Fair EnoughOriginally Posted by lesfunk
Fair Enough
I ended up buying it yesterday, it's lovely.Sorry, was off doing guitar nerdy things...I'm not a huge fan of Ibanez guitars, but the flame one looks cool...
Congrats!
Magic...
No, really you give it a special Tone Rub™ in a certain sweet spot only known by select masterelicbators...
You can even have your custom relic job and rub tailored to make you play more like your favorite artist...
Or you can just put in pickups wound to vintage specs Like Duncan Antiquity, Lollar, or Fralin. But If Elvis is offering rubs... Count me in!Magic...
No, really you give it a special Tone Rub™ in a certain sweet spot only known by select masterelicbators...
You can even have your custom relic job and rub tailored to make you play more like your favorite artist...
I have Lollar and Fralin and all sorts of pickups both in and out of guitars...
They all make a difference, swapping a neck makes a difference, the bridge, the nut, the block on the whammy...all change the tone...
Also a painted body sounds maybe a tiny bit warmer than the same body unpainted, but it still sounds like the same body, I've tried this and I'm sure jhale has as well...
Removing some of the paint or having Nitrocellulose lacquer as opposed to some other type of finish is nonsense...
There are many variables that affect tone, the type of finish is not one of them...
Too much paint could be a problem and hinder tone somewhat, but I highly doubt too much Poly or too much Epoxy sounds worse than too much Nitrocellulose...
The same people that trick themselves into believing this kind of stuff believe that vintage cloth wire sounds better than cheap wire...
You hear that same kind of make-it-up-as-you-go-along logic with car stereo nuts...
I have Lollar and Fralin and all sorts of pickups both in and out of guitars...
They all make a difference, swapping a neck makes a difference, the bridge, the nut, the block on the whammy...all change the tone...
Also a painted body sounds maybe a tiny bit warmer than the same body unpainted, but it still sounds like the same body, I've tried this and I'm sure jhale has as well...
Removing some of the paint or having Nitrocellulose lacquer as opposed to some other type of finish is nonsense...
There are many variables that affect tone, the type of finish is not one of them...
Too much paint could be a problem and hinder tone somewhat, but I highly doubt too much Poly or too much Epoxy sounds worse than too much Nitrocellulose...
The same people that trick themselves into believing this kind of stuff believe that vintage cloth wire sounds better than cheap wire...
You hear that same kind of make-it-up-as-you-go-along logic with car stereo nuts...
I tend to agree with this... vintage spec, even "aged" pickups will get you in the ballpark...less finish of any sort is going to "breathe" better and be more resonant than one with a pound glopped on. But NOTHING sounds like old wood, period.
Don't believe me? Go find a vintage Strat and A/B it with a "relic" spec'd to the same era. No contest.
You are absolutely correct. You are never going to be able to duplicate "played in" old wood. It think it is impressive how close you can get in every other aspect though.
Sure, the well-done ones look COOL, no denying that... I've seen a few that look like they were done by toddlers, but the really good ones are nearly indistinguishable from an actual beat-up vintage piece visually.
I'll add one thing..... I'll bet a weeks pay that although my Nash bass may not be as nice as a real Pre CBS Fender bass, It comes pretty damn close and it's better than 75% of the real ones because as we all know, for every sweet old instrument, there are 6 of them that are junk.
Oh sure, and unless your bass is fully "vintage-correct", it's probably got a better truss-rod and whatnot than its true vintage counterpart...
In my opinion, what's sillier than the relic trend is people paying 20K or more for an old Fender which was designed and manufactured to be a "disposable" guitar. Leo's genius was creating the sound of an entire [i]industry[/] with a cheap, little, well designed plank. Amazing when you think about it really.
Absolutely. I don't do fully vintage correct. Fuck that noise. Mine has a Badass II bridge (as do all my Fender style basses) and Schaller tuners. Those are big improvements on each end of the string and you CAN hear the difference.
Yep, all day long...especially with the added mass of the Badass II.
Personally, you couldn't get the super-wide necks I use on a vintage instrument, so they hold little interest to me overall... and it'd be kinda dumb to plop down a few grand on a guitar you were gonna swap the neck out on...
Closest I've gotten to that was my purple Strat whose body I found in a pawnshop. I tracked down the original builder and he indicated he'd made the body in the mid 80s. So a couple of my guitar bodies and necks technically are or are nearly "vintage".
I wasn't going to weigh in on this thread but what this shit is all about is being a failed musician with $4,000 to spend. Sometimes the questions answer themselves, Sesh.
yeah...right....its called SPAM, Troll
as if you could have kept away....................
I still laugh when people get so excited aboot 1970's Fenders.....
they were considered JUNK when I started playing in the mid-80's
hysterical...................
They're not that bad at all...
