Meet MZ-330!

This Gibson ES 330-style guitar was built for a great guitar player and a great friend, Mark Zampella, hence its name, MZ-330!

Hollow, Man!

The MZ 330 stripped bare!

Roc and I never worked on a hollow-body guitar before, but Mark made it easy on us by ordering this cool body/neck combo and these easy-peasy Kwikplug pick-ups. These humbucker-in-a-soapbar pickups have pull coil taps on the tone knobs for single coil sound in both the neck and bridge. This guitar is a tone machine!

Block Head

The pickups presented a bit of a mounting issue. They needed to be screwed into the body…but the body is hollow! I created mounting blocks out of crafting sticks, and glued them into the body. I think I got the pickup height correct…hope these wooden blocks don’t effect the hollow-body tone!

Wooden mounting blocks give the pickups something to hold on to.

Nice Tailpiece, Dill Weed!

Once of the mysterious mistakes about the MZ-330 is the tailpiece. It looks crooked, but when I install it straight, the string alignment gets thrown off on the neck. Crooked it is!

Uh, is that tailpiece crooked?

Headstock Fail

Aside from the snazzy Imperial tuners, this headstock is a disaster. It’s supposed to be MZ’s signature in gold glitter to match a gold emblem. But the signature got messy, and then the emblem inadvertently got sanded off — I never should have bothered with messy gold glitter glue in the first place! Fail-after-fail resulted in this weak final product. Don’t look at it. Look away!

Aside from the groovy imperial-style tuners, this headstock sucks!

Gone Fishin’

Fishing electronics through a hollow-body F hole.

The GFS Kwikplug wiring system made connecting the pickups a cinch, but fishing the output jack, selector switch, and volume and tone pots through the F-hole was still a challenge.