Can we turn this TRASHED Epiphone into the ULTIMATE Les Paul Custom?! | Restoration & Mod VLOG

we've got a serious project on our hands let's do it [Music] all right guys hope you're doing great out there today if this is your first time here at my channel my name is Kyle and what I do is I take awesome High Gain related guitar gear I record it with a simple sm57 setup and I give you guys the unprocessed audio on your end but today we're gonna dive back into one of my favorite Parts about the hobby of guitar in general and that is budget priced guitar projects and long before I achieved my belligerent status of High Gain ant master of the world self-appointed of course there was a time when I couldn't really afford a whole lot and in those early days I really focused hard on budget guitars because at the time there were a lot of really affordable guitars on the used Market that just punched way above their price range so anyways long story short I recently reviewed that Matt hayfee signature Epiphone Les Paul Custom and that was you know after the 2019 complete restructuring of the Gibson and Epiphone line and Epiphone decided or I guess Gibson decided that they wanted to take the Epiphone Guitar line and kind of make it more like the Gibson line but just at a much more budget-friendly price for the player which in my personal opinion something that they probably should have done a long time ago but one of those guitars that really caught my attention when they redid the line was the Epiphone Les Paul Custom and especially the silver burst because you guys know I love me a good silver burst so about two years ago I was sitting there credit card in hand waiting to make the next irresponsible decision I came across this guitar and it was priced really really well it was priced at 375 dollars there was one picture of it of the front it was a horrible cloudy picture I couldn't really tell the condition of the guitar at all but there was no description saying that there were any major blemishes or anything like that so anyways I placed the order in a few days later this shows up at my door and I'm really excited to unbox it because I was really excited to check this guitar out and as soon as I unwrapped it my heart sang because somebody had taken sandpaper to the entire finish of the guitar front and back and I'll try to get it here in the camera to show you as best that I can it's even on the headstock it's even on the back of the headstock I don't know how long you guys have been around the guitar Community those of you who are watching but in the early 2010s there was this fad going around in the budget guitar forms like the agile guitar forum where people would take Scotch Brite to the finish of their import guitars and they would basically dull the sheen on the polyurethane finish and if you did it right actually looked really really cool but as with most things you can definitely do it very wrong and have the results turn out very bad and unfortunately the person who did it to this guitar did it very wrong and it turned out very bad uh I proceeded to plug the guitar in and it just sounded uh it sounded brighter and clearer than I was expecting the Epiphone Pro bucker pickups to sound so I went ahead and popped those pickups out lo and behold old somebody had put burst buckers in this guitar now I don't like Gibson burst buckers but they're pretty valuable on the second hand market so I ended up taking those pickups out and selling them for 170 dollars for the pair so I'm basically into this guitar for next to nothing but that was all two years ago because what happened is at the time I didn't have replacement pickups for it I didn't really know what I wanted to put into it I just started my YouTube channel and I was really just focusing all my energy on that so I didn't really have time to tackle this as a project so I stuck it in a case and put it away for two years and forgot about it so recently I was reorganizing my collection found this guitar in the case and I was like okay I need to do something with this because that matte hafey guitar that I just got that thing was pretty cool it was pretty impressive so why don't we turn this into a project guitar that led me to hitting up my friends over at Sweetwater to help out with this project so when I told Josh over at Sweetwater what I wanted to do he said yeah awesome idea dude let's do that and I ended up picking a bunch of parts out to really deck this thing out and kind of turn it into a super Epiphone thus Paul if you will and I picked up a couple of tools in order to do some of the projects or do some of the work that needed to be done on this guitar so huge thank you to Sweetwater for sponsoring this video for sending those items out and if you guys need any parts or any tools in order to do a similar project build like this for yourself you know what to do hit up the fine folks at Sweetwater using my affiliate link down in the description and they have pretty much anything that you're gonna need to get the job done and if you don't know what you need to get the job done go ahead and call your Sweetwater sales engineer and they'll get you pointed in the right direction so with all that out of the way what are we gonna do well first off we're gonna try to the best of our ability to fix this finish so on the back of the guitar these matte portions are actually not how it arrives I have actually been using sandpaper to uh really kind of get down because these scratch marks are insanely deep on the back like it's gonna take a lot of work to get these out so I'm basically gonna have to sand it down quite a bit and then go back and kind of Polish it up afterwards as opposed to just polishing the top portion or the top of this guitar which is definitely in much better shape and I've actually already hit it a couple