The Little Guitar - First Act Discovery (2003) - Highly Modded
27I bought this thing in the spring of 2003 for $60 smackers at the local Wally World when I was in a bad mood after work (bad mood + money = dangerous fiscal situation).
It started out as one of those "kiddie guitars" in the toy department, you know, the kind you buy your 6 year old to play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on because they're too small to goof off with your uber-expensive Les Paul. I found it had a decent ability to scare away horses that tried to steal my mom's horses food in the mornings by turning it up to 10 in the pasture and making all sorts of crazy racket.
After awhile, I stopped needing it for that purpose, and moved on to using it to write new tunes in higher tunings (1/2-whole step up in tuning). I found it worked great for this and lacked some of that stratty sparkle I like on higher tuned guitar pieces, so I took some pickups out of a Harmony H-802 I had laying around, and wired those into the guitar where the original single coil went, and a second one in the middle position, and stuck them on a gibson style pickup selector...this lasted like this for several years....
Then this christmas I decided to stick a humbucker back there, so after several hours harrassing my neighbors with the sounds of a cheap Dremel copy trying to burn it's motor out chomping on plywood body for the better part of a Christmas holiday afternoon, I now had the HSS config it has now, plus a new 5-way, and a proper tone control added....and this time, the wiring actually looks something nice.
Note that I am aware that I had some tuning issues in this video, the strings are brand new, and a new size, I still need to do a complete setup, I just intonation'd it and threw it up here.