My attempt to bring Harmony's Bizzaro 40 year run into the modern age....

I always loved the Harmony H-804, and the H-802 especially with it's wacky chrome pickups of mysterious origin.

So what I did here was took a Harmony H-804 body, with a more stable neck (well, mostly, might replace it eventually wiht a different neck as the Memphis neck has it's issues), and a pair of H-802 pickups by putting one in the stock neck position, and the second in the bridge - sscrewed into the wood - where this guitar body once hosted a humbucker.

Those H-802 pickups have a magic all their own, with a very thick low-end, sort of like a P-90, but a little rattier and raspier, and a very twangy, metallic din to the high end, sort of like hitting a metal bowl with a metal pen. Distorted it sounds glorious and thick, but clean it sounds very warm and balanced. What's shocking though, is that it's not very noisy or microphonic, which is the antethisis of what a lot of reviews of the H802 would lead you to believe. When wired right, it has that thrashy garage rock quality to it - but with some class to it.

I built out the pickguard by tracing the one from my 02813 and cutting it out for just one pickup. All the other aesthetics are the same. I used TAP Plastics ABS Anti-Scratch acrylic on it like I did my mad-rite prototype.

The whole shindig is wired up using a replacement 3-way pickup switch and the original Harmony H-802 wiring harness from the 1970's/1980's - which was in amazing shape. The bridge is an ABR-1 style Tune-O-Matic, and it has a 02815 stamped clamshell tailpiece on it (I will be replacing that with the bigger mass tailpiece of the H-802 later as they make reissues of them on E-bay for stupid cheap).

The resulting guitar was quite satisfactory, it came out giving a sound somewhere between a Les Paul Special and a Telecaster - it's twangy, but it's thick. It's not piano-like like a Jazzmaster, but not ice-pick like a lower-output Jaguar. It sounds absolutley crazy with high gain.

Currently I'm looking into turning my Harmony 02813 into a THREE pickup variant of this using another trio of old H-802 pickups.

From Gear Setup