mistermikev

I have some lace sensors... from the 90s. they really are good pickups but I'll tell you the skinny on them from my perspective... a single lace sensor has less hum than a typical single coil pickup... but when you combine two lace sensors or a lace sensor with a std single... they don't cancel hum at all... so they have MORE hum than typical single. They also don't have the "magic" that comes when you combine two std singles. for that reason... they've sat in a box. so... if you want some things that are "different"... here's some favs of mine... dimarzio red velvet. this is a great bridge strat pickup... one of my favs. it has a brass plate on the bottom that reflects the magnetic field upward and gives it some extra growl. It ends up somewhere between a strat and a tele pickup. rio grande tallboy - this is a super overwound single. again... lots of mid bite. for something different... you might try some of the seymour single sized humbuckers. for me... SL59 is just a great pickup. lower output for a humbucker but just a great sound for the bridge or neck in a strat. similar to lace... when you split these and combine with the middle/neck... they aren't great. I prefer combining a bridge with a std single neck and middle at the sm time. great sound. or you can wire up the entire guitar with single sized humbuckers. a jb in the bridge, seth lover in the middle and 59 in the neck? guaranteed great combo. when you split and combine these mini hums together... since you are combining one thin coil with another similar thin coil... they sound great. so you might go with a super switch and do split/combined in position 2/4 for a more strat like sound... and full humbuckers in 1/3/5 for more 'humbucker' sounds. you could go all active emgs... emgs have a sound all their own... and I'd say they aren't as good for cleans but mark knopfler sure makes them sound good. you can see a live vid of him doing 'brother in arms' with all emg singles and it's about as good as it gets. just some ideas.

greatly enjoyable thread. Quite a while ago... I had built what I'm calling the "automawah". It had a switchable boost, freq rotary, switchable in and out buffer, switchable auto-wah, and a switch that would turn it back into a volume pedal. I also did an led plexiglass base... and swirl painted the thing. So many controls on it... I could never keep it straight what was what! I've had a morley and they are really great. they have a feel that is all their own and it's quite nice. I look fwd to seeing how this turns out (demo?).

oof... that top crack is something to be worried about. that does not look superficial. Looking in the sound hole does it appear all the way through? get a little dentist mirror and put it inside and see how bad it is. the neck... that really just looks like a flex stress crack that is only in the lackquer/binding. Hard to tell from a pic and It could go deeper thank I see but I sort of doubt it. Either way... unless you are prepared to fix it yourself I don't imagine there's a lot we can do to help you on this one.

lol, that is terrible insight. kids here annoy me with "epic"... once everything is epic then nothing is epic anymore.

that's right... in merica we speak merican. first time I ever heard someone say "bangers and mash" I was all "WTF could that possibly be"? I oft wonder if folks in the UK take as much amusement in odd things we say in the US.

hehe it's good to have goals!

you bleedin' bloody blood bleeders and your misuse of the english language... blimey. (secretly storing that for later "half-cut"... since in the current climate using "lubricated" gets mixed looks)

we luthiers are the stewards of the forrest in many respects... I admire any/all efforts to waste not/want not when it comes to wood.

"ooooh, dats fanscy"! nice work.

"father jack"... oh feck. gonna have to watch some of his stuff.

thank you sr. I'd like to get the fretboard a lil more... but the risk is not worth it. Purple 'nuf fer me!! thank you as always for your encouragement. very much appreciate it.

"nice joint" -sounds like something a hippy would say... still... nice joint!

pointy guitars aren't my thing at all... but you did a nice job on that. love the more reserved 7 string there. nice build.

reminds me a bit of this: with just a little modification it could be a replica. that said... yours has nicer curves. steve's def has an air of "jigsaw" to it that is not present on yours. sliding pickup... interesting.

