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Eric Claption
Django Rheinhardt
Mark Knopfler
Buddy Guy
B.B. King

I use the grey dunlop or a fender 'thin' for strumming, but I like a stiffer one for picking.

I'm going to have to put some sticky gunk on my guitar to hold different picks if I ever think I'm good enough to play for public consumption!

The whole relic thing seems a bit upside down to me.

In the art world, the purpose of a reproduction or print is to put great art into the price range of the masses.  In the case of relic'd guitars, the purpose seems to be to put copies of famous instruments on the walls of a few fanatical collectors.  This aside from the problem of whether one of these mostrosities constitutes 'Art.'

I imagine a conversation which goes something like this: 

Rich guy #1: "Check out my new acquisition, man."

Rich guy #2:  "Whoah, EVH's frankenstein.  Is it real?"

RG1:  "It's a real relic."

RG2:  "So, Eddie never played it?"

RG1:  "No."

RG2:  "He never even touched it?"

RG1:  "No.  But it has a certificate of authenticity."

RG2:  "How does it sound?"

RG1:  "Are you kidding?  I paid too much for it to ever take it down and play it.  In fact, I'm considering having it hermetically sealed in a nitrogen atmosphere and locking it in a vault away from all light so it won't fade.  Isn't it great?" 

I suppose everyone needs a hobby, including folks with too much money and too little sense.

It might be less of a hassle with your 'hissing' guitar to just gut it and replace all the electronics.  At least then you can be reasonably certain that you don't have rust inside something, preventing a connection.

I should let someone else with more experience answer your second question first, but I'll take a stab:  If you have the tools and confidence, probably not too difficult.  You will need to take off the pickguard, remove all the electronics, make some routing patterns based on your desired pickup dimensions and orientations, and then rout the body (and expand the holes in the pickguard) to fit.  With the coil taps, you're also going to have to replace the regular five-position switch with something that will handle whatever combinations you want for the pickups.  Before that, you'll have to come up with a schematic and wiring diagram, so you'll know what goes where when the time comes to put it all together.

Is it a staticy hiss or a hum?  If you have single coils on this particular guitar, they can be pretty noisy with 60-cycle hum.  Not much help for that, other than using shielded wire for the harness, and using copper foil to line the pickup cavities.  You'll need to ground (earth) that too.

Does it always hiss, or is it more prominent when you adjust a particular control?  That might point you toward other issues-- if you had a rusty jack, the whole guitar might have gotten wet at some point (condensation, maybe?) which could dirty up the contacts in any of the pots or switches.

Also, cold solder joints are easy to miss; they look pretty normal to an inexperienced eye, but dont' provide good electrical contact.  I would pull all the pots and switches and take a good look at all the solder joints, paying particular attention to the ground (earth) connections.  If any of the solder joints look dull rather than shiny, that is probably your culprit.  The fix in this case is pretty easy, you put an aligator clip on the wire leading to the pickup (or any bleed capacitors that might be present, to act as a heat sink) and touch a hot soldering iron to the wire just above the suspect connection.  Hold it there just until the solder turns shiny and starts to flow, then take it away.  Put everything back together and test it out.

Of course, if you're doing this close to the guitar, cover it with something non-flamable.  Hot solder can pop and spit, and that will muck up your finish in a heartbeat.

Eb can be played with an A-form barre chord at the 6th fret (bar the 6th fret with the index finger, and make the A chord shape normally 2 frets up), or with an E-form barre at the 11th fret (same idea). 

You could also play it as a D-form barred at the first fret, as a C-form barred at the 3rd fret, or as a G-form (ouch that one is hard!) at the 8th fret.

Now that you're thoroughly confused, I'll leave it to someone else to type up the tabs for all that.

Why do you need an upgrade?  It already goes to 11.

'Tab' is a type of musical notation specifically applicable to guitar.  'Fingerstyle' is a playing style. 

You can write tabs for strumming, in which the fret numbers line up vertically; if the fret numbers don't line up, it means to play the individual notes.  You can do either with a pick (strumming or 'flatpicking'), and you can do either with your thumb/fingertips in any of the various types of 'fingerstyle' (clawhammer, Travis).

When someone says ‘walk’ in relation to guitar, particularly acoustic guitar, I think of a bluegrass/country sort of chord transition lick used when strumming. 

For instance, if you were changing between the chords C and G and back, in between strums, you would flatpick a walk like so:

o--------3--------o--
1--------o--------1--
0--------o--------o--
2--------o--------2--
3-3-2-o-2---o-2-3--
x--------3-3------x--

If you combine this with a pattern like Jerome describes above, you're pretty much in the country business.

I could have sworn I responded to that post, with almost exactly the same information. 

Ok, perhaps I need to give a little background:

I live in the central US.  I am in my mid-forties, and looking hard at changing careers in 3 years, plus or minus.  I am currently looking into the possibility of opening a small music shop, certainly to include guitar repair/maintenance, possibly to include build-to-order jobs. 

I think I might be able to do this for a couple of reasons:  1) I have a good lead-time to do my research and acquire skills and needed material; 2) I have an uncle who has some luthier experience, who was a shop teacher for 30 years (he ought to be able to 'introduce' me to the trade); 3) after ditching my current job, I will have the time and cash needed to attend a reputable course.  Last but not least-- I love guitars.

Part of my current problem is that I really don't know enough yet to know what questions to ask!  I do own 3 guitars that I would feel comfortable experimenting on, and I can do a setup on a solid-body electric.  I'm getting ready to change out the pickups and mounts (maybe the switch, pots and wiring as well) in a hollowbody electric I own (I was an electronics technician in a past life, that stuff doesn't scare me).

If you guys just keep pointing me to decent books and websites, I can figure out enough to know what questions to ask!  Keep it coming!