Cheap Guitar - with Expensive Pickups - is it worth it…?
US$600 PRS SE Guitar
US$20 to upgrade the Pots & Wiring
US$600 to upgrade the Pickups
US$200 fitting charge, if you can’t/won’t DIY
Total US$1420-00.
Personally… the guitars I have build for myself (at around GB£200 to GB£250 all in), have good Pots (Alpha’s - but not CTS’s) & Wiring - and cheap-ish Pickups.
YMMV… 
Too funny; I am 6 minutes into this video at this very moment.
Spending some for some good pickups is a pretty good bang for the buck. I have an Agile Les Paul-style guitar that I put DiMarzio 36th Anniversary PAFs in and wired with toggles so I can arrange pickups in any combination of single/split or full humbucker. I think the guitar was $450 with a case, and the Pickups were $200 for both, and I sold the old ones for the price of the new CTS pots and toggles.
I have a friend who often buys Lindy Fralin pickups, which are always $200 to $300 apiece. But he is a guy who focuses on expensive gear to make up for the fact that he doesn’t play that well. (Not that I am exactly great.)
I can personally recommend Iron Gear Pickups out of the UK as being an excellent VFM. I put them in an Orville Les Paul I had.
Great Minds… maybe… 
I am in a lower price league. My most expensive guitar is my ‘Partscaster’ Tele-Strat, which has cost be about GB£245, all in. I built it to make use of a nice set of Tele pickups that I had taken out of a previous Tele build attempt, which are from Ironstone Pickups, in the UK. Think the set was only around £40 to £50 - ??
Different League…
I had an early 80’s Strat with the thin sounding pickups typical of that time, and had a guy send me a set of Lace Sensor Hot Gold over from The States, as they weren’t available here in UK at the time.
Wow, that proper Strat sound was suddenly there in Spades again. Best mod I ever did. 
Quote: “Just wondering if Mike Rutherford has fallen on hard times using a £100 Bullet Squier Strat on the recent Genesis tour.”
He probably just wanted to illustrate that one doesn’t require a great guitar to produce great music.
I imagine Eddie vH could have made any guitar sound amazing … even my Korean PRS knock-off.
That reminds me of a string story. Bernard Edwards of Chic was being interviewed about his Musicman Bass and asked what strings he used.
He said “I don’t know what strings came with the Musicman Bass”.
The reasons I have such a stash are:
The Bernard Edwards story, along with what David said above about Mike Rutherford, shows that so much guitar gear fetishing is just that…(it’s almost like hi-fi fetishing.)
Did I read somewhere that it was originally his daughters guitar…?
Doubt he was making a point - but its encouraging for us cheap guitar users…
I could use some new acoustic strings. Elixir would be really nice, but .010”s for me, please. 
That said, I really don’t think coated strings last much longer, maybe a week or two, but it’s just not worth the cost IMO. For acoustic I tend to buy standard Martin phosphor bronze 10s.
For electric it’s Rotosound, Ernie Ball or Daddario, whichever is on offer at the time. Always .009”s though. As a student I dabbled with several sets of .008”, but they were like knicker elastic! They also sounded ‘thin’.
Rutherford aside, it’s very common for guitar players to suddenly change to a cheap guitar during their shows if they are about to:
Garth Brooks always used to give away one of his Takamines to the crowd usually a child… which was a good gesture.
Pete Townshend famously slipped his Gibson SG to a front row fan at Woodstock in the 70s.
That, if it exists still, must be worth a fortune.
Sorry to go off piste…
I have been bouncing between .011s and .012s on acoustic. On my Taylor T5, I use electric .011s (unwound G-string).
On my electrics, I vacillate between .009 and .010 - except when I had a jazz box, I used .013s since there’s no bending anyway.
I played the guitar of a friend of mine with .008s, and they were way too thin for me; tried a bend and, with no effort, was halfway across the fretboard - plus, as a committed lazy cheapskate, they break too often! (I hate changing strings, but since I don’t play out, I don’t really have to.)
Had to look that one up.
Wow… Thats a lot…!
Confirmed user of Ernie Ball Super Slinky’s (so, 9’s) on nearly everything Electric. Only my Epiphone Les Paul has anything different. It has had Ernie Ball Regular Slinky’s (10’s) on, but now has EB Hybrid Slinky’s (9 to 46’s).
My Yamaha acoustic has d’Adario 10’s on.
Fender had a great deal recently. Sign up for a series of lessons and get a free Mexican strat or tele. I think the lessons cost $150. But only available in US.
Since we were under a tornado warning last night and the sky looked very ominous, I quickly snapped some pics of things in case - fortunately, all we got was very strong wind and some torrential rain. I unplugged everything (along with my Naim setup) just before this photo.
Here are my two amps for electric and acoustic. The pedal board is only my distortion pedals, and the rest are on another board elsewhere.
The Vintage Sound is a boutique amp that is basically an overbuilt/higher-level components Princeton '65. I also had him put a switch and a special transformer so it can run on 120 or 220 V electricity, in case I am ever able to get the hell out of here like I (and especially my wife) hope to.
The acoustic amp is a Henriksen Bud Ten - only weighs 20 lbs., with a Fishman Tonedeq for effects.
Boss DS-1 spotted…!!! I have one, too…!!!
Me too.
I also have the Boss SD-1 Overdrive, the CS-3 Compressor/Sustainer and the CE-5 Chorus/Ensemble.
Steve Vai actually had 2 of them on his board for a while.
