Why am I writing about a guitar I’ve owned for fourteen years? It’s Coronavirus 2020 Shelter-In-Place time, and the ever-lengthening number of weeks inside with the family has me ready to ponder something random and non-disease in nature, like the Hello Kitty Stratmaster. Therefore, I’m sharing it here. It’s an example of the inexpensive/odd things that make me happy. I might dream about owning a Gretsch White Falcon, but I’m really happier with something I’m able to drill and add new parts to.

This isn’t a new guitar or a recent project, but again, it’s trapped-in-the-house time, so why not explore it? Way back in 2006, my wife surprised me with a Hello Kitty Strat, complete with pink strap and soft case. Here’s what they look like to begin with:

Over the years, I added and subtracted and otherwise modified it to make it more fun. To begin with, it needed two pickups rather than one. I carefully cut out a space for a Telecaster neck pickup, then painted that pickup (with its cover removed) to blend in.

In the bridge position, I replaced the white humbucker with a chrome single-coil. I love P90-type pickups.

Since the single-pickup guitar didn’t have switches for multiple pickups, I added a Fender Jaguar chrome three-switch plate to turn them on and off individually. (The third switch is an on/off “kill” switch.)

For more chrome-hardware fun, I routed out a cavity and installed a (generic) Jazzmaster/Jaguar vibrato unit and Gibson-style bridge to replace the hardtail bridge. Since there wasn’t much string angle to keep the strings from slipping out of the bridge saddles, I improvised a roller-bar structure using…the bar from a broken French-press coffee maker mounted to the guitar body with two parts from a broken computer hard drive.

While most of the above modifications were done just for fun, the neck was the one part of the stock guitar that needed real help. It was too narrow for my hands, to begin with (it’s almost as if it were designed for someone other than an adult male!). More seriously, the fret ends stuck out on both edges, scraping my fingers as I played. I filed them down, but it still was never totally smooth. Therefore, I found an inexpensive used replacement neck. Sadly, it lacks the pink dot markers of the original, but it feels much better.

That’s about all there is to say about my hacking up this innocent pink guitar. The biggest surprise might be the sound of the neck pickup. I chose a Telecaster pickup for just two reasons: it is small (minimum cutting up of the Kitty face), and I had one in a drawer. With the cover off, the usual Telecaster neck-pickup muddiness is gone; it sounds very much like a Fender Mustang or Duo-Sonic pickup to my ears. If we all make it through this epidemic, I’ll eagerly play it in public again as soon as possible.