Being a worship guitarist means overcoming some unique challenges. It’s a crazy-hard uphill climb of time management, budget allocation (often out of your own pocket), maintaining sacrificial flexibility (“the pastor just asked us to cut the song you prepared and add this one”), and so much more. It’s a wild rollercoaster of intense ups and downs, and while the final note of this week’s set is still ringing, you start climbing that first hill all over again.
Yes, it’s your way to serve and connect. It’s your passion. Even so, it can be daunting.
Sometimes we need a nudge to help us rekindle our determination, focus, and energy. Of course, the first place to start is your spirituality, but with that in mind, artistic inspiration for a worship guitarist can come from expanding your guitar toolchest to solve an issue or open new options.
There’s a further complication. On any given week, worship sets often require a worship guitarist to replicate a wide range of tones that were originally created with different guitar types, amps, electronics, and playing styles. Each song you play may require a completely different combination of instrument, gear, and techniques. However, bringing a Tele, Strat, Les, hollow body, shredder, and acoustic, plus five amps and an assortment of pedalboards is impractical even if you can afford the gear and a truck to transport it all. Sure, you could invest in an additional guitar to get the tone you need for each song. But rather than having to swap guitars mid-set, why not simplify by expanding your guitar’s tonal capacity?
Addressing these demands with a single guitar and simple pedalboard on a quiet stage is kind of like young David going off to fight giant Goliath with just a sling. Take along a few extra stones.
Modding your guitar can provide the extra flexibility to get your goal in reach. Find artistic inspiration by deepening you worship guitar toolchest so you take the music where you need to go without creating distractions for yourself, the congregation, or the rest of the band.
After sitting down with Sweetwater Guitar Workshop luthier Doug Mantock, we compiled this list to help. Whether you want to upgrade your current guitar, add tonal possibilities, or gain a new sound entirely, here are some interesting mods to sharpen your axe without breaking your budget.
Start with a Great Platform
Sure, you could invest in that high-end custom guitar you’ve always wanted. But many worship guitarists are choosing instead to mod their current or new affordable, entry-level guitar. Several high-end brands offer a good place to start, including Squier (Fender), Epiphone (Gibson), Schecter, and Ibanez. One of these guitars could provide a great platform to affordably acquire that guitar of your dreams.
Plek Pro
In terms of playability, the Plek Pro is like a magic bullet for your guitar. It’s a high-tech machine that mechanically crowns and levels frets with a superhuman level of accuracy to eliminate dead spots, string buzz, and sharp fret edges from your fretboard. You get the most even and consistent playing response possible, whether your guitar is brand new or an old, well-played friend.
Pro tip: While all Sweetwater guitars over $399 get a 55-point inspection to guarantee that the quality you receive matches factory specifications, a Sweetwater Plek job includes a full professional setup, a final fret bevel and polish, and your choice of strings.
Change the Neck
If your guitar has a bolt-on neck, having a luthier from Sweetwater’s Guitar Workshop swap it out for another can be fairly simple. Picking a different wood or neck radius can drastically alter the guitar’s feel, playing ease, sustain, speed, and even tone. Alternatively, you could refinish your current neck for a different look and feel (or even refinish the whole guitar, for that matter).
Fretwork
Your frets are going to wear down over time and create more friction when your hands move the strings over them. This can affect your tuning and tone. Having your current frets dressed (adjusted and polished) or upgrading to silky stainless steel can regain that smooth feel and intonation. Check out the difference!
Pro Setup
If you’re happy with your guitar neck, consider a professional setup to adjust intonation, action, neck relief, and pickup height, as well as clean and polish your guitar, oil the fretboard if needed, and install new strings. You may be amazed at the drastic pickup response and output improvement you gain simply by having your tech change the pickup height. If you want to try making some of these adjustments yourself, check out this setup tutorial. Alternately, the luthiers at Sweetwater have the expertise to adjust your guitar precisely for the feel you want and to keep your guitar at its playable best.
