Q: “I love everything about my new guitar except for one thing. The pickup covers are chrome-plated and they look way too new and shiny. I feel they cheapen the look of my guitar and wondered if there was anything I could do to make them look less, well, gaudy.”
A: It’s true that chrome plated pickup covers look brighter and have more overall sparkle than nickel-plated covers. There are three options you can consider, though you need to be aware that these can possibly void your warranty. First off, you might consider simply removing the covers entirely. In the 1960s, almost all Les Paul owners experimented with removing the covers (Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page to name a few). A second option (and probably the easiest) is to take super-fine steel wool and lightly buff the covers until they lose that excess sparkle. Some odd bits of the steel wool will probably end up sticking to the pole pieces, but you can remove those by wrapping two fingers in masking tape with the sticky side out, then gently tapping the tape against the poles to pick out the excess. You might have to do this more than once. Finally, you could purchase nickel-plated covers and swap these out with your chrome covers. We’d definitely recommend leaving this to a qualified guitar tech unless you’ve had experience with doing this yourself. The last thing you want is to damage your pickups.