In our top 5 “S” style guitars for under $300.00, one of our recommendations was an SX VES62 as an excellent guitar at a ridiculous street price of $199.00. We also mention that it’s not only a great guitar for beginners but many seasoned players are buying these guitars with a view to “pimping” them up with name-brand parts and pick-ups. The necks and bodies on these guitars are really well finished and feel very nice, whereas the manufacturers save money is on the parts and pickups and even though these guitars are fine as is, you can vastly improve them with better quality components as well as personalising and customising a guitar to suit your exact needs and budget.
At this point, we need to point out that even though you are spending money to improve your instrument and adding brand-name parts this generally will not improve the resale value so think of this as your own custom shop instrument and build a guitar that suits you and want to keep.
In the meantime, we are going to give the VES62 the right royal treatment as we do feel this is a guitar worth investing in.
As referenced earlier it’s not worth it to swap necks and bodies as you may as well buy a whole new instrument. The first changes you may want to consider are pickups, the tremolo system and machines heads. The selector switch and output jack are also candidates here, however, we recommend replacing these if they fail as they are not as integral to the sound and playability of the guitar.
The SXVES62 SC Style Guitar
Left to right: Sunburst; Vintage White; Lake Placid Blue
Left to right: Candy Apple Red; Vintage Black; Fiesta Red
As the SX VES62 is based on a classic 60’s Stratocaster what we are trying to achieve is to bring this guitar up to a standard reaching an equivalency of a Fender Player series guitar made in Mexico. The parts we are going to use are all authentic Fender parts just like the ones used by Fender and there are a range of styles and grades available. We are trying to give this guitar as an authentic vintage vibe as possible so we are choosing our replacement based on this brief.
One of our product specialists JB has spec’d this one to his personal taste and requirements
Guitar - SX VES62 in Lake Placid Blue (VES62LPB)
Street Price - $199.00
Pick Ups - Fender Pre Wired Strat Pickguard Tex-Mex Tortoise Shell (0992343500)
Street Price - $319.00
Bridge / Tremolo Assembly - Vintage Narrow Strat Chrome (0992070000)
Street Price - $105.00
Machine Heads - Fender American Vintage Staggered Tuning Machines (0992074105)
Street Price - $95.00
Strings - Daddario Electric Guitar Set NYXL10/52 (NYXL 1052)
Street Price - $25.00
Straplocks (optional) - Schaller S-Locks Nickel (10750)
Street Price - $40.00
Total Build = $783.00
The best thing about this process is you get to choose exactly what you want. Our amp tech Jamie has Roswell Filtertrons in his SX Telecaster and our guitar luthier Angelo has a set of Burns Brian May Tri Sonic pickups in his VES62. These both required some slight modification to the guitars to install, however, these staff members are absolutely stoked with the outcome and these guitars count among favourites in their respective collections.
Genuine Aussie Stock