times with the polisher it's going to take a few more passes I have to remove the switch here in order to get everything cleaned up up here but it's going to take a lot of elbow grease to get this thing to shine on the back I don't know how serious I'm gonna take it I think I'm just gonna really try to get the front cleaned up nicely and then the back I can kind of just uh go at my own pace because once the top is finished I can put all the parts put the guitar back together and turn it into a total Ripper which is what we're gonna do foreign so for the first item so for the first item on this build we are going with an entirely new solderless electronics package from Mojo tone they make entirely new wiring harnesses for your guitar that you don't even have to solder they have a little board here and you all you have to do is put the right wires in the right spots no soldering required so if you've always wanted to uh basically change out the electronics on your guitar and be able to swap pickups easily but you were always afraid of soldering Mojo tones got you covered because this kit requires zero soldering in order to swap in and out pickups of your guitar not only that but we've got a high quality switchcraft switch here we have CTS 500k pots we've got two vitamin T Mojo tone branded capacitors here and we have a switchcraft input jack so I mean this is all you know high quality stuff that you're gonna find on much nicer builds so that is the first item sec second item is a new graphtec resomax NV bridge if you guys are unfamiliar with these Bridges they are a light magnetic aluminum bridge that goes on either epiphone or Gibson guitars you can order them for either and graphtec have put the same material into the saddles on these bridges that they put into the Tusk XL nuts so it's basically a super smooth highly lubricated nut material on your Saddles which means a you're probably not going to break strings as often and B you're going to get a lot of tuning stability out of these and I can already vouch for these because I have these on a couple of my other guitars including my Gibson Les Paul studio and it does a really good job at helping out that tuning stability by allowing those strings to flow freely in those slots and speaking of tuning stability we've got the best in the game we've got the graphtec Tusk XL nut these are my favorite nuts and anytime I'm replacing a nut on a guitar Tusk XL is the way to go next up also for tuning stability and just because I have come to love locking tuners for fast string changes on stage we have the graphtec ratio tuners I I have actually never tried these graphtec ratio tuners but uh they're kind of all the rage in locking tuners lately at least that's what I've been seeing online it seems like everybody who used to swear by spurtzel or who used to swear by the grover locking tuners everybody is now saying that the ratios are the smoothest and the most accurate you definitely pay for that because these things are like 135 bucks for a set of them but I wanted to try these out on the Epiphone and see if they really are the real deal or if I can get away with you know continuing to use cheaper locking tuners so we're gonna check these out on the guitar and see if they're worth that price tag and now for the most important upgrade I do not care what the current online sentiment with the current online argument is about pickups for me pickups are incredibly important they can make or break a guitar and I can hear big differences in the room when I'm playing and I can feel big differences when I'm playing and how the pickup reacts as well and I've decided to go with a set of pickups that you guys might find surprising but I recently had a Gibson Custom Shop r0 which is the 1960 reissue that came with the newer Gibson custom bucker pickups in them and they were some of the best pickups I ever heard in my life now you guys know I'm a fan of paf pickups even for metal I love the clarity and the no separation and just the overall voicing of the general paf Vibe and those custom buckers are some of the best that I have heard ever this is honestly the most exciting part of this project for me can't wait to get these in that guitar and see how they perform and last but certainly not least I decided to try some new strings so Sweetwater sent me these Ernie Ball M steel strings I have never tried steel guitar strings but I've always wanted to because they're supposed to be brighter and higher output so in my general experience Epiphone guitars for whatever reason are always darker than their Gibson counterparts one of the things I love about good Gibson Les Paul is even though they are fat and full on the low end they are very bright and Spanky up top for a humbucker loaded guitar with a set neck and a tuna Matic bridge and epiphones on the other hand I've always found them to be a little bit darker in their General tonality I don't know what that is it could be the finish I'm sure people are going to argue with me in the comments that none of that stuff has any effect on tone I beg to differ but you're welcome to your opinion just like I am with mine so anyways I grabbed a set of these strings just to see if we could kind of counteract that a little bit brighten up the guitar through not only the pickups pafs tend to be brighter but the strings as well so we're gonna throw those on too now Sweetwater didn't stop there I had a couple requests as far as tools go because there are a couple things that I needed in order to do this properly so for all the years that I have been doing guitar mods and upgrades I've never had a proper bench setup or work desk or whatever you want to call it and I've never had a proper mat and a neck rest either I've always just kind of made do with like a rolled up t-shirt or something weird using a blanket