Christmas, 2002 - lookit what I got myself...

It's a 1996 Gibson BB King signature model Lucille!

Yes, it's the ONLY one in cherry (or anything BUT ebony) that I've ever seen. It's a work of art, great looking guitar...
But it had its issues as a player, for me...

The neck seemed HUGE to me - it's probably the 50's profile. This was an eBay deal, and although the price was right, I believe that if I had "played before paid," I might have passed on this axe. But, then I'd have missed out on a real tone machine, because this guitar has THE TONE. It landed set up with what I believe is a set of .011's - too heavy for me. Ordinarily, the FIRST thing I would have done was to I swap 'em out for nines - but when I played the guitar "as shipped," it had such incredible tone... I pondering the tales of tone I've heard, many of which extol the virtues of heavier strings... would Lucille lose her MOJO if I slapped on my usual light-guage set? Stay tuned...

The answer was, NO LOSS OF MOJO! If there IS a difference, I certainly can't hear it - and that was good news to me.

The guitar was in near new condition, save for the truss rod cover (???) and the fact that the Varitone cut out on the bridge pup - try any notch but "1" and the bridge pup had no output. Having had some experience with a Varitone before, and believing it to be near useless, I had come up with a few schemes to replace a Varitone with one of my "Chromacaster/FAT-O-Caster" rotary switches, custom wired specifically for this kind of axe, all worked out and drawn up long before I had ever come to possess such an instrument. But, as I played with the Varitone on the neck pup, I found that it actually did have a couple of unexpected good tones... and, as expected, a couple of very bad tones.
Hmmm...

Here's what I've done for now, and you unhappy Varitone users out there might want to try this: since it was cutting out on the bridge pup anyway, I simply wired the bridge pup "around" it - so there's no Varitone effect on the bridge pup at all. But, I left it in the circuit on the neck pup. I find this a very interesting combo. Now, although even on the neck pup the fifth and sixth notch on the Varitone are hideously thin, by blending in a bit of the unaffected bridge pup it fattens the tone back up to where I could actually see using that voice as a Tele substitute, or for other funky-twangy stuff. I believe I will just leave it wired this way until I get everything else the way I want it - it does have some TONE!

After a little more trouble shooting I was able to discern that the issue was not with the Varitone switch, but rather, the goofy multi-capacitor Gibson uses - about half of it was dead. So, the switch is OK, huh? Hmmmm.....

A bit later, I figured out a scheme to use both sides of the Varitone on the neck pup, by putting some caps in the circuit on notches #5 and #6 to bleed some bottom/mids back into the tone - and came up with some cool and different tones that I thought I would find more usable than those really thin stock ones. Gee, that was fun!

A month later, itching to do coil-shunts and other trick wiring, I was not looking forward to removing those lovely gold covers and wanging on the stock stuff... So, I put the stock Gibson pups aside and loaded up a set of Seymour Duncans - a JB in the bridge, a 59er in the neck, with a set of StewMac gold covers on 'em. I rewired the Varitone (again) this time making the #2 notch just a straight coil-shunt on the neck 59er. I put in a push/pull to switch the bridge's coils from series to parallel, and away we go! Man, does this axe sing now...

I loaned Lucille to my pal Mychael Moaze when his band The Urban Gypsys opened for the Average White Band, and he fell in love with it. He took it with him out to Palm Springs to jam with Kal David, and got nothing but wows and gee-whiz compliments. Hey, this guitar just LOOKS GOOD on him... I got myself a bargain on an ES-333, and worked out a deal for Mychael on this axe - and so, now, it's his!