Frequently Asked Questions

All payment option supported by WIX. We also use PayPal, a third-party service that provides us with our secure shopping cart. Did you know that you do NOT need to be a member of PayPal to make purchases? You can make payment using any of the options that are available with PayPal. If you make payment using "pay by check", your item will be shipped after PayPal confirms that payment for your check has cleared.

Your upgrades purchased directly from AweSome-Guitars.com website includes our 30-Day Return Policy for defective items. Our Return Policy is void and does not apply in the following instances: · Any damage or alteration to the upgrade resulting from customization or modification. · Any/all products which are not purchased directly from AweSome-Guitars.com website. · Upgrades that have been serviced or altered by any person other than an AweSome-Guitars.com Certified Technician at an Authorized AweSome-Guitars.com Service Center. · Normal wear and tear on any part of the upgrade, including switches, plated surfaces, pickguards, knobs, etc. · All other damage (accidental or intentional) and deterioration due to normal usage, wear and tear, aging, neglect, abuse, or Acts of Nature. · Upgrades purchased from an AweSome-Guitars.com Authorized Dealer must be returned to that dealer. To return any product for refund, use the following procedure: 1. Use our Contact Form to request our Return shipping address. 2. Ship the product using USPS to the address we provide. 3. You are responsible for the cost of safely shipping the product to us. 4. You must include a copy of the proof-of-purchase receipt, or it will be returned. 5. Your current return address and email address must be included. Once the product is received by AweSome-Guitars.com, our technical team will diagnose the product to determine if the item contains a factory defect. If a factory detect is present, the customer will then receive a full refund of the purchase price or have the option to receive a new replacement. If the diagnosis is found to be damage caused by the customer or no issue found, the refund will be denied, and the customer may request the product returned to them at their own expense. All transportation, insurance and freight charges associated with returns of AweSome-Guitars.com electric guitar or bass upgrades are the responsibility of the purchaser.

You get a Limited Warranty with our upgrade products. Upgrade Warranty Our upgrades include our 30-Day Limited Warranty. AweSome-Guitars.com warrants their electric guitar or bass upgrade products to be free from defects in materials and workmanship for 30-Days from the date of original purchase, subject to limitations set forth herein. This Limited Warranty applies only to the original retail purchaser when this upgrade is purchased directly from AweSome-Guitars.com website. Requesting Warranty Repair To return any product for Warranty Repairs, use the following procedure: All Upgrades Purchased Directly From AweSome-Guitars.com Website Use our Contact Form to request the warranty shipping address. Ship the product to the address we provide. You are responsible for the cost of safely shipping the product. You must include a copy of the original sales receipt or it will be returned. Your current return address and email address must be included. Upgrades Purchased Directly From an Authorized AweSome-Guitars.com Dealer You must return the upgrade to the Authorized AweSome-Guitars.com Dealer. If needed, you are responsible for the cost of safely shipping the product. You must include a copy of the original sales receipt. Our Limited Warranty is void and does not apply in the following instances: Any damage or alteration to the upgrade resulting from customization or modification. Any/all products which are not purchased directly from AweSome-Guitars.com website. Upgrades that have been serviced by any person other than an AweSome-Guitars.com Certified Technician at an Authorized AweSome-Guitars.com Service Center. Normal wear and tear on any part of the upgrade, including switches, plated surfaces, pick-guards, knobs, etc. All other damage (accidental or intentional) and deterioration due to normal usage, wear and tear, aging, neglect, abuse, or Acts of Nature. Upgrades purchased from an AweSome-Guitars.com Authorized Dealer must be returned to that dealer. All transportation, insurance and freight charges associated with warranty service and repairs on AweSome-Guitars.com electric guitar or bass upgrades are the responsibility of the purchaser.

