In two previous videos I've made about this guitar I've criticised the lack of balance between the bridge piezo pickup and the lipstick neck pickup position which are both connected into the installed preamp. Should be good but the piezo pickup so overpowers the lipstick pickup making hybrid sounds almost impossitble to achieve in my experience. SO, I SWAPPED OUT THE LIPSTICK FOR A DUAL RAIL HUMBUCKER. NOW THE GUITAR IS SO MUCH BETTER! It achives good balance between the volumes produced by the pickups and real hybrid sounds right across the pickup selector slider.
The pickup I used was a no-name-brand pickup bought on Ebay for £7.79. It's wired so that the coils can be split. Its a ceramic pickup with an impedence of 9.79 Kohms with half that when coil split. The lipstick pickup I took out has an impedence of 4.55 Kohms.
To do the conversion you remove the preamp and then undo the lipstick pickup mounting screws at the back of the guitar. The pickup comes out through the preamp slot. It's wired into the preamp with a jack plug. I made a new mounting out of a brass strip and tapped holes for the mounting screws in the guitar back and the pickup mounting. I wired the pickup to a toggle swith to allow coil splitting and then connected it up to a jack plug. Reassembly involved pushing the pickup asembly through the preamp slot, using the screws to fix it to the guitar. I drilled a small hole in the guitar top for the toggle switch and then plugged in the jack plug to the preamp. I refitted the preamp and plugged it into my Aroma AG-26A acoustic guitar amp. WOW!!! I hope you agree this is a big improvement ? This is now a brilliant guitar for the bucks!
In this video, the guitar is playing directly into my DAW.