StratDudeDan

all of my instruments are hung except for my upright, 'cause it doesn't need to be, and can't be in all reality... i have 7 string swings, 3 on one wall, 4 staggered on another, and each one is "assigned" to its own axe. for a while, i had nails in the wall right beside them for the straps i liked to use with each guitar, only the wall of 3 has those still, and i also decorate each of them depending on the axe's character. fuzzy dice behind my white strat, tribal patterns coming from the mount for my dragon strat, the wood mount for my quilted maple bass, nothing for the ugly-ass foundation, etc. just makes it fun. also, only on one of my acoustics have i ever noticed anything weird about it and its tuning, but i attribute it to the fact that i tune it down a half step for some more bottom end.

i nulled my vote.

i hate SWR. they just sound fake and cheap. for full bottom and more punch and drive than you could ever imagine, check out Warwick's line of Pro FET's. as you said, price doesn't really matter, so aim high. Mesa Boogie makes some killer rigs, as well. again, more drive than you could shake a ten foot stick at... Ampeg are very good sounding, but you have to choose 'em carefully. some of 'em sound like you took your bass and stuck it in a subwoofer box for a car (no definition, just BOOM! BOOM BOOM!), while others have such a clear midrange, you'll want to put your MusicMan away for the rest of your life. find something in between there, though, and you're gonna have an amp you'll be very happy with for a long time.

when i think covers, i think songs that aren't already punk or rock, and that shouldn't be. a lot of oldies just plain rock as punk songs, not to mention things with female pop stars as the original artist. not britney, though. her stuff just doesn't work... spice girls are incredible when my band plays 'em. probably the most fun we have the whole night.

router. where most of the work gets done with my stuff. not necesarily guitars, but more like in my uncle's cabinet shop.

when you accidentally wire an electrolytic capacitor backwards, they pop. i totally forgot about that since high school electronics class until this morning. i was working last night on a board, and i was freaking tired, but hell-bent on getting it laid out and soldered. and i did. this morning, went in to test and troubleshoot, applied power, about 20 seconds later POP! made me giggle, strangely enough, 'cause i remember intentionally wiring them backwards across the leads of our power supplies just for that. i also found out something new today. for some strange reason, splicing a new grounded power cable onto my amp kicked my ass...it just took forever and was the most uncooperative SOB i've worked with in my life...

he he...funny enough, no... i was in a fender bender a while ago, and saving my insurance costs from going up, i just paid the lady in cash for her repairs, and then my girlfriend totalled her car a little over a week ago, so i've been helping her save up to get a new car. still need about $450 to get 'er done. and yes, i picked the Gotoh 510. for christmas, i'm pretty much asking for nothing but the parts to get this thing done.

random question, but what is your base price for one of those beauties? are they only custom ordered, or is there a "factory basic" style that just comes with a set list of stuff?

that's what two of them just went to the (real) luthier to have done. the third one, i just filed some string grooves in the bridge piece and put a very light set of strings on it.

the mini could be a coil or phase switch.

'how about: in the middle of my first? i've gone past researching/designing it. i'm now just saving up money for random parts for it.

that one... i use both pups at all times, plus a volume pedal and the on-board EQ if something doesn't sound right. low for smoothness, mid for growl, high for punch and what i refer to as "ting" if that makes sense to anyone else. EDIT - fixed img to correct URL

been over the FET pinout over and over again. i've gone through seven different mpf102's making sure it was right, putting them in every possible position, this one twice ('cause i'm 99% sure this is right). i don't have a VU meter, so it'll take some time to get that. a good friend of mine has all the crap and i just borrow it from him when i need it, so i'll post the voltages once i get ahold of him on monday. my layout is a little weird. i just made a bus bar out of a piece of wire for the ground, then soldered everything that went to ground directly to that, and then i used another bus bar coming out of the transistor in order to put the electrolytic cap and the 1k5 resistor on (it was easier than trying to put three leads all connecting at the same point). as for the trim, it seems as though it does nothing. seriously...i don't get it...both while it's "on" and "off," the trim is just a little knob i turn...which is strange, because it's the same thing with the volume knob. it doesn't affect the volume... ah...there must be a short somewhere. yes...i'll play with it, then return here on monday with my results. and uh...you don't want to see pics of my layout on the board...alien spaghetti i believe is the term used often...

i am attempting to create a fetzer valve boost pedal. schematics: (the arrow going off to the left from the lower left pin on the switch connects to the 68k resistor below) i've gone over the wiring and soldering many a time so far. the switch is an on/on. i'm using a stereo input jack for battery cutoff. all of the grouds are soldered to a single bus bar on the PC board i'm using. the battery polarity IS correct. situation: while the effect is switched "off," i get no sound, a hum if the volume of the pedal is about midway up. when on, there's no boost or tone change, just some noise added. question: what's going on and how do i fix it?

