Guitars... what you've got / what you want

Used to have an early 90s Tanglewood Ric 330 copy with weird toaster pick ups. Pretty crappy guitar, traded in my perfectly serviceable Fenix Tele for it due to a teenage love of Peter Buck and George Harrison. Sounded thin (and not in the way I wanted) and was set up badly, but at least grappling with it made me a better player in the long run. If only I'd known and held on to that Tele - it would have saved me years of frustration and pain. I'd second the Tele compressor and EQ trick. A Danelectro will also get you into that jangly zone, although it has a character of its own. I've got a Gretsch and never found it particularly Ric-like - bought it as my Neil Young/Howe Gelb guitar.

Have to say that while I used to think they were great looking guitars, I find them kinda ugly these days, particularly the 330. The bass is a design classic though.

they look more and more like furniture to me

- my main guitar is a late ‘60s galanti grand prix - a funky weird old Italian guitar i love: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPcDy49hhBl/

― na (NA), Saturday, 29 May 2021 01:37 (two years ago) link

i love this guitar, it plays great, sounds great, stays in tune etc. BUT as you can see in the picture, it has pickup selector buttons instead of a switch (galanti started out as an accordion company and they used accordion buttons i guess). the button mechanism is notoriously fickle, and mine has always had problems. basically the bridge pickup always works, but often i am unable to switch to the neck pickup or the combination of the two - if i pick those buttons, there is no sound. occasionally everything works like it should for a while but it always eventually stops working again, sometimes in the middle of playing. however, this suggests the problem is the mechanism, not the pickups or wiring. i have had it "fixed" twice by different shops but both times it has started up again after a couple of months.

i'm vaguely considering having a tech replace the buttons with a standard pickup switch. i am loathe to mess with the aesthetics of the guitar and make it less "original" but also it would be nice to be able to actually reliably use all the pickup options. i think the ideal would be to leave the switches as they are, but not connected to anything, and have them add the switch, but that might require them cutting some wood out to make space for the switch wiring. i haven't actually looked under the pickguard myself. anyone have any thoughts on whether getting this done is worth it?

Any switch can be replaced with a better quality equivalent, but I’d start with some Deoxit on the contacts inside if you’re comfortable with opening it up. No need to ruin its originality if it can be persuaded to work better.
You may also have a short somewhere, e.g. the neck pickup signal touching a ground (would explain why the combo setting makes no sound). A little tube of deoxit and a cheap multimeter will get you a long way.

NA, my main/core memory of the Galanti GP was seeing Polvo many times in the early 90s and Ash's main guitar was a finicky GP that he abused to no end but I distinctly remember he had taped down certain buttons with electric tape.

https://i.imgur.com/f8I7Ivh.png

more here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LKxmoZv-nE

i just saw that today! i was doing some basic research on my guitar and someone pointed that out on another board.
the other funny thing is that no one can agree what kind of pickups it has. the consensus seems to be minihumbuckers but some people say single coil.

Seems unlikely they’d be humbuckers, it’s going for a Jazzmaster equivalent and that era is rife with single coil pickups inside humbucker cases, I doubt they would do it the other way round.

Wow that is some complex switching. I bet it’s full of dust and oxidation, deoxit will be your saviour.

https://www.offsetguitars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=75313&start=15

whoa thanks for finding that. that does seem complex, though that must be for the three-pickup model. i would hope that the repair places i took it to did the dust/deoxit thing but maybe it's susceptible to dust getting in there.

They might be unlikely to use deoxit, it’s a bit of a niche product. I know it from fixing up old hifi gear.
You can get it in a little bottle with a brush applicator like nail polish, good for wiping between contacts. Can’t do any harm. You want the red stuff, the gold is a lubricant for faders etc.

i did open up my guitar and deoxit the button switches, and i thought it fixed the issue because they did work correctly immediately after, but they stopped working again shortly after. still glad i got over my fear of opening it up. might give it another pass at some point.

Very encouraging start tho, there are no serious issues beyond signal path. It’s possible there is a shield or a wire touching part of the switch assembly, maybe taking a pickup signal to ground, which was taken out of contact by opening it but settled back into place after.
You can try plugging it in to a practice amp while it’s opened up and tapping on pickup poles with a screwdriver to hear what’s working or not. No danger to you in doing that.

Instructions unclear. Pickup plugged directly into wall outlet. Amplifier in bathtub. Beginning to smell smoke, hair approaching Christopher Lloyd levels. Losing consciousness. Await further direction.

press "record" and play hard

Just coming here to say that matttkkkk's guitar upthread looks awesome. A Jaguar or Jazzmaster in Candy Apple Red with white pickguard and pickups and a rosewood(?) fretboard is exactly the kind of thing that floats my boat.

