Things to do to my Fender Mustang

I have a Fender Mustang that I’ve modified a bit. There’s a few more things that I want to do to it, in order to make it all around my favorite guitar of all time. Then I’ll have to start hacking on another guitar.

So here’s my thoughts for what I want to do pretty soon. The only downside being that this is all going to cost what the guitar did, all over again:

• I want to put a new bridge pickup on it. The stock bridge pickup is fairly anemic compared to the neck one I currently have in there. I’m thinking perhaps a humbucker that I can split, or a P90. I don’t mind routing out the body a bit more or the pick guard.
• I’m going to put a Graphtech saddle/bridge system on it, which basically is throwing piezo pickups on it. This will allow me to do three things:
  • Output a piezo pickup sound (a bit more like an acoustic, but not quite)
  • Output to a 13-pin midi synth system for synthesis and tracking
  • route a mult of each pickup to send back to a sustainer system (more on this later)
• Put a much better volume pot on there. Tune a fixed tone pot position for each pickup and remove the tone pot. Replace with encoder for midi system or piezo system.
• Rewire pickup switches to make them more useful with new pickup system
• Add a kill-switch
• Add a Fender branded Bigsby tremelo. This will make it look “almost stock” but not quite.

I’d like to build another guitar or two with this similar feature set. Also, thinking of how I could integrate a Nintendo Wii controller on the guitar for both IR finger tracking and motion sensing to use with Max/Msp

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 5:06 pm and is filed under audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.