Making a Good Guitar Your Own

What makes your guitar yours? Is it the wear? The tone? The perfectly dialed-in setup? There’s no shortage of answers to the question, yet one of the most popular methods of adding a personal touch to a six-string is through modification.

Modding: A Gateway to Great Guitars

Modding offers a guitarist the means to take a stock instrument and transform it into something uniquely their own. What’s more, the rise of high-quality, affordable guitars means there’s never been a better time in guitar history to take an accessible axe and deck it out with top-class parts. To prove this point, we tasked Sweetwater guitar install lead Jake Stichter to take a production instrument straight off the showroom floor and elevate it into a personalized show stopper of a six-string.

During his 10-year career as a professional tech, Jake has spent countless hours modding guitars to our customers’ exact specifications in the Guitar Workshop. And, most importantly, he’s an avid tinkerer who admits that this project “is literally what I do at home with my guitars: take a stock guitar and turn it into something very different.”

The Yamaha PAC112V Pacifica

Our modding project begins with the Yamaha PAC112V Pacifica — a guitar that Jake remarks “looks great, sounds great, and feels great” right out of the box. Why the Pacifica? Of all our candidates, the Pacifica won out in the end, thanks to its premium-grade components, quality craftsmanship, and very affordable price point. In fact, the parts of the Pacifica that we didn’t modify for this project — the alder body, the slim, C-shaped maple neck, and the rosewood fingerboard — are the very same tonewoods you’d find on a premium S-style guitar.

The Tuning Machines

As tuning machines are among the most replaced parts in the world of guitar modification, we began our journey with the Pacifica’s tuners. Yamaha instruments are all but synonymous with quality at Sweetwater, so it came as little shock that this Pacifica’s stock tuners performed with stage-ready stability.

The Upgrade: Ratio Tuners

Our sights were set on achieving a smoother, more consistent action with faster string changes. Thus, we opted for Graph Tech’s PRL-8721-C0 Ratio tuning machines. While most tuners utilize the same gear ratio across all six strings, each tuner in the Ratio set boasts its own customized ratio, which ensures that every string reacts the same to any tuning adjustment, greatly reducing the time it takes to tune. Plus, Ratio tuners feature a locking mechanism that dramatically speeds up your string changes.

The Pickups

From the factory, the Pacifica comes equipped with an HSS pickup configuration with two alnico single-coils and a bridge-position alnico humbucker. These versatile pickups serve admirably in almost any sonic application, yet we decided to take a tonal detour toward a more vintage-sounding voice.

The Upgrade: Mojotone Pickups

We chose the Sweetwater-exclusive Mojotone ’59 Clone HSS pickup set: three USA-made, boutique-grade pickups that combine a vintage-style humbucker with two noiseless Quiet Coil single-coils. Jake installed these pickups with a prewired 920D Custom S5W-HSS-1T harness packed full of exceptional electronic components and noted that, for DIY guitar modders, 920D “does a very good job of making it clear and simple where you need to solder.” What about the tone? Our Sweetwater-exclusive Mojotone pickups supply a rich, dynamic, and completely hum-free voice. From crunchy classic-rock rhythms on the PAF-style bridge humbucker to round, sparkling cleans, this set can handle almost any musical application in the book! Moreover, the 920D’s 5-way Super Switch retains all the classic in-between quack you’d expect from an S-style six-string. It all adds up to a guitar with, in Jake’s words, “tons of vintage tonal vibe and clarity.”

Ghost Saddles and Acousti-Phonic Preamp

Instead of swapping out the Pacifica’s bridge for a higher-end piece of hardware, we opted to elevate this guitar with expanded acoustic-electric functionality with Graph Tech’s PN-8000-00 Ghost system of piezo-equipped saddles. This system comprises six String Saver saddles, which are crafted from a synthetic blend of materials that sharpens your sound and reduces the potential for string breakage with a permanently lubricated design.

These saddles sport embedded Graph Tech Ghost piezo pickups, which we paired with Graph Tech’s PK-0240-00 Ghost Acousti-Phonic preamp kit. The result? Singing acoustic-electric tones to pair with this Pacifica’s searing HSS sonics. Furthermore, Jake told us how he installed an extra knob and switch to control the electronics in addition to a stereo switching jack “so that you can send all your outputs to the same place, or you can use a stereo cable to split off electric and acoustic signals to separate amps.”

Plek Pro Fret Leveling Service

Fret leveling is no easy task. It’s a process that necessitates a highly skilled tech, as a few thousandths of an inch can make all the difference between a perfect player and a problem guitar. But for those without a luthier on standby, the Plek machine represents a fast, efficient, and exceptionally consistent means to achieve level frets. Utilizing cutting-edge engineering and computer-driven CNC technology, the Plek machine precisely levels and crowns your guitar’s frets down to the perfect angle.

So confident are we in the Plek’s superior performance that we currently employ a team of around 25 dedicated employees and seven machines to complete Sweetwater’s Plek Pro fret leveling service. According to Jake, every guitar that undergoes Sweetwater’s Plek process “will touch five or six sets of hands before it’s finished.” He continued, “We are taking into account the gauge of the strings, the player’s style, and the tuning. We’re feeding the machine this data to achieve an output that is very personalized toward the player” — one big reason why Sweetwater’s Plek stands above the rest!

Naturally, we chose to Plek our modded-out Pacifica to maximize its performance. Even out of the box, this guitar played well; our expert Plek and setup process took its playability to an entirely new level. Whether you’re strumming cowboy chords down low or dishing out massive, multistep bends up high, Sweetwater’s Plek process ensures a comfortable and consistent feel across the length of the fingerboard. To top it all off, we installed a Graph Tech Model 5000-00 TUSQ nut for enhanced tuning stability, put on premium D’Addario NYXL strings, and picked a Gator Icon Series gig bag to keep it safe on the way to the show.

Personalize Your Guitar with Sweetwater

Whether you’re interested in having the Guitar Workshop trick out a stock six-string to your custom specs or you’re after premium-grade aftermarket parts to start your own modding project, call your Sweetwater Sales Engineer today at (800) 222-4700 for expert advice on everything guitar.
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