Giving New Life to Your Vintage Guitar Without Diminishing its Value.

Local Music Gear Feature Story 
Written By: Jac Harrison

Guitarist... we are a strange bunch. We search high and low to find a guitar that we fall-in-love with, and then after a few weeks we decide that the guitar that we couldn't live without a few weeks back, is not the best. Kinda sounds like every relationship I have ever been in, but unlike a woman you can modify the guitar to your liking legally. Now there are many ways to "hot rod" your guitar, from pickups and electronics to hardware and accessories  -- but when "hot rodding" a vintage guitar there are a few things you want to keep in-mind. To start, I like to stay away from all permanent installation products that modify the original design. If the mod requires a drill, saw or glue just don't do it -- go buy a new guitar.Your vintage guitar is an old lady, so she is suppose to look like and sound like she has some age on her. Some mods are like giving your grandmother a face lift and a boob job -- so ask yourself, who wants a hot grandmother? I don't, my grandmother looks and sounds like a grandmother, like she is supposed to. Now with that in mind, you also want to make sure that your vintage guitar is in full working order before you start your mods.

POS Re-Build, Tackling a Fender Squier Strat Bullet for a good cause ...

Once a quarter Local Music Gear has a POS (Piece of Shit) rebuild. This is when we take the most God-awful, poor excuse of an instrument and give it new life. We do this to show our readers that cannot, or will not, spend big bucks on an instrument how to make one that rocks within their budget. 

For this POS rebuild we did not have to go out and purchase a guitar. We had the pleasure of rebuilding one for a woman that is a little down on her luck due to ongoing health problems. Good for us her guitar was a Fender Squire Bullet Strat and that happens to be one of the biggest pieces of shit guitars I've ever seen --making it a perfect candidate for this series. 

So to me this was a no-brainer. We get a donor guitar for the editorial series -- and she gets it back with some serious modifications making it a playable instrument.