Your upgrades purchased directly from AweSome-Guitars.com website includes our 30-Day Return Policy for defective items. Our Return Policy is void and does not apply in the following instances: · Any damage or alteration to the upgrade resulting from customization or modification. · Any/all products which are not purchased directly from AweSome-Guitars.com website. · Upgrades that have been serviced or altered by any person other than an AweSome-Guitars.com Certified Technician at an Authorized AweSome-Guitars.com Service Center. · Normal wear and tear on any part of the upgrade, including switches, plated surfaces, pickguards, knobs, etc. · All other damage (accidental or intentional) and deterioration due to normal usage, wear and tear, aging, neglect, abuse, or Acts of Nature. · Upgrades purchased from an AweSome-Guitars.com Authorized Dealer must be returned to that dealer. To return any product for refund, use the following procedure: 1. Use our Contact Form to request our Return shipping address. 2. Ship the product using USPS to the address we provide. 3. You are responsible for the cost of safely shipping the product to us. 4. You must include a copy of the proof-of-purchase receipt, or it will be returned. 5. Your current return address and email address must be included. Once the product is received by AweSome-Guitars.com, our technical team will diagnose the product to determine if the item contains a factory defect. If a factory detect is present, the customer will then receive a full refund of the purchase price or have the option to receive a new replacement. If the diagnosis is found to be damage caused by the customer or no issue found, the refund will be denied, and the customer may request the product returned to them at their own expense. All transportation, insurance and freight charges associated with returns of AweSome-Guitars.com electric guitar or bass upgrades are the responsibility of the purchaser.

Although rare, there are times when we are in anout-of-stocksituation for a specific product. This can occur when we have a special incentive or advertising that results in more sales than normal. We ship your order with currently stocked products and your backorder product(s) are shipped when they are in stock

Orders are normally shipped within three to five business days (between Monday to Friday). We currently only ship our upgrades using the U.S. Postal Service. Our first-class shipping to U.S. addresses includes insurance and delivery confirmation. Since guitars are made to order, they typically ship within four to five weeks through UPS. The purchaser will be provided updates as to the status of their item as well as a tracking number once the item leaves our facility.

We are exclusively an online business. We have no retail store, no salespeople and no telephone staff. But we support our customers 100% and are more than happy to answer any of your questions via email. You can use our Contact Form to send us your questions or comments. Emails are answered when time permits during normal business hours: M-F/ 9am-5pm E.S.T.

We have chrome metal control plates for our Telecaster upgrade products. However, we currently only offer black plastic control plates for our Jazz Bass products. If you want a metal control plate, you can always purchase one of our products and use the plastic control plate as a pattern to have someone make a metal control plate. You then simply transfer the parts to that metal control plate. We only use the highest quality mini switches available anywhere, but the factory only makes them in chrome. We also use nautical grade stainless steel flat washers under the mini switch lock nuts to prevent the lock nuts from gouging your pickguard or guitar finish. In addition, the stainless steel washers will not rust over time from sweaty hand exposure.

Our Telecaster and Jazz Bass products can be used in either right-hand or left-hand instruments. All of our switch products can be used in either right-hand or left-hand electric guitar or bass instruments.

The fifth wire is intended to be a ground wire for the metal pickup housing. Normally, this will be connected to a suitable electrical ground location, such as the back of potentiometers with existing soldered grounding connections or the ground lead coming from the input jack. One caveat: use an ohmmeter to make sure this fifth wire is not electrically connected to any of the four pickup coil wires. If you read any continuity (e.g., a resistance of 3K to 12K) between this fifth wire and any of the four pickup coil wires, then do not connect this lead to ground. Tape it off so it is insulated or the Pickup Switch UpgradeTM product that you purchased will not operate correctly.

