crafty

sure. But like I said, been reading through the site the last few weeks, lots of great info, but I kept coming across posts from this clown, always picking stupid fights just like this and generally being an ass. And then I figured out that he's never actually built a guitar, he just comes here to dump on people, and no one ever seems to call him on it. it just makes me wonder what this site is about really. so I couldn't help myself. sorry. I tried taking this to PM's for once, but here's the message I got: Soooo... 1. I've never built a guitar from scratch. 2. But I've modded the hell out of a lot of 'em. 3. You've obviously never seen any of my posts in the electronic forum. 4. I'm a contributing member, you are a squatter. 5. I've been here waaay longer than you, and I generally have more people here who like me than don't, so you can take my comments about Laney amps and either take 'em as a joke like I meant them or get all offended and throw a nasty newb fit. It's up to you. 6. Or you can just let it go and so will I. Oh, one more thing, I noticed that you've never actually viewed my profile to pull up all 2,251 posts I've made since 2004, so I'd say you're really in no position to judge my contribution to this forum.

Fortunately, guitars are like women. You never have to choose to have only one woman to have carnal relations with for the rest of your life.

What do Paris Hilton and Laney have in common? They both suck big balls! One time, Chuck Norris got bad tone out of a Laney, so he roundhouse kicked it and it became a Marshall JCM Slash. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get away from the Laney in the trash heap.

This is what happens when you don't buy Mesa. Marshall sucks balls. Next time, buy a real cab. Go Mesa. BTW, your RA must've just loved that big 4x12 in the dorm...

Funny, in my 50 Years of the Fender Strat book, it shows one of George Fullerton's personal Strats. He used a metal control panel much like the Jag and mounted the volume and tone control out of the way of his hands. Keep in mind that Leo designed the guitar around his test players of the day--and most of them were chickin' pickers, not windmill artists! I actually routed a small cavity for a pop-up battery box in the back of my Strat for my EMGs. I think you could probably nail most of Clapton's and Gilmour's tones with the EMG-DG pro series setup, but you gotta have those hands...

Mesa craps big buckets of tone all over Laney. How do you say Peavey in English? Laney. What is quite possibly the worst thing to come out of Elton John's ass since Bernie Taupin? Laney. Why does Eddie Van Halen play Peavey? Because it's not a Laney. I could go on and on cracking my self up...

Clapton runs hot amps and quiet pickups. The MDX system helps contour the signal and provides a nice boost for solos, but the amps are running pretty flat out at 7-9, too. The guitar master volume is set to 1-3. Lace Sensors are nice pickups, but they're not vintage Clapton. They're more "Forever Man" than "Layla". He doesn't even use 'em anymore. Any quality single-coil pickup or noiseless pickup will work fine, though. Unless you're having problems breaking strings, I'd stay away from GraphTech unless you just want to kill your tone, too. They take away that nice Stratty, bell-like chime.

How's the height on the strings at the bridge?

Trade it in for a real amp, like a Mesa?

BB's are great pickups and you can usually find them for a great price second hand from all the Historic guys who are replacing them with Wolftones and Fralins. I like the Epi Dots because they really aren't made any different as far as the wood goes, and you can upgrade the hardware for next to nothing.

Have you tried setting the intonation at the bridge first?

You can also just find the end of the wire and resolder it to the eyelet. Losing a turn out of 5000 isn't going to affect the sound of the pickup at all.

RS kits are great. I know people who've installed them on Epis and cheap Fenders and they have no desire to change out the pickups afterward. Short-shaft is what you want, but definitely do not get the pre-assembled kit because you may need to tweak it yourself. Try to pull out the old wiring intact and use it as a guide to build the new harness.

