Good Les Paul to alter

[bluefoxicy]

I'm considering in the future building another custom Les Paul off an Epiphone base model. My last was an Epiphone LP Special II, to which I added Sperzel silk chrome tuners; locking strap pegs; two DiMarzio DP161 Steve's Special 2-coil humbuckers; and have 2 push-pull pots coming to do series/parallel mode on the humbuckers and .022uF/.047uF capacitor selection on the tone pot. (too bad I can't get a 1M push-pull pot.)

 

I was looking into either an Epiphone Les Paul Studio or an Epiphone Les Paul Standard. I want to use Seymour Duncan or DiMarzio Super Distortion pickups (4 coil humbuckers; pretty much, two single-coil sized humbucker blades stuck together to make a humbucker sized pickup that runs a lot hotter). What I'm going for here is a solid mahogany body, really clean/hot pickups (with parallel/series mode), another cap mod, and 1M tone pots (I'll use the Vol pots for the 2 push-pulls); the result should give better sustain than mine, a really good bright and clean sound, and good tone adjustment range, letting me more closely match Eric Johnson's guitar and maybe Slash's depending on mode (continuing goal for me).

 

Both guitars of course come with pretty good hardware already. The Standard uses closed humbuckers, so I'd need something like DiMarzio Super Distortion P90 body type pickups. I'm also wondering (barely) about destroying the other half a dozen or so pickups I have left over; the cheap ones from the Special II have Alnico magnets in them, which I could tear out and drop into the DiMarzio pickups with unpredictable results (ouch). Seymour Duncan has a model of pickup that they advertise was created by changing the ceramic magnets to alnico 5 because they saw all these users on their forums talking about how they dropped in alnico 2 or alnico 5 magnets (great marketing response, huh?), so the idea sounds plausible.

[leps]

Try a Lp-100, an employee at my local guitar center said that my les paul(les paul 100)was perfect to hot rod.

[thunderstruck507]

go for the standard! then when you're done you'll have one that both looks amazing and sounds amazing

 

but I wouldn't frankenstein any pickups...I'd just choose some that sound nice as is and enjoy

[smd24fan]

I agree with thunderstruck507, get the Standard. I changed my pickups to SD Alnico Pro II's and made the capacitor changes and she just sings man. I personally like the open-coil pickup look. It still looks just great and sounds even better. Don't go over the top with it, they are such a great looking guitar.