i know that nobody really cares... but for the record I tried this out quite a bit the other day and it is fantastic. #1 it runs very smooth and doesn't bother the hand at all. The 4.0Ah battery lasted long enough for me to sand 220 and then 340 on the entire guitar and idk how much time it has left but that's good enough for me. I imagine if you had a LOT of sanding to do all at once you might want a couple of spare batteries... perhaps even a plug in sander if it is really a lot of sanding... but this for me is a detail sander. It is so small and agile - perfect. Little bit heavier than a da sander. With the speed control I would be willing to bet I will be able to put a buffing pad on this and it will be VERY handy for buffing contours auto-magically. I give it a 9.5/10 as the only downside I can see is the weight.

so... probably fairly reckless and certainly experimental... now that I have my purple body finish sanded... I wanted to take a heat gun to it to try to enhance the purple.... before: and after: purpleheart starts to "sweat" if you get it hot enough... and I imagine that is getting to the danger zone because heating up titebond is a dangerous proposition. If you watch enough pen blank videos you'll see them really heat the piss out of the blank and before your eyes the purple will darken... def not going that far here. Can't heat it up before you work it because sanding turns it back to dull/brown/red. it def looks a hair more purple to me.

"Fish On" - oak Try to push myself beyond my comfort zone on every build. For this build I had planned many milestones... first time doing a scarf joint, first time doing a channel around the fretboard/headstock with veneer, first time doing a piezo bridge, first time building a bridge myself, first time doing a 5 string and reinforcing a neck via carbon fiber strips. This build is a "sister" to a purple heart version that is similar but fretless... I freq build two because I use one build as sort of a "lab rat"... and anything that I'm unsure of myself on I attempt on that build first so that I can limit the risk of "throwing away" more expensive wood. These two builds took forever... had so many issues I can't even recall them all. I had cut the body on both of these thinking I was going to use a hipshot "Type D" bridge... but then made a mistake on cutting the studs too wide and decided I would take the opportunity to build my own piezo bridge... but could not reconcile how I would get a ground wire to the strings... fortunately the forum was here for me, slapped me and said "why don't you just do EMG and you don't need a ground". One of those "why hadn't I thought of that" moments for sure (thank you all for your continued support!!). I also realized after the fact, that I had no wire channels for either the piezo or the magnetics... so I had to do a dangerous drill from the neck pocket all the way to the bridge... then connected that hole to a straight down hole from the bridge... then used "sanding cord" to soften the 90 deg transition. This was my very first cnc build... right off the bat... my cnc broke down... and screwed up the neck pocket on this version. If you look very carefully you can see just to the left of the fretboard where I spliced a piece back in to fix. Turned out to be an issue with a bad driver board that @curtisa and @MiKro were instrumental in helping me solve. Initially I had planned to use fretboards that I bought... but being a gluten for pain I decided to cut them out of oak/purpleheart on my machine. Problem is my machine is only 24" max... so I had to struggle with figuring out how to cut a 28 1/2" fretboard on it with acceptable precision. Again, relied mostly on an old thread I saw by @curtisa to manage that. As usual... the forum here gets 50% credit for my build. Always some member there to encourage me when I feel like giving up, and slap me when I think I know something. @Bizman62 and @curtisa also gave me a lot of feedback on my camera work... so I hope that help shows in the photos. Many of you have stopped into my thread with a word of encouragement... and I very much need and appreciate that. With that in mind, I stand here on your shoulders screaming "in your face guitar!" to this build... having barely survived it!! SPECS: 27 Frets 35" scale length 10 deg headstock angle 1 11/16 Nut Width, 16mm String Spacing at the bridge Profile is a thin "C": .834" thick at the nut, .945" thick at the 12th fret Compound 6" to 8" radius fretboard 8lbs 8oz Weight. MATERIALS: 3/4" Flamed Red Oak Carved Top 1 Piece mahogany body Multi-lam neck: Mahogany / Oak-Veneer / Sapele / Red-Oak / Sapele / Red-Oak / Oak-Veneer / Mahogany 24" LMII dual action truss rod and 1/8" carbon fiber reinforcement on either side Fretboard and headstock overlay are Flamed Red Oak Inlays are Maple and Gaboon Ebony HARDWARE: Frets are Jescar Stainless Med Jumbo Gotoh Tuners Graphtech Saddle Graphtech Nut Bridge is Oak/Ebony has locking studs and grub screws for fwd/rev intonation movement Truss rod cover and control cavity covers are all secured via magnets ELECTRONICS: EMG 35P Active Pickup wired to 18Volts Controls: Vm (volume magnetic), Tm (tone magnetic) Artec PP-537 under saddle piezo Hand made Active Bass/Treble Piezo Preamp Controls: Va (volume acoustic), Ta (treble boost/cut acoustic w push/pull preamp bypass), Ba (bass boost/cut acoustic) Switchcraft jack link to my project thread: I would normally do a video... but my office is a disaster area that I am not going to clean until I finish the purple one... so some sound demos will have to do for now... piezo magnetic