I feel like the only weirdo who never wanted an offset guitar. Don't hate em but don't particularly like em.

snoball you’ll probably like its sibling I restored it couple of years ago - https://i.imgur.com/KVxTecr.jpeg

argh “a couple” I meant

Yeah, I commented on the Jaguar upthread.

I feel like the only weirdo who never wanted an offset guitar.

I've got to say that it's really only the Jaguar and Jazzmaster that I like. Most other offsets look strange to me the way I imagine that all offsets might look to other people.

They kind of look like they’re in flight to me. But if you forced me to choose just one guitar it’d be a Telecaster.

I think that offsets without the floating trem look extremely weird (too much unused real estate), but also JM's with smaller/strat-ier headstock look even weirder:

https://i.imgur.com/4KvuudS.jpeg

Wish that Fender/Squier would do more period-correct reissues in terms of body/headstock shape (EXCEPT for the bridge lol)

Guessing you're not a fan of the Offset Telecaster then!

Yeah that guitar looks amazing

I have been using this beautiful ES-350 clone with a single P90, I tried in on a whim in 2017 and fell in love immediately and have been using it ever since…

…but I’m resigning myself to the fact that a single P90 is just too hum-risky and I’m considering my options (replacing the pickup, or installing a second P90, idk idk idk)

Kinman and Lindy Fralin both make hum canceling P90s - I believe the Kinmans sound better but are eye-wateringly expensive

damn this hits such a very specific set of pickups/body style/etc that i've been looking for

https://reverb.com/item/78494451-vintage-revo-series-surfmaster-thinline-twin-electric-guitar-greenburst

Oh wow, same -- though that set of features at that price almost makes me worry there must be some weak spots. I always find myself looking at Reverends in vaguely similar territory, but they only ever do Bigsby or Wilkinson vibratos, and I've come to really depend on the JM/Jag one.

Sure is pretty!

I just had a dream Chrissie Hynde came to my house and I got to show her my Telecasters, she was so down to earth and friendly too.

ve come to really depend on the JM/Jag one.

― ን (nabisco), Wednesday, March 20, 2024 11:05 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'd had guitars with the classic fender style or a bigsby but not a jazzmaster trem until i got one installed in a guitar a couple years ago and it was definitely like a "oh yeah the porridge is just right" moment for me

The only bummer is thinline offsets (usually?) don't have contoured bodies. I've just come to really want that. I can tolerate a thick slab of Les Paul. But like a Tele for example? Definitely prefer something shaped.

A nice offset trem is really really sweet.

this guy does some of the best pedal videos out there, always has unique approaches to things that you've maybe not thought about before and a fun way of presenting stuff too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fetsd_qURtg

that was fun, the sega genesis lead tone cracked me up

Had my Greco P-bass up on Reverb for a couple of months, but then I made the mistake of playing it again and realising it's better than I remembered.
So I might have to keep it now. The pickup doesn't sound especially impressive on its own, but it sits in a mix quite nicely. So it's useful as a recording tool.
I installed some lightweight tuners and that made a big difference. It was too heavy before but now it's manageable. You wouldn't think 170 grams less would make a difference, but I guess it's more about the balance than the overall weight.

Dirt cheap Dolamo overdrive from eBay, YES. Beautifully cranked on my Tele, wide range of tones, no background noise, goes from a bit burred to snarly in very good ways. $A31 delivered so probably $US 20?

Apparently it’s a Timmy clone. Nice quality for no money, and I can dial in the sounds I want to hear very easily.

following my acquisition of a shijie strat a couple of months ago, i've continued my quest to acquire high-quality knockoffs of established design classics with this mij tokai love rock, which arrived earlier in the week

https://i.ibb.co/BqzjjVS/IMG-6276.jpg

that's pretty love the classic gold top look

gorgeous!!

went to put a fresh set of strings on the love rock and the nut fell clean out of the fretboard, having apparently only been held on by the tension of the strings

ffs

That’s common enough and not a major issue. All you need is a dab of superglue / krazy glue to tack in in place, make sure it’s snug to the end of the fretboard and the edges of the neck, then hold it down firmly for a few secs while the glue sets. Only a small amount of glue, less than you may think, and doesn’t need to cover the surfaces completely.

this is one of the worst looking things I have ever seen, no matter what clever shit it can do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgWLonnch_8

I guess you could slice an egg with the headstock though?

It's weird that 'woodworker' guitars are so often bad examples of both woodworking and luthiery.

Charlie Clouser's Moog MIDI lap steel is cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OubCmnlEjiI

A little pickguard makeover for this 70s FST-70. Think I'll go black for the other plastics too.
https://i.imgur.com/AcD5fKn.jpeg
https://i.imgur.com/evk6skX.jpeg

https://www.christies.com/-/jssmedia/images/features/articles/2019/05/21/the-black-strat-david-gilmours-iconic-fender-stratocaser/rl-138-eamonn-mccabe.jpg

how did you get a photo of me?