I was doing a little spring cleaning, '03, and decided to unload the "Purple Haze" in the hope that I would become a little more motivated to get the "Jimi's WoodStick" project moving...

I decided it really needed a new paintjob if I was gonna get anything for it, so I pulled it all apart. As I did, I realized that, hey, there's some spiffy hardware here, worth more than I could get for it as a complete guitar... cool! The bridge was saved for another secret project, but the lefty neck and tuners wound up on a new, strange Strat project I decided to call "Black Magic" (because the name "VooDoo" is already over-used)...

This is an MIM Strat body. The "VooDoo" pickguard was cut for me by Pete over at Vintage Vibe Guitars. That's a Carvin dual-blade in the neck spot, a Seymour Duncan JB Jr. in the bridge, and a Reverend RW/RP Strat pup I had just laying around in the middle...
I installed a SuperSwitch, wired for my "Five-Tone Tele" setup, selecting five different series/parallel/phase combos of the humbuckers in the neck and bridge. There's a master volume, a "blend/volume" for the middle pup, and a push/pull under the master tone pot for coil-shunt on the bridge and neck pups.

After it had been together for a month or so (on the left), I decided I really liked the tones, but wasn't crazy about the neck, after all - so it went back on the "Purple Haze" (along with a new lefty vibrato bridge, so that axe is now all set up left handed). For this axe, I ordered a Gibson scale conversion neck from Warmoth. I have one on my mahogany thinline Parts-o-caster Tele, and I really liked it. I also ordered all the black hardware I could find... The little skull and crossbones on the headstock was hand-painted and is under six coats of clear laquer (on the right)... pretty cool.

MARCH 2005: Well, here's a little story... I have never been really satisfied with the pups in that Epi Firebird. Not that it doesn't sound good, it actually has a pretty good tone, but no matter what I put in it, the pickups are so microphonic that it is unusable at almost any kind of stage volume. I was complaining about this to my pal Pete over at Vintage Vibe, and a few weeks later, a pair of pickups were delivered to me... Are you ready for this? They were mini-humbucker-sized SINGLE coil pups with engraved "mirror" tops, with "Deaf" on one and "Eddie" on the other... YIKES!

Well, these were never gonna LOOK right on the Firebird, and the LOOK is almost the ONLY thing that guitar is all about, so I had Pete whip me up a custom Strat pickguard so I could mount them little boogers and give 'em a listen. I test-muled them in Obie, my '93 Strat (seen here on the right), for a bit and LOVED THEM.

But, I had other plans for Obie... So, where to mount these little tone-bombs? And then, I realized that the Black Magic Strat, with its shorter Gibson-scale neck, might really show these new pups off... and so that's where they wound up! Now I have a Callaham steel sustain block, and to keep the black trim thang going, a set of GraphTech saddles for the bridge. It makes a nice little guitar...

After I built and tested a prototype, I was participating in a thread at the TDPRI with Don Mare where he said he's tried a few things with dummy coils, but found that the placement of the coil was critical - and completely inconsistant! He had found that the location that worked great on one axe didn't work well on another. It became apparent to me that there were too many variables to consider and "adjust" for before we could offer any kind of a generic one-size-fits-all kit with guaranteed results. Oh well...

JANUARY 2008: Now it's the test mule for the new N-Tune system (shown, left).
Pretty cool idea - a digital tuner in your guitar on a push/pull switch.
This product should be available by the end of the year.

AND, so it is: get in tune with N-Tune!
I've installed these in a few guitars and basses now, they work great.

MAY 2009: AND NOW, raised from the depths of my parts bin, Black Magic returns! Well, sort of...

I have the old Black Magic PG loaded with all single-coil-sized humbuckers now, as an R&D platform to develop a FAT-O scheme that works a little more effectively with hot-rails-type pickups than the "regular" FAT-O schemes - all of which include some series combos, which I have found produce hyper-fat and muddy tones with the humbuckers. The tones are probably great for slide, but not that spiffy for the rest of us, IMHO. Hey, I been wrong before - somebody MIGHT like 'em - BUT...

I'm also going to be playing with unbalancing the coils on Seymour Duncan's Lil' 59er and JB Jr mini-humbuckers, to see what can be gained out there, after my happy results tweaking the adjustments with full-sized humbuckers.

JULY 2009: OK, here's where I'm at now: p/p at the tone pot to coil-shunt the neck and bridge, a p/p at the volume to coils-parallel the mid pup, and the new FAT-O scheme, the FAT-Rails, installed. Hey, now I remember how much I liked this axe!

The FAT-Rails is a three-throw rotary, a slightly modified Original FAT-O. It has the same first two throws as all my rotaries, a "normal" notch and a "bridge+neck" (parallel) notch. For the third notch, I decided to go with bridge in series/out of phase with the neck pup, which I have (and like) on the V.3 and the Chromie, and also use on my some of my full-sized humbucker axes.

Well! Of all the Strats I've modified, this one's FAT-O notch #2 may get the best "Tele-middle-throw" tone out of the neck and bridge parallel so far - no doubt because of the S-D mini-humbuckers loaded and tweaked (as below) - and that's according to my pal Mychael Moaze.

I've wired the coil-shunt p/p so that it shunts to the "inside" coils, which means that I still have a noise-cancelling pair when I play the neck+bridge combo in coil-shunt. On the neck and bridge pups, I lowered the polepieces of the (shunted) outside coil, and raised the polepieces of the inside coil (stays active), and, by golly, it really does balance out the coil-shunt vs. humbucker tone, just like on full-sized humbuckers. Instead of just the drop in gain that I had always experienced before, now the coil-shunt seems to simply roll off some bottom, with only a slight drop in gain. When the pups are played as full humbuckers they may be just a tad brighter, too, which is OK - hey, it's a Strat.

On the mid pup, I arranged the heights of the polepieces to imitate a Fender Wide Range Humbucker - three up and three down on one coil, and the reverse on the other coil - and I set the p/p up to give me the coils-parallel option, instead of a coil-shunt. Again, I found that this "unbalanced" polepiece adjustment seems to have brightened the tone of the pickup slightly, but, it also makes the difference between series and parallel coils almost moot (I'll be removing the parallel/series p/p at the volume for this pup, as it does almost nothing). I think the "adjusted/unbalanced" pup has more character than the standard humbucker-ish tone you typically expect to get from these pickups.

And, don't forget, adjusting the pole pieces in ANY manner does NOTHING to the noise-cancelling properties of the two coils. Win-win!

If you have some of these Seymour Duncan mini-sized humbuckers, but find them too warm, muddy, or just ho-hum, you might try one or the other of those two pole-piece height adjustments. I wasn't especially a big fan of the Lil' 59er/JB Jr pups before, but I sure am now!

I guess the last test is to try the FAT-Rails with some Hot Rails, with their non-adjustable poles...