1987 Kramer Pacer Custom II

Details

Bought this one on Reverb. The body is in better shape than expected, and the sanded neck - while something I would not do myself - is a nice change of pace to play on.

The previous owner installed a Dimarzio FRED in the bridge position that I just couldn’t quite get along with. I am a big fan of the PAF Pro in the neck position though, and with the FRED being so similar I moved it over to another guitar’s neck position and replaced it with a Dimarzio Double Whammy. I’ve had the Double Whammy for a while in another guitar, and despite liking it, it made its way to my parts drawer. It sounds great in this guitar, more output than the FRED with similar punch and a little more midrange. For those that don’t know, the Double Whammy was discontinued in the early 90s as Dimarzio felt it was better replaced by the ToneZone, a design with mismatched coils (the Double Whammy has traditional matched coils).

In the neck and middle positions, I installed a pair of ESP SH-100 “Power Rail” pickups. These came out of my blue ‘92 ESP Maverick, which I converted to use EMG’s. I love these pickups, and they sound just as good as any Dimarzio dual rail design to me so I used them here. One of my favorite tricks, as done here, is to wire the neck pickup in series like a full humbucker. That gives me a great soloing tone in that position especially under high gain. Then, I wire the middle pickup in parallel. This retains hum-cancellation, but gives a much lower output, almost like a true single coil. It also helps retain some quack in positions 2 and 4 with the series-wired humbuckers.

I no longer own this instrument