No, Matt is correct. Although many nice instruments came from the Fender factory during the '70s, The era is widely known for generally lower quality control throughout the entire line of products.
I happen to be fond of the 70's era basses as my first Fender bass was a 78 Jazz with a bound and blocked maple neck. (it also weighed about 13lbs....ugh)
The 70's Fenders were known for heavy woods, loose neck pockets and overly thick Poly finishes
Last edited by lesfunk; 12-18-2012 at 06:49 PM.
I'm familiar with the story...
I'm just saying the 70's guitars are not as bad as the negative hype...
I have seen some bad ones though where the neck didn't fit the pocket at all...
Yngwie's strat 4 example?
...and Blackmore's and Marcus Millers bass... all 70's fenders
My admittedly not huge experience of 80s strats back in the day was that there definitely seemed to be a time when most Japanese Squier strats I tried were great and the much more expensive US ones were totally mediocre.
I know you have another thread going on this 'failed musician' thing as well.
To me it's kind of an immature simplistic concept. I don't think I ever wanted to be exclusively a musician just like I don't want to exclusively be a company director or a father.
Some people do and they may totally succeed at one thing. I don't want to just do one thing in my life I want to do all sorts of shit and that doesn't mean I've failed at it all. That's like saying if you don't get a gold medal in the Olympics you should never swim or if you can't fill an arena as a comedian you should never make a joke.
I think you have a certain kind of person in mind with this failed musician but not only should you define it better you should also consider for a minute that many of those guys just enjoy the taking part.
Jeff Healey and Adrian Smith played Jap Squiers...
Don't get me wrong my pal bought a US strat a couple of years ago which is the best one I've ever played.
But there was a problem for a long time. I heard that they ended up getting Japanese quality control people into the US factories and that fixed it??
Stewart Copeland too I think.
It's all very subjective. I have a friend who has a $5000 Gretch semi and I find it a bit nasty to play but everyone else seems to love it.
They've always had a quality control problem, so does Gibson and others...
You can take ten Strats from any era and some will sound better than others...
The finish and set up seem to be very nice on the current Fenders...
I have three Japanese Fender Strats, but I'm lefty and the quality always seems to be better on a Left hand instrument...
I've seen tons of junky Jap Strats...
The shitty 70s Strat thang was why I bought a Lead I when they first came out.....a 4-bolt neck as opposed to the Crapro-Tilt 3-bolt necks.
Out of all the 70s Strats I played in guitar shops, pawn shops, or at friends' houses and jam rooms, I would say 70% of them were deficient in one way or another. The neck was not fitted properly. Or the fucking thing moved because the holes had elongated, and there were only 3 to begin with.
The tone sucked fucking ass. The action was bad.
So it is easy for me to understand how 70s Strats got the reputation.
The Lead series guitars were rock-solid by comparison. I still have the one my best friend bought in 1980 brand new....the same day and at the same shop I bought mine.....it has a seriously solid feel to it, sounds great, plays great.....
But it could just be an anomaly.....one of the percentage of guitars off the production line that were good....
Fender cut costs with cheap metal on the bridge and almost non existent body contours which were still being done by hand...
The three bolt neck works great as long as the neck pock fits perfect, which most didn't...
There used to be a pretty cool "relic" tutorial up on a builder's site that has since been taken down (some sort of business shiftiness), wished I'd saved it as HTML to repost here... but the guy took a finished body and froze, baked, and generally abused the hell out of it before he ever took a rasp or file to it - to correctly "age" the finish pre-'wear'... he was letting his kids ride their bikes over it, tied it to the bumper and drove around the block a couple of times on gravel, rubbed ash from his BBQ grill into the exposed grain...crazy stuff, but it looked pretty authentic when he was done.
can I show off my relic strat?
Don't notice most of my posts are less than 2 lines...
Fender Custom Shop Owners Club
Gibson Custom Shop Owners Club
Cato's YouTube Channel
KEWL looking strat Cato-san!
I'm all for the authentic way of picking up dings & dents, scratches and the such....the more ya play that thing "out and aboot" the more you seem to pick up............
that being said....I have some guitars that I've had for ages.....15+ yrs...that look like new.....becuz I TAKE CARE of my shit!!!!
I just got a new 2011 American Standard last month and it looks like a gem to me, but I don't have much depth in this area. The little girl sings and the beauty of it is how it was mass produced and the price was great. I love the way the frets and fingerboard sparkle. I guess that is boring for some folks but I'm so inspired now with this baby. I guess you get jaded after enough axes and want something fancy, but I wouldn't pay someone to trash a guitar before I bought it. I can do that myself.
I got to compare it to a 2012 model which had yellowed plastic and I didn't dig it. It looked like someone left it in the sun for a few years. And it had fat 50s pickups which sounded too vintage and weak to me compared to the awesome alcino Vs. But everyone is different and I didn't want a really vintage sound.
gnaw on it
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