Kiwi

Checking frets with with a fret rocker would be the second thing to do after checking the neck relief and string height.

I really like PRS Mira pickups. I have two sets installed in guitars and feel they're a bit of an industry secret for those who aren't label and trend orientated. Loads of upper midrange and note definition in the style of a Seymour Duncan 59 but without shrillness. If I want a classic rock (think AC/DC or GnR) then I'll sling a set in.

I have a soft spot for boogie kit and have a triaxis and studio pre as well as formerly owned a Bass 400+ and Strategy 400. The bass needs stamping on in the Mark series amps (and the studio pre) but that singing lead tone is unbeatable.

Nice guitar. My headless Kleinberger looks like a toy on me. Yours doesn't.

Not convincingly. The Hank Marvin was single coil pickup, alder body, maple neck and tape reverb and a very clean signal. That's all.

Very blonde hair and british...it's not a lot to go on. Could be Geordie Walker (who died recently) or Billy Duffy - both were fond of semi acoustics. Any clues about genre? Years they were active? Associations with other musicians? How many arms do you have? Asking for a friend.

Welcome aboard! Feel welcome to make your own gear thread, if you haven't done that already. Update: I've been playing around with this stuff for nearly a couple of months now. I really like the triaxis. It has nearly all the sounds I want to hear and it has plenty of midrange attack. By comparison, I'm finding the Studio Pre is a little looser, a little more old school and it seems more sensitive to pickup output. I am probably going to list it for sale soon. The Marshall is great. It's got those classic sounds that we know well from records. I can also get the triaxis to sound like it if I boost lots of treble and select the british voice. But yeah, it's going to stay with me for a while. The Carvin Quad X is a really interesting beast. First impressions was it's very hifi - lots and lots of presence. It's a bit of a swiss army knife in the sense that there are loops for each of the four MIDI selectable channels and a master effects loop as well as inbuilt spring reverb. If anything, it's a little excessive. The gain channels (3+4) sound very tight and crisp, the tonal curve is a little flatter than the triaxis which suggests that putting some kind of filtering in the channel effects loops may be worth while. Either eq pedals or perhaps amp sim pedals like the Joyo American Sound. But as they stand, the eq isn't quite as ear-friendly as the triaxis. This is a shame given it's potential versatility but it's not a lost cause by any means. The Fender Princeton Reverb II is just lovely. I've been playing around with preamp valves and at the moment it has a set of TAD 12AX7's with an EHX in v2. I had the opportunity to compare the EHX to a Mullad, a Mazda, the TAD and a JJ Tesla Ruby. The EHX and Mullard were very close to each other tonally - lots of warmth and slight compression without losing attack. Very nice to listen to at higher volumes. A full set of TADs was a little modern sounding and hifi. The Mazda was half way between the TADs and the Mullard. The Ruby was a little harsher than the Mazda but not quite in TAD territory. So the TADs are doing the heavy lifting with something in v2 for shaping tonal character.

Right, time for an update. Firstly...it lives! But just as I thought things were going to get easier, they didn't for the following reasons: 1) The control cavity needed to be made bigger. I actually bought a SSS strat body template and compared. 2) The pickup cavities needed to be made 1mm wider. 3) The pickup cavities needed routing out to allow for the depth of the screws (the screws couldn't be shortened enough) 4) The neck pocket had to be shimmed with a 2mm piece of sapele veneer so that I could fit the scratchplace under the fingerboard extension. Any how. The neck, pickups and bridge were all aligned. I changed the pickguard from HSH to HH because the pickguard fitted better and the electronics were simpler to get sorted. The pickups are an old set of PRS Mira (non coil tap). It plays really well although a couple of the frets have been knocked at some point and won't level so I'll need to replace them. But apart from that, the Mira pickups are giving off AC/DC vibes, plus both the string tension and action are satisfyingly low. It's my first unsupervised build and it's not as bad as it could have been. I'm fairly sure none of the issues would have happened with Fender licensed parts and they would have sunk anyone with just a screwdriver and hex key set. But I managed to solve all the cavity and neck heel problems and come out with admittedly a cosmetically rough but still very giggable instrument. I might just need to start making my own bodies after the next build - tone chasing Phil Collen.