underneath the guitar and I figured you know what it was finally time why don't pick up this music Nomad work mat and cradle here that way I don't have to deal with my fiance yelling at me for using blankets for guitar projects so those will be a welcome addition and finally I had them send me out some nut files because I generally use larger strings than most people for e-standard tuning and I have found even with the graph Tech nuts if the string slot is not cut properly well those strings don't want to go through that nut slot they get bound up because they're too large for the slot so I asked Sweetwater to send me a set of these nut files now these all have a particular gauges associated with each nut file so we've basically got 13 through 56 here and I figure that gives us enough leeway to cut those slots out in order to put on anywhere from 52 to 56 on that top string which is generally where I tend to be for D standard tuning I want to use this guitar as a leave behind at my band Human animals practice spot so just in case I'm feeling lazy I can leave the guitar there and have an awesome guitar at the spot without having to bring something along with me so that is it guys there is nothing to it but to do it at this point so let's get started all right guys so first up on the list of things to do we had to strip the rest of the parts off of the guitar that way I could get the big polisher onto the surface of the guitar without any of the hardware getting in the way that included mainly at this point the tuners and the switch for the pickups as pretty much everything else had already been removed once I had those items off it was time to start the polishing now I had a dual action Porter Cable polisher this is what I use in order to polish my car and I had a bunch of different pads and some different products in order to try on the guitar to see what would work best now through trial and error I used a couple of things I did use the Porter Cable polisher on the bigger surfaces including the headstock and for the pad I actually used a special type of pad that is used for polishing and cleaning windows this is basically made to use on really really hard tough surfaces and it just ended up working out perfectly on the surface of this guitar because poly finishes are really really hard and they're hard to cut through for some of the smaller spot polishing areas or removing the scratches in some of the curves of the guitar I actually used a drill bit attachment that I bought I ended up using the same Maguire's Polishing Compound but I used this drill bit attachment and a couple of different pads that go on to the attachment in order to get into some of the areas that the large and wide Porter Cable polisher couldn't get to overall on the headstock I only had to do about three passes and it actually took off the scratching that was up there very quickly I was super happy and I was hopeful that it wasn't going to take a ridiculously long time to get the guitar polished up moving down to the body it took a lot more passes I ended up having to do probably 15 or 16 passes there were a couple of problem areas that I really had to focus in on in order to get as much of the surface scratching as I could out of it I would say that I probably polished for a good hour and 20 minutes straight taking a couple breaks here and there in order to let the surface of the guitar cool off because it does heat up overall I had pretty good success and really there was only one problem area if you look close to the switch the guy who had scratched up the surface of the guitar really really scratched it up around the switch and I ended up burning through some of the Finish just a little bit which was what I was worried about but I ended up taking off some of the black right around the area where the guitar switch is but overall it doesn't bother me and any if anything it gives it a little bit of character that doesn't look bad it actually looks kind of neat but that's my personal opinion but overall uh I was super happy with how the top of the guitar came out I mean it's almost mirror finish there are a couple areas where there were deep scratches where you can kind of still see the the very dull uh leftovers from that scratch because I wasn't able to get deep enough into the clear coat to get it all out without removing too much but you're never going to notice that unless I call your attention to it like that's how well the top of the guitar cleaned up and I'm honestly ecstatic for that because the guitar are dead on from the front looks nearly brand new like it it looks really good so I'm super happy with how that turned out and that was really the bulk of the project because that was where most of the work was going to be and with that out of the way it was kind of just putting the guitar back together so I did just that starting first with the tuners I went ahead and installed the graphtec ratio tuner super excited to try these tuners out they were an incredibly easy install and one of the nice Parts is they give you a bunch of different bases with these tuners so that you can install them and not have to add any additional screw holes if you're installing them into different types of guitars they give you different bases to fit different styles of tuners that were previously on the guitar that you're swapping the graphtec ratio tuners on I think that is an incredibly nice touch and those things went on without a hitch next up it was time to remove the remaining Electronics from the guitar I had to pull the switch out through the cavity I had to disconnect the remaining wiring inside because the switch was on a little Quick Connect plug that pulls out really easily but the rest of the input jack and all the pots and the ground wire those were all still soldered on and for some reason I was