Consider Your Hardware
Adding or upgrading your string trees can improve your tuning stability, especially if you play with a tremolo. Upgrading to a higher quality of guitar tuners can improve tuning stability or provide a convenient and stable locking tuner option — plus, they can look really cool. The guitar nut at the top of your guitar neck wears over time, faster if it’s plastic. That affects tuning stability, tone, string height, buzz, and tuning ping. A new nut can address these issues and improve articulation.
Changing your tailpiece, bridge, or saddles can brighten and add spank, reduce string breakage, and increase sustain. If you find that you don’t use an installed tremolo, blocking the tremolo (literally with a block of wood) can increase sustain and stabilize tuning, basically turning it into a hardtail. If you’re willing to get more invasive, you can take your pick of Floyd Rose, Bigsby, or even an incredibly stable EverTune bridge. Order the parts and do these mods yourself or ask one of the luthiers at Sweetwater’s Guitar Workshop.
Strings
It may sound obvious, but simply swapping to a different string gauge and material can be a game changer. Beef up your sound with heavier strings or lighten the gauge to add some brightness and increase playing ease. Check out this guitar string shootout. If you make a drastic change, say from 12s to 8s, expect an adjustment period as you adapt to the new feel, and you may need to adjust the action to compensate for the different string tension. For more guitar strings info, check out this page.
Shield the Electronics
As we start to consider the guitar’s electronics, one simple mod that’s especially helpful for noisy single coil models is shielding the guitar cavities. Conductive shielding tape or paint, properly applied, basically creates a protective Faraday cage around your pickups and pots to drastically reduce interference from noisy stage lights and rogue frequencies.
Pickups
Changing your pickups is one of the greatest ways to modify or expand your tonal toolchest.
You have a huge range of options if you want to swap out a pickup or two. Humbuckers and single coils both come in sizes that fit the other’s footprint, so you have plenty of options that do not require routing out your guitar. While installing a modern high-output pickup with a battery-powered preamp would require routing, getting overwrapped pickups can take you well into that territory without the need for invasive surgery. You have a huge list of tonal choices besides single and hums: active, noiseless single coils, hot rails, cool rails, stacked coils, sustainer pickups, P-90s, custom wound, and more — so talk with your Sweetwater Guitar Workshop luthier about the nuance or flavor you’d like.
Adding a piezo pickup installation requires routing a place for the battery and other components, but it allows you to blend acoustic-type tones into your electric sound for additional articulation and clarity or to avoid swapping between electric and acoustic guitars during the set. Numerous manufacturers offer piezo-enabled electric models, including Godin, PRS, Fender, ESP, Schecter, Taylor, Danelectro, and EBMM — check them out to get ideas for what you could do with your guitar.
If you like thinking outside the box, consider adding a non-invasive MIDI synth pickup like the Fishman TriplePlay wireless MIDI pickup or the TriplePlay Connect MIDI controller. These low-latency, fast response polyphonic pickups slide under your strings right next to the bridge so you can plug into a computer or the TriplePlay floor controller. Print music and tab or record directly as you play. Blend in orchestra or other sounds. Want to launch Ableton scenes and clips from your guitar, anyone?
Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio‘s websites offer helpful guitar pickup finders to help you discover the differences for yourself before you order at Sweetwater.
Electronic Mods
If your guitar has 4-wire humbucker pickups, consider a coil split mod to give you access to single-coil tones. This is such a popular mod that it had become standard on many new mid-level and high-level guitar models.
A treble bleed capacitor mod adds a treble bleed capacitor in-line with the volume to reduce the tone suck that can happen when you roll your volume down, kind of like a highpass filter. This is particularly helpful if you use the volume pot to adjust humbucker tone and distortion.
If you use single coil pickups, consider a series/parallel mod controlled by a blade switch, toggle, or pot. When in series mode, the single coil pickups function together like a humbucker hybrid to beef up the low mids and minimize hum. Switch to parallel mode and your pickups function traditionally.
Regardless of your pickup type, modding the volume tone pot capacitor can impact how dark or bright your guitar sounds. The higher the value, the darker the sound. Single coils often start at 250k, hybrids at 350k, humbuckers at 500k humbucker, and go up to 1,000k for a really woolly jazz sound.