Super deal: low profile sander at lowes! so... my sander died today. I've wanted a festool or 3M for a while... would love an air sander as they are the ultimate for guitar, but req a giant compressor. Found the bosch genx 18v sander on sale at lowes for $109.99. Went into the store and they had a sign "buy one get one free" saying you buy and base tool you get a battery free... but the guy says the sander isn't part of the deal. looked on their website and it shows the sander and battery as part of the deal... so they got the manager and I walked out with both the 18v sander (good deal at $109) plus the 4Ah battery kit ($109) for a total of $109.99. This is the perfect guitar detail sander so just wanted to share with my luthier bretheren!

I often find myself about to curse... because my wife is maniacal about cleaning and freq puts stuff in the most random of places. just happened the other day when I had bought groceries along with a new box of latex gloves... made the mistake of leaving it on the cupboard for 24hrs and now it is lost forever. that said I always catch myself and give thanks that she keeps our place so clean and doesn't complain about how messy I am... she's a saint really. had a set of 2x15 fender/jensens from a late 60s bandmaster and one of them I didn't have a box for... she put a box right on top of it in the closet and the box corner tore a hole right through the cone. i guess that was on me for not immediately finding a box. still not over it. tools... man I'm trying to learn to put them back in their place as soon as possible. that and guitar parts... I try to keep everything for a build in a box... but then I pull stuff out to measure or test fit... and I somehow loose the original tuner screws or can't find the nut I was gonna use. at points along a build I will have every open space on every bench covered with stuff. then I spend a half hour looking for the tool that was "just in my hand"! tis the nature of the beast!!

really hopeful to hear this. that sound srv gets is lovely. have never seen that vid but have seen/heard that song a million times. a while back I had an h and k rotosphere that i played all the time... instant "late night with david letterman" sounds. cool project, enjoyed your share and hope to see a demo someday!

listened again here on my studio monitors then on my q701s... I think there maybe is something in my axefx setup that might be restricting the lows on that b. it does seem to drop a little bit. so much so that I went to my axefx and looked at my setup for this sound... think I found the culprit:

well, had shared this with one of my long time friends who is an accomplished gtr player and his fist thoughts were also regarding the low b... so you aren't alone. he remarked that for such a low note it was very 'clear'. the low b is really at the extreme edge of my hearing ability - so much so that I more feel it than hear it... and I have not listened thru headphones yet but I know with my dt990 and q701s... only just reach down to 20Hz and 5Hz respectively so... I can't imagine that note would be represented well on anything less than an 8" speaker but what-do-I-know!

thank you biz. very much appreciate it. the piezo... well was hoping this came across similar to an upright, at least that is what i was going for. idk if the low b is quieter, but it def is clearer then on my other 5s. doesn't flab out. that said I was playing it more delicate than typical. pretty happy w the sound of either by itself... but blended there are still some issues... might be impedance mismatch or phase but they don't combine so well. will have to work on that. thanks for taking the time!! very much appreciate it.

brothers and sisters... would really appreciate it if you could lend me your ear? Tell me how this strikes you? Would appreciate it. piezo Testing123.wav magnetic PERSNIPPETY.wav

thank you stu for noticing. I had considered how I might integrate that sm motif with the bridge but couldn't reconcile how it would work with the mirrored "claws" , perhaps something for next time. thank you again for the feedback, very much appreciate it!!