I bought my 2013 Guild Starfire IV two weeks ago and have played several gigs with it already. I'm in both a blues cover band and an rock originals band, so have had plenty of opportunity to use the guitar on different types of material.
For blues especially I tend to dwell on the neck pickup a lot, but was finding the one in my Guild fairly muddy, not really cutting through the mix (compared to the neck pickups in my SG and Telecaster).
I'm aware of the design "glitch" (or "feature" if you wish) where the low output bridge pickup (5.1 kohm in mine) contrasts with the hotter neck pickup (7.6 k is the reading I got). I've heard about people swapping them -- so thought I'd give it a go.
I'm glad I did it. The lower output pickup in the neck makes a lot more sense for getting warm blues tones -- and the 7.6k pickup in the bridge gives a little extra bite when I'm looking for overdriven rock tones.
The swap was also made easy by the solderless connectors Guild puts in the soundhole: once I switched the pickup rings on each pickup, it was just a matter of plugging them in and they were good to go.
Glad I made the switch. In fact, I almost wonder why Guild doesn't make them that way in the factory.
For blues especially I tend to dwell on the neck pickup a lot, but was finding the one in my Guild fairly muddy, not really cutting through the mix (compared to the neck pickups in my SG and Telecaster).
I'm aware of the design "glitch" (or "feature" if you wish) where the low output bridge pickup (5.1 kohm in mine) contrasts with the hotter neck pickup (7.6 k is the reading I got). I've heard about people swapping them -- so thought I'd give it a go.
I'm glad I did it. The lower output pickup in the neck makes a lot more sense for getting warm blues tones -- and the 7.6k pickup in the bridge gives a little extra bite when I'm looking for overdriven rock tones.
The swap was also made easy by the solderless connectors Guild puts in the soundhole: once I switched the pickup rings on each pickup, it was just a matter of plugging them in and they were good to go.
Glad I made the switch. In fact, I almost wonder why Guild doesn't make them that way in the factory.
