[Music] Hello friends and welcome to ask S today we're going to talk about this cream
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cheese blueberry stone that I got at this coffee shop called public us I have
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to say this is like the top is almost like a sugar cooked it has a wonderful Blaze on it and it
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has some creamy smooth cream cheese and uh just wonderful blueberry flavor
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wonderful texture I give it a uh a 10 out of 10 it's a a real treat and as
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soon as my coffeee will get here it will be the perfect compliment to the other and it's going to be an amazing day this
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is you know Street talk with ask Zack so one of the things I really love about guitars is that there's just this random
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quality where the right pickups the right body and the right neck will all go together
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and it's just kind of like you can't really make it happen I mean then there's also the the the getting it set
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up properly and things like that but still there's just these times where you know where a new guitar can just be
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amazing and it's like you don't have to have some old piece of wood so it just blows my mind it's like every time I
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think you know vintage is everything then all of a sudden I'll find a new guitar that's just ridiculously great
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who plays great and sounds great who responds well when you're playing live and you play as many guitars as you can
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and uh you know and and if you're putting a guitar together sometimes you know you keep swapping Parts on it keep
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swapping bodies and necks and whatever until you get the thing that that finally is Magic for you here's a
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specific example A friend of mine filt me a Telly and it was good but it wasn't
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like amazing and he ended up just getting another body in putting on there and all of a sudden it was like
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everything came together and part of it was that the body was lighter so I'm a big believer and I really think the
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golden weight area on a Telecaster is 6 and 1/2 to 7 lb and that might sound
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ridiculous to some and some people say oh heavy guitars are great too but there's something about having to do
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with the moisture content that's in wood and then it dries out and it just feels like it can it gets more resonant and I
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know that might be again foodo to people I think tone comes from the pickups alone this one guitar we switched out
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the body and it went from being a little over 7 lb to being 6 and 1/2 and it was just so much more resonant and I don't
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know if it was just that piece of wood and that the that neck and that body they decided they were Partners or
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something like that but all of a sudden the guitar went from being good to just amazing I've actually played that guitar
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for the last three or four weeks that's pretty amazing you know for me cuz that 57s bar is still my favorite guitar but
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this one is just so nice and it responds so well and you know I've been gigging with it and it's like it does what I
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want it to do it responds to me it's been fun to have a new guitar that you know it just does what I
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wanted to do and sounds great and it kind of made me uh I still like finish
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and it's still fun but it's nice to know that it's it is possible to put together a new guitar that's great so this of
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course is a guitar that yall have seen a couple times this is uh nicknamed the Brad oter for obvious reasons uh you
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know using this guitar it's got uh it's got Ron Ellis pickups in it at this
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point it originally had some others but it's got a 52t and a standard plus and of course I've wired it where the tone
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controls only on the bridge uh got a cool uh danoc Caster
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aged strap on here that he did and uh this guitar is working out really
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well
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[Music]
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Bender yeah this frous guitar made in Germany it has a lot of really neat
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aesthetic acutal uh you know I love these uh you I
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guess you can't call them F holes looks almost like birds or something like that and of course I love this pck guard
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mounted electronics and and the pickups even mounted on there so this is
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probably from the ' 50s or early 60s this is a and I'm reading this I don't know this for memory this is a black
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rose Deluxe big huge fat neck we got a zero fret one here you got this perloid
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overlay and the white you know I mean this red kind of uh you know painted on
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binding and you've got these big old lays on the fretboard this is really a gorgeous piece really fun red
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burst really cool guitar and this is at uh Sonic rodeo in Las Vegas here's our
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bigger rehearsal room we just kind of wrapped it with a bunch of uh more or
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less iconic [Music]
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artists oh that's [Music] cool La je ay Johnny
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casy Charlie C Ray Price
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[Music] CH George
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J here we have the burnt Telly I made this back in Jesus
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2009 2008 somewhere in there uh the neck comes from the first guitar my father
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ever ever bought me back in 1988 or '89 it's from a squire obviously I changed
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it to make it look like a regular the body the company I was working for was
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putting up shelving in one of our closets so we had a deep shelf top and
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then the back is literally 2x4s just glued together okay so while it may look
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bitching it it it there's just uh weather treated pine is not a
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tone wood by any stretch the imagination so I decided to throw also the first pickup I ever
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bought which is a an 89 Demario super humbucker and then I found a Seymour
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Duncan 59 hoping that maybe the pickups would make up for it too little not