+1 on Perry's comment. From a legal perspective, he's absolutely right. I worked as in-house counsel for a while and he's hit the nail on the head with the boredom and digging aspect of the job. The threat of winning a case against a small-time builder or owner of a web forum is nothing compared to the initial threat of litigation. If a web forum is regularly trading logos and showing off guitars that have been built and are being sold with unlicensed logos, they're going after the forum, whether they can really win or not. All they'd have to do is send a C&D letter to Brian and the forum gets shut down tonight until all the offending material can be purged. With the sheer volume of threads and posts, Brian would be better off deleting everything and starting from scratch. *Nobody* wants to see that happen. If you've copied a logo, fine. Just don't tell anyone about it, please, and certainly don't brag about how much it grabbed on eBay!

Being a refinish will hurt it's value a bit on the vintage market if it hasn't been done right, but even then you'll get more out of the guitar by selling it and then you can either buy or build a guitar that's made how you like it. I had several issues with the way Diezel rebuilt that guitar, but at least he used a competent luthier to do it clean. It's your guitar, it's up to you. I'd just hate for you to wind up being one of those guys who took a router to a '56 Les Paul back in the '70s to install a couple of Super Distortion pickups just to sound like Boston.

Actually, it was because he fell ill and his doctors were telling him he needed to get his affairs in order. After he was able to get back in the business, he developed a line of very fine tube-based amps at MusicMan. I'm not saying that magnetic pickup-based guitars are going to totally disappear, but their popularity is going to be seriously diminished as the digital modeling technology matures. 20 years ago, Gibson built a few MIDI-based Les Paul prototypes. They gave up back then because the guitar and associated rack full of equipment to make a limited amount of sounds was too expensive and too immature. Now Fender, Gibson, and Line6 are using the evolution of that technology to build digital guitars that'll run circles around traditional electric guitars within just a few years. 20 years ago, as the F4 was coming out as the pinnacle of Nikon's 35MM SLR film technology, Nikon was also selling F3 bodies to Kodak to have special digital backs installed and sold to companies to make ID cards. If you'd told me 13 years ago that my school ID card made with one of those was the future of photography, I'd have told you "no freakin' way". Now Kodak is on the verge of shutting down their film business, 99.9% of photojournalists, event and portrait photographers, and most amateur photographers exclusively use digital cameras now. It's coming to guitars, too.

I think you'll see more along the lines of premium manufacturers licensing the technology. Gibson has MAGiC and Fender has Roland/VG, but PRS is suspiciously quiet. I'd be willing to bet that Line 6 could eventually hook up with PRS for a premium line, or simply use Warmoth or another boutique supplier to source premium parts much like Yamaha did with the high-end Pacificas.

Eventually I can see the Roland GK system going piezo, especially as nanotech improves piezo technology. The nice thing about the Roland system on the new VG Strat is that you can use any bridge with the system, but the tracking is never going to be as accurate as piezo setups are going to become. I think electric guitars are going to look very different 50 years from now. Of course, 30 years from now the guitar may be dying in popular music like the saxophone has in the last 20 years.

Well, that's how they're all gonna look in a few years. Magnetic pickups are going to go the way of the dodo bird as digital technology gets better and better.

Use a couple of nuts glued into the body for each pickup.

Use an RS Guitarworks kit. Premium stuff.

There's been a lot said about him on this forum and others, no need to rehash, just use the search feature. Most of the stuff on his website and that video is just pure hubris marketing trying to sell as many of his own private label guitars as possible. Funny thing about that shop tour. They have a wall full of necks waiting to be installed on guitars. Did you see any machinery that could make all those necks in there? I get the feeling that along with all the other components, he merely outsources 99% of the process and the instruments are only "assembled" and not crafted at the shop. Something he seems to be very much against according to the rants on his website, but that "shop" didn't look anything like a wood shop to me, 'cept for the few billets drying up on the rack. BTW, Ed, it's 2007. I'm sure you can find a newer limo than that busty 15-year-old Lincoln.

Use a threaded insert in the body, or use a set of EMGs that are designed to be direct mounted, like the P81/P85.

Oh lord, another ER thread... Honestly, that video had me on the floor. "If you wanna guitar made out of the skin of your mother-in-law, we can do that too! Kill it and grill it!"

That isn't cedar, either.