A lot of Guitar for the Money
I got this Indonesian-made S-Type guitar about 2 years ago because I wanted a contemporary style of Strat for covering different genres of music at one gig.
The original pickups were: Alnico 2 single coils in the middle & bridge positions. I’m not sure of the HB specs, but it’s wound to about 14-15kΩ.
It’s a very good guitar for the money (about B10k Thai Baht – just under $300US). On the whole I found this guitar to be a very playable instrument, but the shortcomings, though minor were enough for me to not really play it that much.
Those shortcomings were:
- The bridge humbucker was a too hot for my liking and too mid-heavy compared to the very bright, but good-sounding single coils.
- The string spacing at the nut was too narrow for my liking (only a recent realization).
But now I’ve modded it, it’s a really fantastic guitar to play and suits me much better than it did stock. It has lots of twang, bite and girth all at once.
Now there is an Artec H90 (humbucker-sized P90) in the bridge (wound to about 8kΩ) and an unbranded hotrail I got from Ebay (also about 8kΩ), which I cut the glued-on cover off and replaced with a plain Strat pickup cover. The original look of those pickups were a bit odd to me and didn’t really suit any of the guitars I put them in, but they sound quite decent and were very cheap.
One thing to note though is that they are very, very easy to destroy when attempting to remove their covers. I was luckily able to successfully remove the cover from a total of three of these pickups, but sadly ruined a few in the process.
I replaced the nut with a Graphtech Tusq XL and it has made a night and day difference to how lovely this guitar feels to play for my liking. I also changed the pickguard (obviously).
I was thinking of selling this guitar, but now I’m keeping it!
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