We use 500K potentiometers (i.e., pots) and .047 mfd capacitors to give you the best of all possible tones — from muted and subdued pickup tones to those glass shattering twangy pickup tones that will turn EVERY country electric guitar player green with envy! Most players want to get the maximum 'ring-in-a-bell' brilliance out of their instrument. Players who prefer 250K pots are welcome to swap out our 500K versions for a 250K equivalent. Based on several years of customer feedback, we find that it's better that all of our upgrade products have the flexibility of 500K pots instead of the limitations of 250K pots. Many of the pickup manufacturers recommend the use of 250K pots to avoid "support issues" due to the pickups sounding too "glass-shattering" brilliant. But there are people who "worship" this type of tone (as evidenced by fans of Robert Cray, Mark Knopfler and others who have this particular signature sound; as well as the numerous customers who want that intense country twang sound). It would be a poor decision for us to exclude a large market segment who has a particular taste — especially when all that is required is a simple twist of a control knob to address this issue. Here's how you benefit from our use of 500K pots: You can get more brilliance from your pickups than with 250K Tone pots. The 250K pots (especially the tone control) will automatically mute some of the brilliance of the pickup signal because there is a circuit of a 250K pot and capacitor that "bleeds" some of the brilliant pickup output to ground. This is not a bad thing. But having 500K pots, you are able to "dial back" to a 250K level and have access to this muted brilliance. The problem (at least for some players) is that they WANT that glass shattering country twang to cut through everything and be heard. With a 500K pot, you can immediately crank the tone control to get that subtle but powerful benefit. But when you have a 250K pot, you're "stuck" because you can't increase the resistance that constantly "bleeds" your twangy brilliant tone to ground. Because our unique upgrade products give you numerous combinations of pickup coil connections, you will find that some of the reverse-phase pickup coil settings will cause a noticeable drop in output signal. This behavior is a normal characteristic (and physics principle) that involves the interaction of two copper coils and magnets, it is not a deficiency of our Pickup Switch Upgrade products. An effective strategy to address this is to have your instrument's volume control dialed back by about two increments (to about "8") when using normal-phase pickup tones (again, another reason for using 500K pots vs. 250K versions — to avoid added loss of brilliant tones when dialing back the volume control). When you use the reverse-phase pickup tones you can dial up to "10" to compensate for the reduced signal output variation and keep your output sound (and brilliance) more consistent among the range of pickup tones that our products give you. We are looking for our "Next Generation" products to automatically address this issue. We believe that the design of our upgrade products are well thought out and offer all players the best possible benefit and greatest flexibility available anywhere. Our T3Plus-Switch product combines the series connectivity of three pickup coils (i.e., Red Special) with the parallel connectivity of three pickup coils — all in one simple and intuitive pickup switch control to give you access to 35 unique pure analog pickup tones.

Our Pickup Switch UpgradeTM products work best when you have a "diversity" of dissimilar pickups because this will produce lots of unique tone surprises. This is one of the strengths of our products. You can cobble together an instrument with a hodge-podge of different pickups and come up with an instrument that has no equal (tone-wise). Conversely, instruments with pickups that are almost identical in specification (i.e., same number of windings, same magnet type) will provide you with 35 or 68 pickup tones. However, the 'range' of pickup tones (from muddy/dirty blues to tin-canny) will be somewhat narrow. By replacing one pickup with another one that has a different characteristic (e.g., different coil impedance or different magnet type), you will experience a much wider and richer range of pickup tones. By using our products, multiple pickup tone variations can be unlocked – and this is before your analog or digital processing unit(s) get the chance to add even more flavoring to your output.

A previous T4-Switch customer and guitar fanatic was doing research work in the local university's Autology (hearing) department. He said that when you map out the range of pickup tones from Blues to Tin-Canny and start carving that range into smaller and smaller equal tone segments, the maximum number of pickup tones that the average human ear can distinguish is 64. In other words, if you took one of these 64 tones and split it in half - then played one half of the tone followed by the other half, test subjects couldn't tell the difference between the two halves. Although it's not published science, it is also very telling and useful. Taking into account that there will always be several pickup tones that will be so close together as to be virtually identical (it's inevitable when combining multiple pickup coils), our T4 Pickup Switch UpgradeTM product is a practical, simple and powerful compromise designed to give you 68 pickup tones from four pickup coils. This also means that it is pointless to come out with a "T5-Switch" to produce more pickup tones because it would increase the complexity and give you several "groupings" of identical sounding pickup tones. We have hit a wall (from a purely physics standpoint) and simply cannot make our products any better. This is as good as it gets. Fancy that!! So to summarize; although there are only about 64 pickup tones that are possible, our products give you access to them all (even though there will be "groups" of pickup tones that are virtually identical.) Our T3Plus-Switch gives you 35 pickup tones from instruments with three separate pickup coils. Our T4-Switch gives you 68 and our T4Plus-Switch gives you 102 pickup tones from instruments with four separate pickup coils.

