Mollusk | soldguitars

2009 Fender USA Yngwie Malmsteen 'Artist Series' Strat

"Mollusk"

#SZ9386095

All Malmsteen Strats are a curious beasts. A little odd ... a bit like Mr Malmsteen. There are a few quite elegant, old-school touches on this ... like the old-style huge headstock and the bullet truss rod adjuster, but that's where the traditional ends. Malmsteen is renowned for screwing with his lovely vintage strats ... like adding HUGE Dunlop '6000' frets, a brass nut, and scalloping ther living crap out of the fingerboards. Aaaah, the scalloping. For those who've not come across one of these (where have you BEEN), Mr Malmsteen likes his Strats to have scalloped fingerboards (fretboards, if you must), where the wood between the frets is removed, so that your fingers only come into contact with the string, and not with the board. This one (a "Series 3") has the deepest scalloping of any of the Malmsteen Signature Strats ... to the extent that there's absolutely no chance of your fretting fingers ever feeling any wood.

Now before I go off on one of my rants, understand that I REALLY like this guitar. As a stand-alone effort, it works very well. A little odd, admittedly, but that's ok.

But ... the pickups. They're toneful, crisp and punchy, but they're ... just ... not MAN enough to play rocky stuff without screwing with the amp and adding a boost. The easy way around it is just to add a pedal to boost it (which is what I do, and it is capable of sounding great, and that's what Malmsteen does too of course), but that seems like cheating. Like you're hearing the tone of the pedal, not the guitar, which I think is a shame. Secondly, the trem works fine, but for rocky stuff I want a trem I can do tricks with (i.e. a Floyd), and something that holds tune really well. So it KINDA misses the mark as a purely rocky guitar.

Secondly, if I play a Strat, I tend to settle straight into the quacky out of phase positions 2 and 4. That is how a Strat should sound. Quacky and cool. So why the HELL does the Malmsteen Strat have a three-way switch? That's like deliberately fitting shitty drum-brakes to a race car, just because the old ones used to be that way. Curious.

I flirted with the idea of keeping it stock, but figured that life's just too damn short. So. I ripped it ALL out and installed some proper face-melting single-coil-sized 'blade' humbuckers, routed through a 5-way. I installed three DiMarzios ... a "Fast Track 2" at the bridge, another at the neck, and a "Fast Track 1" in the middle. The FS2 is a pretty crazy mofo, with THREE TIMES the output of a normal single coil. Yikes. The FS1 is a little cooler, with just twice the output of a normal single coil. The results were FANTASTIC, and made this a much more rocky guitar. I went further with the electrics. As Malmsteen has bypassed all of the tone controls on his main guitars, I figured that it might be cool to wire each of the pups to its own volume control, so not bother with any tone controls. SO, the guitar wore three knobs marked 'Volume', and each controlled one pickup, so they could be blended nicely, AND could be set for choppy chords, crunchy drive and blistering lead tones, just be dialling in the volumes then using the 5 way. I also put a push-pull coil split on each of the volume controls, so the pickup controlled by each volume knob can also be split by pulling that knob. The breadth of sounds (and range of output) was stunning, although it WOULD have be nice to be able to get a little more "quack" from positions 2 and 4 when the pups were coil split. You can't have it all I suppose ... and I have another strats for quacky stuff.

However, as I like to keep my stuff stock (wherever possible), I ditched all of the fancy new electrics and threw them into "Muffler", then put this one back to completely factory-spec (with the original DiMarzio pickups, the 3-way, the original 'notched' tone controls and the low-resistance YJM volume control). I figured that the low output pups could be compensated for pretty easily by stomping on a boost pedal ...

Now maybe I should just stop being a spoiled little bitch and just enjoy playing it ... yeah ...