Your mission, should you accept it...

...is to try and make this Mockingbird play nicely.

One of my first noughties acquisitions, this has never played well. I got it in a scruffy state, changed the hardware, messed around with several flavours of pickups and so on but it has never been nice to play. In fact it's always been a bit nasty.

So today I ripped out the pickups that were in there. The bridge pot I used last time I swapped things around was iffy so I simply wired up the original BC Rich bridge pickup straight to the jack socket. This way I will not be at all distracted by dicking around with the electrics and can just concentrate on working out what it is that makes it nasty.

A very quick look shows the following.

  • Almost no (if any) relief in the neck
  • A quite high action at the nut

These could easily be conspiring to result in the current state of it. The cheap-ass tremolo (literally the cheapest I could buy so I could see what a gold one looked like on the guitar) is something to think about swapping but to be honest it works OK.

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