gorgeous. the bass i've been working on designing follows similar lines (that massive horn is cool, yes...but it doesn't need to be THAT long...), and i love the "smooth, sharp" look it has. very...very modern. as for the lightwaves, i only wish i could find one in a local store to check out, 'cause i'll be honest, i'm very picky about my pickups. MEC-II's are sweet, some bartolini's (yes...i said some...i don't like all of them...), but other than the odd, "whoa...when'd this get in stock and how much is it?" backroom of the music shop find, i find that pickups usually just kinda force me into a world where i'm restricted by them. i'd like to try more stuff and AT LEAST a different kind of pickup. and those tuning heads are just plain sweet...i don't care what anyone says...they are hot and a half. the tuner in the neck...hmm...i don't know...i suppose if it was done expertly it would be cool. i have a very small (1/8" long, 1/32" wide, 1/64") ding on the back of my neck that i haven't had a chance to drop some laquer into yet, and it drives me crazy. a small bump around the tuner on my hand and thumb would probably force me to kill myself. perhaps he could move it to the side of the body? make use of that massively huge horn? i'd have to talk to the guy to find out. finally, what's with the "each bass is molded to your body" thing? does he use his dentristy skills to cast you, then uses his ergodynamic engineering training to craft a body that would fit perfectly up against you? not to rip on the guy. i would buy one in less than a heartbeat, i'd just have to find out about those things first. but they truly are gorgeous...i have now altered my list of "basses i would be willing to buy now that i have the bass i love" from 3 up to 4. 4) Warwick Corvette FNA 3) Bassurgury 2) Warwick Streamer Stage II 1) Warwick Infinity LTD 2000

why not wire up a tone circuit specifically for the hb? a lot of the time, i've seen strats with tone pots that control the neck and mid, but the bridge just bybasses it all. that could be changed by simply changing the <neck/mid> tone pot to the bridge tone pot at the switch. if he already has a tone pot for the bridge, then perhaps he just needs to find a happier cap/pot value combination that would reduce the mid/low a bit more, leaving some "scream" to it. you said he has volume for each of his pots, so i'm going to assume that he has zero tone pots altogether. in order to increase the high end on my own sodomized strat, i wired a .022uF cap from the "hot" side of the volume pot to the wiper terminal. the noise went up a wee bit, but as i said, it was a sodomized strat that used two single coils (neck and mid) wired like a parallel humbucker in the bridge and mid position. crazy, but it gave me the punch/drive/high-end "scream" i was looking for. perhaps he could do something similar and just play with the value of the cap until he finds a happy tone. he'll loose some lows in the process, but the mids will be cut along with it, creating a high-pass circuit that'll throw a bit more edge into it. or you could go crazy and make a 3-band parametric EQ centralized around the midrange, then pull the middle, bump the two outsides in order to create a massive dip right there. that would suck and be hard, but hey, it might be a fun project.

yeah...solder... and from a standpoint of someone who was there years ago. YES! TAKE OUT THE ELECTRONICS! i will never EVER try and do that again. it is so much easier to put them back in than to try and either spray around them, mask them, or whatever. pull the SOB's out and put 'em back when you're done. you'll also learn a lot more that way. like...wiring basics and soldering.

i didn't say that was the ONLY fix. i just did that to help. in cases of a very slight action change, just 1/6th of a turn looser on the truss rod can typicall pull the neck straighter and allow for everything to sit right. i wouldn't exactly define it as "cranking..." thank you for your own input and a wee bit of extra-exageration. i used mine to make a point... if i remember my truss rods correctly...this is impossible without a two-way truss rod, and pretty much 90% of cheap acoustics don't have two-ways, if not more. infer what you will, but i'm afraid i can't take a whole lot of advice from you in the future.

fyi, it works the way i planned. so the official pinout is as follows: if two rows of four lugs has this pinout: 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 where 1 is the neck pup and 4 and 5 are hot then the pinout on one row of eight pins is: 1 2 3 4 5 8 7 6

Hooah! love that song!

that would give me (with the mid wired "direct" so it's always on): neck + mid parallel all three parallel mid + bridge parallel correct? i understand what you were saying about wiring in parallel then disappearing. i just forgot to actually draw out or picture the wiring, so that didn't even pop into my brain. i was just like...but the bridge isn't wired there...but then...it is, so i was wrong. also, would this then give me hum cancelling in positions 1 & 3? that's mostly what i'm looking for, 'cause i never use the others that much...

i was thinking (going downward): neck + mid pup (parallel) open mid + bridge pup (parallel) hot hot (the two hots wired together) tone for neck + mid pup open tone for mid + bridge pup this in a 3-way switch would give me: pos 1: neck + mid (parallel) pos 2: all three (parallel) pos 3: mid + bridge (parallel) yes, i'm talking for a 3 single coil strat here. one of my odd ideas. does this sound correct?

i'm starting to scare myself with this one, but i always see diagrams for strat and tele switch wire done with two rows of four pins. however, the switches i own are all one row of 8 pins. 4 3 2 1 5 6 7 8 compared to x x x x x x x x question: using the numbers above, who here knows what the pins are on the below drawing? i'll give a cookie out, even. it's just totally baffling me, probably because i'm tired, but you never know. (btw, my guess was 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, but that was wrong...possibly 1 2 3 4 5 8 7 6?)

ratio the two. take the dimensions from the LP scale and calculate them to the strat scale. or just eyeball it. or a double-fat-strat pickgaurd might be just the answer to your query, as the spacing would be right there, measurable if you don't want to use the pickgaurd.

that was the most wonderful post you've ever responded to me with. thank you much, i'll probably buy maybe 10 of each of those, then play around. maybe even mix and match on the breadboard. and high gain is no problem. the gnarlier the fuzz, the better IMO. plus, it's got a volume on the end of it, so i can go with whatever sounds awful while still keeping balance between my amp's drive, my other two distortion pedals, and my clean.