Consider adding a stereo output jack so you can route two of your guitar’s pickups to separate rigs for an extra wide tone. This can be done with any two pickups on your guitar, including piezo, neck, saddle, or bridge pickups. If your guitar already has separate volume pots for each pickup, you can control the blend even more easily.
The Sweetwater Guitar Workshop luthiers regularly do these mods and can give you recommendations.
External Add-ons
Whether you play through an amp, direct to board, or with a pedalboard, adding an IR foot pedal like Celestion Digital’s Impulse IR Loader gives you access to a huge range of entirely new sound profiles including specific acoustic and electric guitars, amp and cab profiles, pickup types, microphones, and effects IRs — all at a tap of your foot. Because you can add third-party IRs, you can create them yourself or add your favorites from the web. It’s like getting the advantages of a huge mod with the affordability of a single, non-invasive pedal you can change easily and endlessly.
Similarly, adding an EQ pedal enables you to shape your tone to capture a more Tele, humbucker, Strat, modern, or PAF tone. Consider using a highpass filter setting to help remove mud, a lowpass filter (around 8K for electric and 12K for acoustic) to clean up the high end, and a slight cut where the vocals shine so your sound tech can keep you higher in the mix without muddying or competing with the vocals. A simple EQ pedal like Behringer’s EQ700 can be acquired for less than the cost of a decent cable and scale up to favorites like the MXR M109S and Boss GE-77. Feature-laden programable versions like Source Audio’s EQ2 and the Boss EQ-200 expand your options considerably.
Try a string wrap to remove unwanted string noise, ringing, rattling, or chatter. You can place it above the nut on the headstock, or, if you don’t use open strings, you can place it right on the nut to help mute string noise while you’re shredding “Carol of the Bells” next Christmas season. Check out this elegant solution from Gruv Gear called the FretWrap.
If you’re relying on a long instrument cable to deliver your sound, you may be amazed at the increase in warmth, articulation, and tonal quality you’ll regain by changing to a quality guitar cable. If you must run a longer distance, consider using a direct box and an XLR cable to maintain signal integrity.
If your goal is to create clarity between multiple guitars, or if your team includes a second guitarist, consider stringing the second guitar with a set of Nashville strings. It’s like adding the high strings of a 12-string guitar. You get instant sonic separation. Have the second guitar play diamonds — striking and holding the first beat of each chord — or arpeggiations using eighth notes in synch to the kick drum or high hat. This is a great way to add nuance and depth to the sound, plus it provides another musician an opportunity to serve without adding the sonic challenges of trying to match 6-string guitars.
Once you’ve completed all your mods, protect your new creation with strap locks. Sweetwater carries a huge assortment of brands, styles, and colors so you can customize to your heart’s content.
Education
Regardless of changes you make to your guitar or rig, you’ll still bring the sound of your unique playing style. As your sound tech will tell you, good sound starts at the source. Adding some training to your daily routine — even if it’s only 5–15 minutes a day — may be the most significant mod in this entire list. Whether you’re looking to expand your general musicianship skills with online tutorials like you’ll find on Sweetwater’s inSync, YouTube, or from our content creator friends, get subscription-based training on specific worship songs from sources like WorshipArtistry.com, MusicAcademy.com, or TheWorshipInitiative.com, or take in-person lessons like we offer at Sweetwater Academy, you can apply new skills and technique to expand what your fingers can do.
How Will Modding a Guitar Affect Value?
If the instrument is vintage or collectable, a modification could reduce its value. Otherwise, if the potential buyer has similar preferences and appreciates how the personalization allows the instrument to perform better, the impact of the mods upon value depends upon the quality of the work and the potential buyer’s preferences. The goal of modification is to create the ideal instrument for your needs.
Your Sweetwater Guitar Workshop luthier can answer your questions about any of these mods. They love a challenge. Basically, if you can dream it, they can do it, and you’ll be free to explore a whole new frontier.