Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom60
The tone follows the neck .. thatīs what I believe too, heard it many times
And as for the body - the nocaster has a depth and richness of an acoustic
guitar - like no other electric guitar Iīve played ... so they are doing it right,
tapping the blanks or not 
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That nocaster sounds great! I just love when a guitar comes together as a total package.
I own, have owned, many guitars and I've only kept the ones that have the magic. Some of them came that way from the factory, others needed a little tweaking to get them there.
Although some people think they are getting much better woods and parts at the custom shop level, I think a lot of what really makes custom shop instruments great, is the attention to detail on the string path. When a guitar has a perfectly cut nut, perfectly level and crowned frets, and a bridge set-up to perfection, it just works at it's optimum level. Add some good pickups, and it's on.
Even though I have some cool very good sounding custom shop guitars, one of my all-time favorite guitars is a poly finished standard run production model Zemaitis guitar. Go figure! It's one of the living, breathing animals.
You can breathe on the pickups and get a good sound!
It wasn't that way when I bought, but I felt the resonance, and I could hear the tones trying to get out of it. And the fretwork was immaculate. So I totally gutted it. It was originally equipped with high output humbuckers and run of the mill electronics. I swapped the pickups for some 50's DeArmond 2000 inspired pickups called MR2000SB made by Gabojo Amplification. I also closely matched the 500K pots (closer to 550K) to get the brighter tones that I new I could get out of it, swapped the caps until I got the perfect tone sweep (I alligator clipped in many different caps till I got there), replaced all wire with cloth pushback wire, replaced the 3-way for a better Switchcraft switch, and replaced the output jack with a Puretone for better contact. I also replaced the tuners with a 21:1 ration set. It is is now a monster guitar, that actually looks too pretty to take too seriously.
And here's one that breathed fire right out of the factory...