The T4-Switch product controls four separate pickup coils in two separate banks. The design was to keep it as simple as possible but also provide a jaw-dropping number of 68 subtle pickup tones. The final design didn't permit 'spanning' a coil from one bank with a coil of the second bank to put them into series. However, our T4Plus-Switch uses a push-pull potentiometer to let you span coils from separate humbuckers - putting them into a series circuit to give you 102 pickup tones

The T4-Switch product controls four separate pickup coils in two separate banks. The design was to keep it as simple as possible but also provide a jaw-dropping number of 68 subtle pickup tones. The final design didn't permit 'spanning' a coil from one bank with a coil of the second bank to put them into series. However, our T4Plus-Switch uses a push-pull potentiometer to let you span coils from separate humbuckers - putting them into a series circuit to give you 102 pickup tones

You can use the T3Plus-Switch with two pickup coils. However, the total number of unique pickup sounds will be limited to 6. Many customers do this because they plan to upgrade their two pickup coil instrument to one with three pickup coils. An example is replacing a single-coil pickup on your instrument with a 4-wire humbucker pickup. By having the T3Plus-Switch already available, your pickup coils can be easily connected to it and give you 35 pickup tones.

Here is the non-technical explanation: Due to the physics of these 'S' type (i.e., dual rail) humbuckers and with both the coils and magnets being so close together) when the two coils of this humbucker are put out-of-phase with each other, the resulting output signal drops about 9-18 percent. Regular 4-wire humbucker pickups also exhibit this behavior — but to a lesser extent. This single pickup switch combination requires that you increase the amplifier volume for this pickup switch combination. This behavior would not have even been known except for people who are using our products. An effective strategy to address this is to have your instrument's volume control dialed back by about two increments (to about "8") when using normal-phase pickup tones (again, another reason for using 500K pots vs. 250K versions — to avoid added loss of brilliant tones when dialing back the volume control). When you use the reverse-phase pickup tones you can dial up to "10" to compensate for the reduced signal output variation and keep your output sound (and brilliance) more consistent among the range of pickup tones that our products give you. Also see the topic "Why do you use 500k potentiometers?" elsewhere on this page for additional information to address this issue.

Our Upgrade products include our Professional treble bleed circuitry.

Assuming that you already checked for an intermittent ground connection, another reason that will cause a "static" sound when touching your plastic pickguard is a build up of static on the plastic material. This is a real problem that can happen — especially in a hot, dry climate like Arizona, New Mexico, etc. To fix this problem when it occurs, simply wipe an anti-static clothes drier sheet on the pickguard. The anti-static sheet will soak up all of the static and solve this problem. Repeat as necessary.

Yes, we have lowered all of our upgrade products.

When you have MORE pickup tones, it gives you Total Control over what You will sound like.  Even more important, you also have more control over what others hear what you sound like. Why should you settle for 3 or 5 pickup tones?  You can't get Total Control over what You will sound like when you're saddled with an antique 3-way or 5-way switch that hasn't changed in over 100 years.  It's like settling for a job that pays you "three" hundred or "five" hundred a week. Wouldn't you rather have more?   Like a job that pays you "six" hundred, "thirty five" hundred or "sixty eight" hundred a week? What if your vehicle's radio only had three or five stations. Wouldn't you really want a radio with more stations? Would you subscribe to a cable T.V. provider if they just offered you just three or five channels? Would you buy a cell phone if you were limited to calling only three or five people? Why are you settling for just three or five pickup tones? Now You can Upgrade your electric guitar or bass and join the AweSome Pickup Tone Nation. As one customer clearly stated:"I am SO pleased with the upgrade on my Nashville Tele. The standard 5-way blade switch is an 8-pack of Crayolas when compared to your upgrade which is the 98-pack with built in sharpener. I now have colors I didn't even know I wanted. Do I need EACH of the additional tones? No, of course not; but there are many new tones which, now that I have heard them, I cannot live without. The next time I buy a guitar, your products will be that guitar's first upgrade! Thank you for answering my questions so darn thoroughly!" — Branden Garner (MI) Put simply: You can never have too many pickup tones.

To comply with the banana republic of California CCPA requirements, we have created this policy (1/4/2020).We collect and store offline the following data about our customers and visitors. This data is what you have provided to us, either directly or through purchase(s). We do not share this data with anyone. We use this data both to establish warranty information, and to send you an alert about a new product that would be of interest to you.Your First and Last nameYour email addressDate(s) and product(s) you have purchased from usIf you want your data removed, use our website contact form and request removal. Note: this also permanently removes all applicable product warranties.

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