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Strat Diary

2021-01-19

Watching guitar reviews for a few weeks but I’m now leaning towards keeping my old guitar. It’s gonna be difficult to find an electric guitar I like as much. (I also have a nylon acoustic, sweatshop made Rivertone that was super cheap off the Cl_s Ohls_n rack but I love everything about that guitar (except how difficult it is to mic). I am grateful to whomever put that thing together.)

A non-Fender s-type, three tone sunburst, white pickguard, maple neck my friend Lina found in a dumpster in Iceland (where I’ve never been), I got the impression that it was outside some >student housing, like dorm rooms on moving day. She found it mid 00s, so the guitar is at least that old.

I have finally learned what words like “action”, “stall”, “bridge”, “nut” and “pot” mean (outside of the context of playing poker).

Here is the sitch with this guitar.

The trem bar a.k.a. whammy bar is lost. I’ll eventually wanna get a new one.
I’m happy with the action. That’s a relief because “bad action”, “setup action”, “adjust action” etc has been such a constant refrain on the Internet and I didn’t know what it was so I just assumed mine was gonna be bad and it was gonna be a schlep.
There are some things about this guitar that makes me think it’s some sorta real vintage guitar (like, it only has a threeway pickup switch, most newer strats have at least five. And the pots don’t push or pull. It has SSS pickups). There’s no headstock logo of any kind. The metal plate on the back near the neck says Made in Japan. There’s no skunk stripe and the pickup switch has no plastic handle, it’s just metal. But the one thing that screams “cheap” is the frets. They need filing. Every single fret on both sides is sharp and snagging. The height is fine.
The three pots need cleaning and/or replacement. They are for sure bad.
The jack and/or pickups also might need cleaning and/or replacement. They are probably bad but… I know the pots are trash, all three. That’s just painfully obvi.
The nut is broken (the piece that holds the bass string has broken off—that happened during my time with it) and that was a huge problem when I had NST and a fat C string. It rattled. It works fine for DADFAD which is what I’m playing now.
The outside of the pick guard, buttons, and pickups all need cleaning. All the plastic parts basically, front and back. That has been a problem since I got it. It’s basically always been gross. I’m just bad at figuring out how to get things clean. I’ll need to look that up.

Now, we did soldering in high school and I hate it. Probably least favorite activity. So I’ll need to ask an ex or a friend. And that means waiting until after pandemic probably.

Identification thread on Strat-Talk

DADFAD

2021-02-02

Last friday I cleaned out the guitar properly with soap. It’s awesome to have the vintage, yellowed knobs and pickup covers be clean. I love the agedness and the yellowing, I hated the dirt but now it’s clean and nice.

This guitar is from the 70s, I learned (on Strat-Talk). I should tune it up and try it out to see if nothing got busted up, broken, shorted or corroded from the cleaning. Also the strap fell off and the guitar fell guard down and the pots and bridge dented my floor.

Eventually I def need to get new pots, I wanna get new pickups and a new jack, I wanna keep my threeway pickup switch but I want to put a new blade cover on it. And I need to get a whammy bar.

This morning I was checking out a tutorial on how to fix the sharp frets. I was hoping that was gonna something I can do on my own, but I don’t think I can.

Fixing this is maybe gonna get more expensive than just getting a Squier. I should keep a running total. But so far $0 except for strings and a pitchkey.

I forgot to write in the diary

A few years between now and last entry I took it to a guitar shop that cleaned the pots. It sounds great now. It probably cost more than a new guitar would’ve…?! But then again I would’ve had to do the same tune up with a new guitar eventually.

2024-08-11

I ws chasing down the noise issue with my guitar setup and I finally found it so here’s a note to self (although I must write this down in my paper notebook as well because I’m more likely to look there).

1. On the SmplTrek, don’t have both Monitor and Ext Src on. One is enough, the latter is best.

2. Set the gain on the rec source screen to low! Any higher sucks and is super noisy with single coil. I add gain or level with a send effect, that sounds much better, and with the input knob, I can even crank the guitar’s volume knob or the fish drive’s volume knob up. The poison turned out to be the gain setting on the rec source screen.

After trying all the other places it could’ve been (guitar volume knob, tone knob, fish drive one of five settings, and in the SmplTrek it could be one of seven places, turned out that the issue was only one of those fourteen places. That’s a relief, usually with a single coil guitar every single volume knob is a minefield with few sweet spots (that’s normally the tradeoff with single coil) but here there was only one that was bad. With that set to low I have lots of room to play around with the other settings.

This record is gonna suck and will probably never be released. It’s gonna go straight to /dev/null. But I do wanna try to finish it. As a learning exercise.