The P270-EX project : Chapter One

This is the first of three (or perhaps more ) installments on this ongoing guitar project.  I wanted to get this published so you'd know I hadn't forgotten, and also to help keep each installment a reasonable length.

The project began as an Agile AL-2000  3-P90 guitar available from  Rondo Music 

I nicknamed it “P270”.  Since 3 times 90 equals 270, then 3 P90s must equal P270, right?
 

P270 arrived with an excellent setup. Neck relief and intonation were spot-on and the nut was cut flawlessly.  Acoustically it was lively, present and relatively loud, with decent sustain.  Overall I was favorably impressed with it and IMO this one can hold its own in any comparison of Les Paul style guitars, besting many.  The bargain price is icing on the cake.

The original wiring had one independent volume for each pickup and a single master tone control for the whole guitar. The Paul-style selector switch was wired to provide neck-middle/all 3/bridge-middle. I didn’t like the fact that the center pickup was always in circuit. I’ve always wanted to find an elegant way to access more pickup combinations on 3-pup axe without resorting to a confusing bank of little switches. (Don’t ask me if I’ve ever succeeded at this.) Thankfully I’ve never been infatuated with in/out of phase, series/parallel, or coil tapping humbucker possibilities. I bought this guitar to try out a wiring scheme I’d been pondering for several years.

In original configuration the sound of this guitar was a pleasant surprise. The p90s being single-coil pickups of course, combined with the 3-pickup configuration gave this guitar a sound not like a Paul - or any humbucking guitar - but more like a whoppin’ ballsy Strat. I was so tickled with the feel and sound of this that I almost abandoned the project and left the guitar alone. Perhaps I should have.

Soon P270 was gutted and hung up to bleed out.

Not only did I want to try a wiring idea I’d been pondering, but as always I wish I could hear every pickup on the market for myself.  My  plans called for leaving the stock P90 in the middle and looking for other flavors for both ends. 


I went to Guitar Fetish and selected a GFS Mini-Crunchy humbucker for the neck, their small 'bucker which includes a mounting ring for P90 sized applications.  A Vintage wound Soapbar 180 was chosen for the bridge slot.

Watch this space for P270-EX Project, Part Two to find out about the wiring I had in mind, see my famous piss-poor photos of the first generation result, and read my no-asses-kissed review of the initial results.