My first good electric guitar was my Epiphone Les Paul Black Beauty. Prior to this I had an Ibanez TR series strat copy for many years but when I started getting more serious and playing on stage regularly this no longer cut it. So, since I couldn’t afford my dream guitar, a real Gibson Les Paul (one day it will happen), I went for the next best thing, an Epiphone. And the 3 pickup gold hardware Black Beauty custom model just looked so hot I just couldn’t resist.
It’s a guitar that looks awesome, and sounds great too, with a nice thick full tone and heaps of sustain. It was my main axe for a long time but in the last couple of years has languished while I’ve primarily used my two Fenders – my VG Stratocaster that I bought in Nashville and my beautiful Custom Telecaster. Both of these are fantastic sounding versatile guitars that are a delight to play and are perfectly suited to worship music… but a Les Paul is still the ultimate guitar as far as I’m concerned.
Recently I’ve been inspired to get my Black Beauty out again and start playing it, although it needed new strings and had a couple of little crackles in the input jack and toggle… so I decided to give it a complete overhaul to make it better than ever.
The Problem
My main criticism of the Black Beauty has always been that you can’t take full advantage of the 3 pickups in the factory configuration, in which your three way toggle switch selects between the following 3 combinations of pickups :
- neck
- middle & bridge
- bridge
I never liked it that you can’t have a typical Les Paul middle position neck & bridge combination, and also that you can’t isolate the middle pickup on it’s own or with the neck pickup. Ideally they should have put in a 5 way switch to give a strat style combination of pickup options. Years ago when I first googled this I discovered some methods of adding a new switch and rewiring the guitar, but they seemed overly complicated and I was never brave enough to do it since it was my main guitar at the time.
The Solution
This time I discovered a simple more elegant way of rewiring the Black Beauty that didn’t require any new parts. Basically the aim is to create a guitar with a volume control for each of the three pickups, and a master tone control (who really needs two tone controls anyway?). The toggle switch would switch between pickups in the normal Les Paul style, ie :
- neck
- neck & bridge
- bridge
However the middle pickup would always be “on” independently of that switch so using it’s volume control I would have the option of dialing it in to any of the above combinations, or dialing out the other pickups if I want the middle one on it’s own.
I found some wiring diagrams online which portrayed this setup. Here are the two most useful ones I found (click on the pictures to see larger versions) :
Now I’m pretty much an electronics newbie, but on first glance these didn’t look too complicated to me. Unfortunately, once I’d removed the plates on the back of my guitar and looked into the control and switch cavities, I found myself totally bamboozled by what I saw. Anyone who’s not such a tech-newbie like me would hopefully find it somewhat less confusing. But anyway, I managed to disconnect all the existing wires, and re-route the wire from the middle pickup which was going to the switch, and instead point it down towards the control cavity. At this point I “phoned a friend” and called in my talented brother Kyle who knows much more about this kind of thing. He took the guitar away and got it all wired up just the way I wanted it.
Results
So now it’s like I have a new guitar all over again – and all polished up and shiny and with a new set of Elixir strings. Nice to be able to isolate the sounds of the ‘normal’ Les Paul pickups in the neck and the bridge and to be able to add in that middle pickup when I want to. Also never having been able to use that pickup on it’s own I didn’t realise what I was missing – the middle pickup has a nice treble sound to it but with a little less bite than the bridge pickup… nice for playing clean arpeggiated rhythms or U2 type stuff (have always loved listening to their stuff but only now getting game enough to try playing it… spent half the evening at our home group the other night jamming out some U2 stuff on Gav’s new guitar… also helps that I have an awesome new delay pedal, which I may or may not get around to blogging about.. a TC Nova delay).
Anyway it makes the 3 pickup Les Paul the versatile instrument it always should have been… sounds great and I will definitely not be neglecting it as I have done over the last couple of years. It’s actually good to give me another tonal option in addition to my Strat and Tele – both of these are still a good fit for a lot of the worship music we do at church – the challenge will be picking the songs where the Les Paul will be a good option. My favourite song we used to do which sounded great on the Les Paul was ‘Take Me In’ which we did in a lot heavier style than the Kutless version. It was in F#m which is an awesome key for Slash sounding lead work and also allowed me to play in drop-D for heavier sounding power chords… but it’s been a while since we’ve done that one… I still haven’t got a song list for this Friday’s service, but I will definitely find a way to include the Black Beauty in there somewhere (especially since it’s my last service for a few weeks as I’m off to Queensland for Uni next week..)
I love that song but somehow the lyrics of the second verse still seem a little inappropriate but judge for yourself. Regardless, I am hooked on this band at the moment. Just wish we could introduce new songs a little faster at church – there’s just so much I would love for us to do!
