I've been making a pretty big deal of my shitar situation lately. Out of this mess, though, has come a very positive result - I'm now ready to customize my Strat.
What this situation has done is remove the sanctity of the Strat. When I get a new guitar, it takes on an air of wholeness. It's a pristine example of factory goodness, a sealed unit, a black box. In other words, I don't want to screw with it. It's probably a reflection of my personality as well. When it comes to anything - cars, computers, cell phones, even houses - I don't like to mess with them because I don't want to mess them up. I think it's my fear that once it's messed up I won't be able to put it back the way it was. I'm the same way with computer code, too - if it works I don't want to alter it too much in case it stops working and I can't fix it. It usually takes some kind of outside force to change it in some way as to remove that "black box" quality and make it OK for me to get my hands dirty and make some serious changes.
For guitars, it usually takes the first ding, dent or scratch to remove the factory glow and make it mine. In this case, it was the first serious dirtying. It's no longer a perfect specimen - it's just a guitar, my guitar, and there's more I want to do to it to really make it mine. In the case of my Strat, I want to rewire it so I can have a tone control on the bridge pickup. I also want to get a black pickguard to make it look more Gilmour-esque. I may try to set up the tremolo again, but since I'm really enjoying it as a hardtail, I'll probably wait a while on that. Heck, I may just buy a replacement tremolo from GuitarFetish.com and see if it works any better.
The nice thing about these mods is that none of them are expensive. The rewiring is basically free, except I have to get a soldering iron, but still they aren't a lot of money. A new pickguard is less than 20 bucks, shipping included. Even the tremolo won't cost more than $40. In other words, they're all economical ways to make my Strat more than just a typical Mexican Standard Stratocaster.
I can't wait to get started!
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