Matsumoku Greco HH

This Matsumoku built white 1973 Greco SE-500 arrived in a fantastic condition - it had obviously been loved and cherished. Unusually, it was sporting a humbucker in the neck position with a little mini-switch to access a single coil sound. Having already been routed for one humbucker, and having a pair of new DiMarzios in the drawer, I did a little more routing and mounted them in a new plate. The tremolo routing had also been extended for a replacement unit, although the original one was present on delivery. The original finish was so nice, I complemented it with a shiny new Gotoh vintage style unit. The blocks on these Gotoh tremolos never fail to provide a glorious sustain and harmonic ring and this encouraged me to get a little creative with the wiring and tone options for this guitar. Keith and I used to talk about piezo pick-ups for electric guitars and often found ourselves with a Graphtech basket full of technology, only to bottle out at the check-out page - the cost had got ridiculous. And we don't like batteries in guitars unless absolutely necessary. We didn't want the electric guitar to sound like an acoustic - we had a room full of amazing acoustics - we just wanted that "sparkle"; that high frequency accompaniment to the guitars inherent tones. We just needed to hammer a Fender Mustang over a Strat somehow. The Mustang reverse phase tones are interesting but more often than not useless in a serious delivery requirement. Time to experiment... The second tone control is now replaced with a 6-position chicken-head. This is NOT a Vari-tone - no rats nest of capacitors and resistors here - just regular wire to configure the coils of the DiMarzio Air Norton in every possible way. Both individual coils can be voiced, they can be voiced together in series or parallel, and in phase or reverse phased. 6 tones in all - 4 that stand on their own as viable tones, an the reverse phase tones that are there to work together with the bridge humbucker. The Master Volume knob is a push pull that configures the Gravity Storm bridge humbucker in series as a regular humbucker when pushed down, and into parallel when pulled up. 2 distinct and characterful tones on their own - the parallel setting is our chosen alternative to the traditional coil split which more often than not does not complement the humbucker at all, and doesn't have the teeth of a regular Strat unit - certainly not the ones we use! In parallel, the tone is full of bite, but loses the compression that humbuckers deliver.