I love guitar gear as much as the next guitarist, and every so often I go through this upgrade phase — trying out new pieces to see if it improves my rig.

But experimenting takes time and money, and it seems that every time I get a bit overzealous — in search of improvements, I lose sight of things that are actually working well.

This last week, I made a mistake of trying 3 new things at once.  I changed to a different brand of strings, swapped all 3 pickups of my main Strat, and bought a new (to me) overdrive pedal.  The latter of which isn’t a problem, but switching both strings and pickups at the same time was a mistake.  It obviously changed my tone but I couldn’t tell which contributed to what!  To make the matter worse I don’t have any left of my old brand of strings.

Once again, my current lesson pops into my mind.  If you are in a hurry, go take the long way.  I should have changed one thing at a time, so I could evaluate accurately what I think of them.

Life keeps hammering this point in me, because I’m just not learning the lesson.  Sigh. How much of a stonehead am I?