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enough just just not there it's such a controversial subject like because guys will say that you know the wood doesn't
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make any oh you couldn't be more wrong yeah you could because it has to do with the resonance and that's the pickup is
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going to pick up the residence how long the Springs are going to sustain and also it's just hard when you know when
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when the wood is super dense it just makes it to where to me you get a harder
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sound and it just you especially when a body's heavy it just makes it where well it's brighter yeah it's a lot brighter
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but yeah that's the story of it's really cool burning man yeah I've never called it that before it just jumped in and I
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think I'm going to give it give it the same burnt treatment um after I get some of the
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problems well there's some flat spots on the side and roundover is not that great
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and being a Firebird I might do that qu inch you know step up strip right here
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oh yeah haven't decided but at the end of it all it's this body with that treatment same with the neck I'm hoping
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that that flame that beautiful flame comes out even after I strip it down cuz obviously
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to burn it I'm going to have to strip the finish off yeah right right and then I've got to Route it so that a
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Stratocaster 252 in scale fits a Gibson 24 and 3 quarters so it's going to have
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to get bumped into about there but it should be fun if I ever get 2 minutes to
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rub together I'll work it out yeah is that Ash yes yeah it's not that heavy so
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it should be a pretty well a pretty good guitar and I like the reverse cuz they balance you know when you're doing like
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this and your strap buttons way back here tends to yeah it tends to dive on you do you feel like the burning process
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changes the guitar at all like you know since I've never done anything with construction materials it's hard to tell
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you just you just don't know Hardware is kind of a controversial subject and
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here's something that happened with me so I bought a 67 Telecaster that had you
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know the uh the grooved saddles on it and so I decided to change the Saddles
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out because I wanted them to be inable and I didn't really know about you know bending the screw to do that and I ended
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up getting these really high-end fancy saddles for the guitar and all of a
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sudden it sounded completely different and I immediately pulled them off and
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the thing I noticed when I was going to put the original Saddles back on was that the weight differential was
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enormous the original Saddles that were on that 67 Telly the grooved ones they
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weighed nothing I mean they were light as a feather cheap soft metal Leo Fender
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did that on purpose because it cost less they're not going to go through their equipment as fast you know blades and
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and such and so he used because it was cheaper he used soft cheap light metal
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and so here's what happens when you change to the heavier like tighter
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tolerance stuff what happens is you change the kind of balance between
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fundamental and harmonics because when you have the cheap light stuff you kind of have fundamental and you have kind of
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harmonics are kind of you know in more equilibrium but when you put heavier
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Duty Hardware all of a sudden the fundamental gets to be a lot louder than the harmonics and so this happens with I
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don't care if you're talking about a Telly a strat a Les Paul it's like when you put a tone crows Bridge or some type
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of high-end bridge on a Les Paul all of a harmonic level comes down well it's not
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really coming down what's happening is the fundamentals getting louder and so it changes the sound and some people
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like it and it's great if you like it because it gets to where it's a more kind of iny face but some of us like the
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bloom and we like the the harmonic stuff going on too and so for me it's like I
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don't I like radly you know kind of cheap you know Bridges and Saddles and
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stuff it's like the original you know bridge on a Telecaster same thing you know he's using lowlevel you know thin
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metal because it's easy to bend it's easier to Tool and so that allows uh
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again it doesn't have as much fundamental has more of this harmonic stuff going on and it's like to me I
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like that sound it it kind of contributes to the classic Telecaster sound as soon as you put a heavier Duty
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Bridge even if it's three saddle you put thicker Steel on there it has more
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fundamental and that changes the s if you like it that's great but if you're wanting the old Telly sound you've got
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to use the thin cheap Bridge plate and you've got to use you know lightweight
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whether it's brass or steel Saddles cuz that's part of the sound and when you start putting heavy stuff again whether
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it's a a Les Paul Bridge or whatever it just kind of it messes with things but
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it's just whether you like it or not I mean Keith Richards uses those heavy duty Sher bridges on his Tellies you
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know and he loves it so as soon as you bring up the DI density of those steel parts you know you get more of the
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fundamental sound which is different and it just depends on whether you like it
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or not and if you're playing through you know some big amps at really high volume
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and with a lot of distortion well maybe you like that better maybe you want that going on you know but if you're playing
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through a deluxe or a a twin or something like that you know and you want that
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Dess then you want the cheap bit Steel uh you know Bridge or bent steel Saddles
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like you see on an old strap just has a sound you're not getting as good a coupling with the less dense parts and