having an issue with my soldering gun where I was having a really hard time heating things up this thing usually works super well for me so this was kind of a little bit of a foreshadowing of what was to come because everything up to this point had been fairly smooth sailing but this is about the time where things started to get a little bit irritating so once we had the remaining wiring and electronics out of the guitar it was time to open up the Mojo tone wiring harness and get that installed in the guitar they give you an entire instruction sheet so it was really really easy to figure out how to put things in everything there is basically plug and play uh the only thing that you really need any tools for is you need some sort of socket in order to tighten the pot the nuts on the tops of the pots down on the top of the guitar but that pretty much goes without saying one thing I did notice on here is on both the switch and the Jack they left out the extra screws on both of these so on a lot of switches on a lot of jacks they give you two screws one to go underneath the surface of the guitar and one to go on the top of the surface of the guitar and really what this does is it allows you to fine tune how far the switch and how far the Jack stick out of the guitar because every guitar has a little bit of a different depth depending on the make and the model so so that way having both of those screws it allows you to get the switch so it's not sticking out too far same with the Jack the Mojo tone harness did not come with these extra screws and therefore my input jack and my switch are kind of sticking way out of the body it looks a little bit goofy I'm gonna have to go and get extra pieces in order to kind of fine tune the depths of those but otherwise it's not a deal breaker but I found it a little bit odd that they left those parts out next up I wanted to pull out the old bushings from the body for the bridge I found a super easy way to do this the reason I didn't remove them before is I thought it was kind of a pain in the butt to pull these out turns out it's really easy you just drop a screw down in the cavity of that bushing and then you stick the post into the bushing and as you're screwing down it meets that screw that is in the cavity and it just naturally pushes up that bushing and it's able to pull out super easily so I learned a new little trick when doing that but here is where I run into another issue the bushings that come with the graphtech resomax bridge did not fit in the holes of the Epiphone bushings the holes from the Epiphone bushings were actually wider so when I dropped those studs in for the resomatics bridge uh it was just way too big way too much play like I would have had to have had a significant amount of extra wood in those holes in order to make them fit snugly and that just didn't really want to do that to be completely honest another issue I ran into was on me turns out the graphtec resomax bridge that I ordered was Chrome much like the tuners because I thought that the hardware on these Customs was Chrome but that was an oversight on my end because the hardware on these Customs is nickel Chrome so therefore it didn't match so even if it did fit I probably wasn't going to use it on the guitar anyways because I didn't want the random bridge to be a mismatch with all the rest of the hardware on the body of the guitar so that one's on me so with that being said I went ahead and I just just put in the stock Epiphone Hardware that came on the guitar and maybe in a future episode we'll take this to the next level and we'll install a Faber bridge and tailpiece kit that's pretty much top of the line when it comes to the bridge and the hardware or a Les Paul style guitar let me know if you guys want to see that video down in the comments next up it was time to put this Mojo tone wiring harness to use with the solderless installation so I pulled out those Gibson custom buckers that I was super excited to try I started to put them into the pickup rings and I ran into a little issue so check this out they left a big metal Burr in the screw hole so if I were to try to install the screw uh it it's not gonna go at first I thought that there was a little Burr on the screw hole of the pickup mounting leg it turns out that a piece of the drill bit they used to drill those screw holes had broken off inside of the pickup leg actually on closer inspection what that is the tip of the drill bit broke off inside the tab and the Gibson employee just left it and as much as I tried I could not get that thing out it was wedged in that hole and there was nothing I could do to get that out keeping the threads intact now luckily we got these parts from Sweetwater and Sweetwater has the best customer service so I went ahead and I hit them up and they actually overnighted me a replacement set and gave me a label to send back the uh the messed up pickups and it was literally 100 painless they even sent me an email and apologized for the hiccup and they said we want to get you running as soon as we possibly can so we're gonna overnight you another set of pickups and this was not because I was doing a video with them like this was just a general customer service person that reached out to me so that I think that's just a sign of their commitment to customer service so once the new pickups arrived the following day I got those installed into the pickup rings and I dropped them down in the pickup cavities on the guitar I was getting really close at this point so I was starting to feel a little bit impatient went ahead flipped the guitar over and this is where I started to use use the the solderless wiring harness for moja tone and guys I gotta say it is incredibly easy and painless to get pickups installed in this thing all you do is pop the wire into the corresponding port