I was doing a little spring cleaning, '03, and decided to unload the "Purple Haze" in the hope that I would become a little more motivated to get the "Jimi's WoodStick" project moving...

I decided it really needed a new paintjob if I was gonna get anything for it, so I pulled it all apart. As I did, I realized that, hey, there's some spiffy hardware here, worth more than I could get for it as a complete guitar... cool! The bridge was saved for another secret project, but the lefty neck and tuners wound up on a new, strange Strat project I decided to call "Black Magic" (because the name "VooDoo" is already over-used)...

This is an MIM Strat body. The "VooDoo" pickguard was cut for me by Pete over at Vintage Vibe Guitars. That's a Carvin dual-blade in the neck spot, a Seymour Duncan JB Jr. in the bridge, and a Reverend RW/RP Strat pup I had just laying around in the middle...
I installed a SuperSwitch, wired for my "Five-Tone Tele" setup, selecting five different series/parallel/phase combos of the humbuckers in the neck and bridge. There's a master volume, a "blend/volume" for the middle pup, and a push/pull under the master tone pot for coil-shunt on the bridge and neck pups.

After it had been together for a month or so, I decided I really liked the tones, but wasn't crazy about the neck, after all - so it went back on the "Purple Haze" (along with a new lefty vibrato bridge, so that axe is now all set up left handed). For this axe, I ordered a Gibson scale conversion neck from Warmoth. I have one on my mahogany thinline Parts-o-caster Tele, and I really liked it. I also ordered all the black hardware I could find... The little skull and crossbones on the headstock was hand-painted and is under six coats of clear laquer... pretty cool! And, that's the picture you see here (left).

MARCH 2005: Well, here's a little story... I have never been really satisfied with the pups in that Epi Firebird. Not that it doesn't sound good, it actually has a pretty good tone, but no matter what I put in it, the pickups are so microphonic that it is unusable at almost any kind of stage volume. I was complaining about this to my pal Pete over at Vintage Vibe, and a few weeks later, a pair of pickups were delivered to me... Are you ready for this? They were mini-humbucker-sized SINGLE coil pups with engraved "mirror" tops, with "Deaf" on one and "Eddie" on the other... YIKES!

Well, these were never gonna LOOK right on the Firebird, and the LOOK is almost the ONLY thing that guitar is all about, so I had Pete whip me up a custom Strat pickguard so I could mount them little boogers and give 'em a listen. I test-muled them in Obie, my '93 Strat (seen here on the right), for a bit and LOVED THEM.

But, I had other plans for Obie... So, where to mount these little tone-bombs? And then, I realized that the Black Magic Strat, with its shorter Gibson-scale neck, might really show these new pups off... and so that's where they wound up! Now I have a Callaham steel sustain block, and to keep the black trim thang going, a set of GraphTech saddles for the bridge. It makes a nice little guitar...