Michael’s Rally GL400 in black with gold and double-bound body is in for a new middle pickup to convert it to a ‘Black Beauty’. For this upgrade I’ll rout a new pickup cavity between the original two and after shielding the cavity, will install a new IronGear Blues Engine bridge pickup. While many ‘Black Beauty’ guitars feature a neck pickup in the middle position, I selected the bridge pickup in this case because its resistance value was nicely between the Rally original bridge and neck values.
Just in case you’ve never played one, don’t turn down a Rally Les Paul copy if you get a chance to buy one second hand. They’re in my book far and away the best LP copies out there. The build is superb and the pickups are amazing. And they usually came out of the factory with very low actions and few, if any, high frets. Amazing quality. The two models to look out for are the Rally GL300 – almost identical to this but single-bound top and a variety of colours (cherry burst, lemonburst, gold top, black and crimson-burst…) and this model, the GL400. The other slightly quirky LP styles plus the other shapes in the Rally catalogue are good but not the outstandingly good that characterises their LP copies.
I’m fitting 4 new CTS mini pots on this guitar mainly because the space in the cavity is too tight for full size and to keep control of the budget we don’t want to be enlarging the cavity (whether with chisels, Dremels or routers…).
What a Beauty this will be after its upgrade. The set up is already just about spot on so we won’t need to make any adjustments there 🙂 I’ll add a gallery of pictures below when the work is done.