for the pickup and for the ground and that was it no tools required I did it with my fingernails no solder required No Mess honestly I hope to see something like this wiring harness becomes standard in all guitars because this was just super super easy to install pickups and honestly this guitar may become my pickup test base with how easy it was to put those pickups in alright so at this point I'm really getting impatient because we are super close to being done last thing I got to do is throw the knobs on the pot so I put the original stock black speed knobs back on those CTS PODS of that mojotone wiring harness and it was time to put the hardware back on and to put the strings on get this guitar strung up and ready to root now the last thing that I needed to do in order to get this guitar ready to be strung up was to install the new graphtec Tusk XL nut so in order to do this I went ahead and I compared it to the old graphtec new bone nut that came on the Epiphone Guitar I looked at the depth of the string notches on the nut as well as the depth of the nut itself I went ahead and made some marks on the new Tusk XL nut and I started to sand the base of the nut and small increments and put it back on the guitar as I go just to make sure that I had not overly sanded it and make sure that I didn't get too far down to the point where I would have to put some sort of wedge in between the nut and the guitar itself you don't want to do that you want the nut to make contact with the guitar that way you get the best string vibration transfer to the guitar and you don't lose any tone or resonance so after I had tried a couple times and got the nut sanded down to the proper depth I put it on the guitar and I broke out those music Nomad nut files and I started filing the nuts for the new larger gauge string this also ensures that the nut slots are really nice and smooth that way the strings don't get bound up in the nut and it ensures even better tuning stability so this thing should be Rock Solid by the time we are all said and done and honestly I can't speak highly enough of these music Nomad not files they are incredibly easy to work with and I've already used them on a couple different guitars since I got this set from Sweetwater and it has really cured a couple of tuning issues on a couple of different guitars so these are a big win in my opinion so at this point guys the guitar is done it's ready to go everything that I wanted to do to this guitar to restore it has been done and the only thing left to do is rip through it and see how it sounds so uh we're gonna do that right now [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] guys so as you can see the guitar turned out to be a total success I thought it sounded great in that track uh I think it looks great honestly like this thing looks beautiful to me I'm super happy with how it turned out you would never know by looking at the top of this guitar that at one point this entire top was just ruined by surface scratches and stuff it looks pristine it feels and it actually feels smoother than the average guitar finish like it is super super mirror polished at this point so I think it looks cool every time I look at the atar I'm super happy with how it turned out even the headstock the headstock is just if you catch it in the light man it's just it's it looks perfect like you would never know of course if you flip the guitar over to the back you're gonna know and I may work on that at some point like I said we may do a stage two to this I almost thought about stripping the back of the guitar down to bare wood and just kind of finishing it in a clear Paul or something like that with like a dark wood stain or something just to set it apart even more because I'm not going to be getting rid of this guitar it plays really well I didn't even have to touch the intonation um all I did once I strung it up was I gave it a quick uh adjustment on the truss rod because obviously the guitar has been sitting for a couple of years and even then it was sitting for a couple of years with no strings on it and I was able to get it adjusted to where the action sits perfectly and I had no issues with it so yeah overall super happy with it let me know if you guys want to see more videos like this because I love uh projects I love budget guitars and taking budget guitars and turning them into rippers uh whether it be replacement parts or just small changes set up stuff like that I have a lot of fun doing stuff like that so if you want to see more stuff like this video make sure to leave a comment down below that way I know whether to make more content like this for you guys or not real quick we're gonna do one riff through the Soldano behind me just to send it off and let you guys hear how it sounds without any processing those custom buckers are so clear they are so clear they sound so good thank you [Music] all right guys that is gonna do it for me today huge huge thank you again to the fine folks at Sweetwater for sponsoring this video and allowing this to happen they were the ones who sent out the parts for this build and I gotta say thank you to them again if you guys need any parts for your project guitars of course you know I'm going to send you to Sweetwater affiliate Link in the description of this video as well as all the parts that I use for this build thanks so much for watching and I'm taking this guitar to with me to band practice tonight so I'm gonna let the video play out with some footage from me using it with my band human animal Kyle here again thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time you know what this wall is missing another ant there we go

Channel: Kyle Bull

Views: 106,049

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Id: 8AJVx05jawI

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023