Any standard wiring mods?

[Jmundell]

Hey Everyone,

 

New Heritage owner and psyched. Just bought a killer looking H150 Vintage Wineburst from the forums here. Now, i actually get my guitar on Thursday (shout out to Guy for the amazing H150!) and I'm curious if there are any standard wiring modifications you guys do to make them a bit more vintage accurate?

 

I hear paper in oil caps are great, the 50's wiring is great and keep hearing about RS Guitarworks. Can you tell me a bit about the Sprague caps and CTS pots that these come standard with? I hear that the value of the caps is similar in output to the vintage caps, so is it basically a vintage sound when the pots are wide open but the dynamics would change as I rolled the knobs if I had PIO caps?

 

How does everyone else like the Duncan 59? I'm considering some aftermarket PAF's but it seems like throwing some A2 magnets in the 59 might get me 95% of the way to a vintage PAF vibe. Is there a set of aftermarket PAF style PUPs that work particularly well with the Heritage brand's construction quality and the timbre produced by these instruments or is Duncan the best fit?

 

Cheers!

 

-Jeremy

 

 

[SlappyTappy]

You'll probably get replies all across the board (pun intended) here. Stock, Heritage tends to use Duncan 59s, Duncan Seth Lovers, or their own pickups. They used to use Schaller Golden 50s as well, not sure anymore. I happen to like the Schaller pickups I've played but mine came with 59s. I love the bridge position, but I've considered trying a Seth Lover in the neck to try to get a more open/airy tone out of it. I don't mess around a lot with buying pickups I've never played, so I've been slow to do this.

 

The 50s wiring mod I did recently really made the tone controls much more useful and seemed to open up the tone a bit. I don't fiddle around a lot with different brands of pots/caps, I just try to make sure they're the correct value. CTS and Sprague work just fine for me. I tend to run the tone controls full 99% of the time though so, consider that. In fact I'm considering "hot-rodding" it and removing the tone controls from the signal path completely.

[yuominae]

I don't know anything about RS guitarworks (other than the standard hearsay) and haven't modded my Heritage (yet), but I just upgraded the wiring on my Gibson LP Firebrand. I got a harness with russian PIO caps from martinsixstringcustoms.com for about $80 and it's the best money I ever spent on any guitar part. My LP sounds amazing now. I wonder hoe I managed to play it for a year until I did the mod...

 

Saying that, it was from the 80s, and from Gibson's budget line, so it had 100k and 300k pots, so upgrading it to 500k pots made a huge difference of course.

I would expect that Heritage guitars are made with better part from the factory, so buying a new wiring harness might not make much of a difference for you.