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the fact that they can kind of rattle around and such and you're getting better coupling with the Heavy Duty
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Parts and of course you know there are builders that will sand the bottom of a Telecaster
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Bridge like a thicker Tel bridge and they will sand the bottom of the bridge
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so that it is just just dead flat because they want to have better coupling another thing they'll do is
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they'll add screws to the bridge so you don't just have the the screws on the back holding it down don't put screws on
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the front part of the of the to bridge because they're trying to get as much coupling as possible which again it
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gives you this really assertive fundamental sound but
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everything comes at a cost so what do you like so let's talk about like ab1
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bridges on Gibson's well you know they have this bridge and it has no wire at
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first well then people start having problems with some of the Saddles flying off when a string breaks or when they're
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changing strings and what is their solution they add a piece of like paper
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clip wire it would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars to retool the
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way they were making the bridges while all they had to do was add these two little holes and then they bend a
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paperclip piece and plug it in I know it's just but they did that because they
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you know it would have been too expensive and as like they they couldn't have done it because I mean that bridge was on all their guitars at that point
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it was on everything except for the junior you know but every everything else had the avr1 on it and they were
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even starting to put it on Acoustics and such they had to have a solution that was inexpensive but that's another one
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of the things it does the same thing all that stuff on an av1 on a vintage one it's all rattling around and it's like
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cheap light metal as soon as you upgrade that to something with closer tolerances that fits really tight well it doesn't
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sound the same because you've done the exact same thing as in the Telecaster example you have raised the fundamental
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way over the harmonics and again you might like that you might like that sound it is more assertive but it
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doesn't have all that other you know I know people like to use crazy words like Bloom and stuff like that but but there is there's more Bloom and other things
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going on when you have the cheap Radley avr1 or an old strap Bridge or an old
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Telecaster Bridge because everything's not fitting so tight together and it's not getting crazy going back to this te
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this new Telly that a friend put together for me again that we had swapped all sorts of Parts on and everything and even done some uh you
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know some adjusting of uh of the bottom of the neck and the heel on one of the bodies and such
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you know it comes down to all these pieces coming together and finding out
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what works and then all of a sudden you have this really inspiring guitar to play so it's like I just got the guitar
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a couple weeks ago and now here I in Vegas and I've already used it two nights you know so I've got eight solid
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hours of like gigging on it and it is so inspiring to play it's just like it's so
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much fun to play and part of it is yeah a friend built it for me it's a cool guitar but it just it feels good it
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sounds good and I'm not even you know running through an amp I'm using like a dream 65 and going direct cuz that's kind of
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what we had to do but even through that it's really inspiring to play and it's
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like I keep you know picking it up and it keeps challenging me it cuts through
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it has yeah and it responds well to my hands and I'm inspired you know while I'm playing it it's I mean it's fun to
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play Fender guitars are basically Parts guitars and
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the fun of that has kind of been as far as like the Vintage stuff has been taken away because things have gotten so
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expensive so it used to be fun to buy old necks and put you know put it on a
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new body and use new pickups and stuff like that that was a thing 20 years ago 15 years ago you could get a maple cap
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you know telling neck from the you know mid to late 60s you know all the time
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you know that were you know under $11,000 but then when you're paying you know $33,000 or more you know for a
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maple cap neck and then you're talking about thousands and thousands of dollars for like a uh a a
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pre-65 Rosewood board or mapleneck you know you're talking about huge money so
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that kind of thing is kind of dead but that's what Dan string Dan Castro he used to do that he used to get paper cap
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necks and put new bodies with him and he would he would do it for himself I think sometimes he'd end up you know selling
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them with friends of his and even like Rick Holstrom that works with May the Staples he will you know he has like
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some mid-50s you know Phoenix that he'll put on a a new you know like a custom
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shop body or something like that and then put Ron LS or whatever kind of pickups in there and uh and you can do
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that but those kind of days are kind of gone but the great thing is is that there's all these great parts that are
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out there and it's like and you can you can buy a Telly you know it's already put together and you can just swap parts
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on it or whatever but I mean this is a it's a fun thing that you can do and you can find a guitar that really works well
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together because again they're they're parts and uh and if you're you know getting parts you know from the
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beginning you don't feel bad about swapping stuff out either because you know some people will get all wound up
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and you know the worth of something so experiment you know swap stuff around
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the crook Paisley that I have switched back from uh so it was a g Bender for a
