... isp=thd&zw

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=2 ... isp=thd&zw