Beauty and the Beast

I have some crazy guitar modification ideas that I wanted to share with everyone and see if there are any opinions or things I haven’t taken into consideration.

I’m always dreaming of cool guitar mods to make guitars more than they are – or at the very least separate them from the normal bunch. My problem is that I’m constantly torn between the idea of loading a guitar up with all sorts of cool knobs and switches and trying to make it as streamlined as possible.

So this round of ideas is entitled Beauty & The Beast and features two Gretsch 5120s (6120s would be better, but are significantly more expensive and because of the price a little more difficult to accept the idea of cutting into it).

We’ll start with the Beauty since it’s the easiest to describe.

The poly finish would be stripped off and replaced with a clear lacquer. Then the pickups would be replaced with P90s from an undetermined company and the hardware would be upgraded to include a brass Tru-Arc bridge, a US Bigsby and some sort of tulip tuners (like you find on a lot of Gibsons) since they’re my favorite style of tuners. I’m a little torn between chrome and gold. On one hand I don’t like gold, but on the other, anything else on a natural body doesn’t look quite right.

Since this is all in dream land, I’ll say we’ll replace all the hardware with gold.

Now, the Beast. The beast will also be refinished in lacquer but in an off (or aged) white. The binding and Gretsch logo on the headstock would be black. I’m getting excited just thinking about it. The pickups would be replaced with Seymour Duncan P-Rails which feature the ability to be switched between three pickup tones (a Strat style, a P90 and a humbucker). The wiring is incredibly important when it comes to these pickups. A lot of people use a two way rotary knob but that only lets you have two of the possibilities and while I can’t imagine ever calling upon a Strat style pickup, the fact that it would be there is pretty cool. I would have it wired with two new three-way toggle switches under the pickup selector switch on the upper bout so each pickup could have not only the full amount of tonal possibilities but also the ability to blend as I see fit (say, a Strat in the bridge and a P90 in the neck).

I would also put one more mini-toggle in with the cluster of knobs under the Bigsby (which would be replaced with a V-Cut Bigsby, by the way) and instead of those knobs being two volumes and a tone, they would now be the volume, tone and fuzz controls for a hard-wired Pro Tone Monster Fuzz. The mini toggle would be the on/off switch for the fuzz.

Of course, I’d like a dedicated tone switch for the guitar like what’s on my 6118T. The tone switch on a Gretsch is lovingly called the mud switch. I would install that next to the pickup selector but closer to the headstock instead of the usual position closer to the bridge. That positioning never made any sense to me.

So there you have it! Beauty and the Beast and I’m sure they would be great guitars. Maybe one day I could build one or both. Who knows?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions about these modifications.

-Pappy