Oh, man. On my way home from city　hall, I stopped at a guitar botique on Koshu-Kaido. It’s the closest instrument shop near me, the next being Yamano Gakki which I fucking hate. There was the nicest archtop sitting there in a corner. I played it and realized that the instrument I’ve been using for the last 5 years in inferior. It looked niced, played better, sounded better, had a louder acoustic tone, and better design in so far as it was a traditional one with f-holes and a set neck.
The things I like about my guitar are it’s acoustic tone, natural finish, paisley soundhole, and bolt-on neck, but the guitar doesn’t seem to work. That’s why I’m always modifying it, and trying different string brands and gauges. The trouble is that I’m actually pretty sentimental when it comes to guitars. When I got my Tacoma, it wasn’t quite what I expected and so I conceeded that I would need to adapt my technique to the guitar. It was never an ideal instrument though, and I’m definitely outgrowing it, but how do I affort a 700,000 yen guitar?

No sooner than I brought my guitar to my repair guy to have a new pickup installed than I realize that I can’t stand the pickups on my other guitar either. For the last 13 years, I suppose I’ve been just tolerating the bridge pickup on my G&L Legacy, probably because I like the other two, especially when together out-of-phase in positions 2 and 4. They sounded so funky and clear.

These days they just sound weak to me. Once I replaced them with a set of Van Zandt’s which were too hot and thick. So I went back to the stock Seymour Duncans. Around the same time, I had a Roland GK-2A synth wart mounted as well. The hex pickup wouldn’t fit between the bridge and the rear pickup, so the solution my repair guy came up with was to move the entire pickguard forward a few milimeters.

This actually had a subtle but unpleasant effect on the sound, but since I had just acquired my Tacoma archtop, my strat became my back-up axe, so I wasn’t overly concerned with this. Now that my archtop is in the shop, I’m playing my Legacy again. Last night while I was trying out a V-stack it was just unbearable though. There was a second note, just slightly sharp whenever I picked hard that caused a harsh warbling.

It wasn’t the first time I noticed it, but I had previously thought it was my amp which was just repaired. I thought the repair people fucked it up somehow, but after hearing the same problem through a different preamp, I realized it must be the pickup. Lowering the pickup away from the strings solved the problem, but it sounds even weaker now. I was planning on getting a new pickguard to restore the guitar to it’s original condition, but I think I’ll need new pickups, too.