You had posted the same content in at least three different locations. It wasn't necessary and normally we would discourage posts that provide a commercial benefit to the original poster. I've consolidated the content of your posts into a single one in the most visible location as an act of good will. Feel free to edit it as you see fit.

It's Guthries promoter rather than Guthrie. I'm sure Guthrie would take a dim view of spamming. The posts in other parts of the site have been hidden.

Last night I tried to fit the pickguard and the neck on at the same time and discovered the neck pocket was probably 1mm too deep. So I fashioned a shim out of some 2mm sapele veneer I had left over to fit the neck pocket and now the pickguard fits. It's a less than elegant solution though and one that wouldn't have been discovered until I'd nearly finished the instrument.

Over the Christmas NY period I hand sanded the neck heel to fit and managed to get it aligned enough to screw in place. However the problem with hand tools is that they round off edges and corners and the end of the fingerboard had suffered as a result of over enthusiasm. After a few days of feeling frustrated, I had another burst of inspiration and, after setting up the bandsaw/sander, I rounded off the corners. It looked great. I also disovered that the electronics cavity was too small. 111d575d0ceb271657641c2113bb3e76.mp4 It feels like if it's not one issue then it's another. Anyway I carefully took a couple of mm off the sides of the pickup routs and enlarged the control cavity a little. Then the HSH pickguard didn't align properly anyway and I double checked with other HSH pickguards and they were all the same. They were all a bit squashed from top to bottom and didn't sit on the bottom horn attractively. So I'm not sure if the body is the issue or multiple pickguards from both Chinese and overseas suppliers, it'll need double checking against Fender licensed products. However the HH pickguard did align a lot better and it's sort of more consistent with a punk/street asthetic anyway so I went with that and applied some stickers... The pickups are some SD clones by a company called Johnny Eleca. For Chinese knock offs, they're not bad at all but there doesn't seem to be much difference between split and humbucking modes. Just a little more edge to the split mode. Currently I'm still applying glue to the neck heel and fingerboard edge using a scalpel blade to dig out any bubbles before backfilling. Then I'll sand to achieve a fit.

Its a lot of faff for not a lot of extra benefit. Why not get a semi super switch from Seymore Duncan? I have them installed on all my strats and they allow bridge and neck pickup combinations instead of the solo middle pickup setting.

I can make it fairly simple - get a Kemper Stage Profiler plus any unique effects you want. It will do nearly anything (apart from trichorus and Dimension D, so I have a Line 6 M5 plugged into one of the loops and MIDI mapped) OK so it won't be the cheapest solution but they have just released a pedalboard friendly version for five hundred quid which will do everything you've asked for above. It's also about half the price of the full fat profiler I have. And you can use it for bass too.

Not a lot done recently as I've had other priorities - unpacking stuff from the UK including my Spector bass which has had two tuners shunted with sufficient force to sheer off the tuner screw heads. More on that later. This week I reduced the neck heel width of the fluoro caster by half a mm on each side but when I test fitted the neck to the body, I could tell just by looking that the neck wasn't centred and checking alignment confirmed it. I'm still cautiously sanding back the shoulders of the heel on one side to get it centred better. Nearly done...and then I need to fit the bandsaw with a new blade and set it up so I can finish off the control cover plate. And I'm also going to test spray some 2K clear just to see how well it absorbs minor dings and imperfections in the undercoat. Regarding the Spector, I also discovered a neat way to get out sheered off, headless tuner screws from the tuner holes in my spector. I bought a metal tube implement normally used by potters to make very precise holes in wet clay, usually in teapots for straining the water as it's being poured. They're made from very thin stainless steel but the perfect size to fit around the screw snugly. So I inserted one in a drill bit and once the tube was around the screw, just pushed to the right depth. The bonus was when I pulled out the tube, the screw came with it and it left a very compact hole that could be easily backfilled with wood chips, sawdust and plugged. Just need to get my hands on some replacement Schaller M4 machineheads as the lookalike spares I have needed bigger holes.