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bit while I did that video and then I just found it was to crazy for me going back and forth um you know having one
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guitar with a b and one with a G and every time you pull down it'd be like okay which is it and so I switched back
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to a uh a b vendor so that's the way it's wired up and of course uh both
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guitars are Diario nyxl 95 through 44 strings which I've
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really been a big fan of for quite a while
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now
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kind of Park swapping and hot roding so they really kind of go hand inand
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because what you're ending up doing is you're wanting to personalize the guitar you're wanting to make it to where it
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suits the way you play the way you want it to look the way you want it to respond the sounds you want it to have
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and it goes back to the beginning I mean it goes back to Les Paul and Chad Atkins
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and even you know players from the 30s and 40s they were all you know swapping
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out things changing out you know Bridges changing out the pickups you know trying
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different things cuz they were they were trying well at times they were just trying to be heard but they're trying to
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get a good sound but even Les Paul you know one one of the great hot roders and
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Tinkers he had his personal Les Paul Customs that he played not the like I
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mean even his original gold top he put like that g arm and pick up and he did all sorts of stuff to it but then he had
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Gibson make him some Les Pauls that had flat top that weren't carved because he
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wanted to be able to experiment more with pickups and he knew that it was going to be easier for him to swap out
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pickups and put different type of pickups in if it had a flat top instead of a carved top like Leo Fender design
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in the Telecaster with that brge cover on it I mean that was the way the he envisioned the guitar being played but
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in a conversation I had with James Burton he got his 52 Telly in 1952 and
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he was 13 years old and the first thing he did as a 13-year-old was he pulled
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that cover off and he said was he was the first one to take it off and play it that way all these things are to make
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the guitar more responsive to you and you know you have the aspect of just
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tinkering to Tinker sometimes when you get something you feel like it's not really yours until you start messing
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with it and I'm guilty of that and a lot of guys are it's like you can get a perfectly good guitar and you feel like
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well I've got to do something to it to make it mine so every guitar I get probably one of the first things I do is
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I rewire it you know which means basically I I change you know one connection and uh you know I can always
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put it back but uh yeah even like this guitar that I just that I just got you
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know one of the first things I did was I rewired it so just subtly but again you
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know because that's what I'm comfortable with I like it when the neck pickup doesn't have any tone control on it so that way it can be as bright and clear
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as possible and it'll help me you know cut through the mix when I'm on a neck pickup because I like a darker Bridge
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pickup sound and when if you just flip over to the neck all of a sudden it's it's it's just too dull you know it's
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like and people have been putting Floyd roses and humbuckers on strats like Dan Huff you know did you know back in
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the'80s and it's all because you were trying to make a tool where you could use it and it would do what what you
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wanted it to do what you needed it to do for your work and that's what it all comes down to it's like you want
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something that'll that will that will work in the gig that you're playing and uh yeah and sometimes they
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come up with really cool things like I I think it's cool that Dan Huff still plays that that old 63 strata his I
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think he has put like a Wilkinson tremolo bridge on there he's taking the Floyd off but it still has like the JB
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humbucker and the two hot Strat stack you know pickups in the in the neck and middle and and it's like you know that's
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that's a cool guitar that's an iconic guitar that's been used on so many sessions you know in La during the'80s
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and then you know during the '90s and and onward in Nashville he still still plays the thing that's uh that's cool I
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like it when guys kind of get attached to a guitar and they use one throughout their career and uh and especially if
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they get it dialed in and they kind of stop he heavily modifying it it's it's kind of cool because then you feel like
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it kind of arrived
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biggest thing I wanted to mention that's you know kind of different from the last time I went the last time I used they
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have some boss Katana amplifiers here which are fine but uh
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I really wanted to have a little more control and also wanted to you know kind
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of help with the stage Vol and kind of helping bring it down a little bit and
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so I decided to use an amp modeler and I normally would have used the idium which
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I have and recently uh I picked up one of these dream 65s and the reason I did
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was mainly not so much for the sound because of course I hadn't really heard it and hadn't ever used one
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was because it has uh tremolo and Reverb on it and you can set it to where the two foot
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switches uh do like a boost function and then the tremolo and then you can have
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it where the Reverb is on all the time which is what I've done I like the dream 65 it's a it's a
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cool pedal it sounds good the one kind of note is that uh you can see here I've
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kind of had to turn the treble down pretty low and the base up a lot which I know that's just kind of like knob
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psychosis if you will I know we can all get crazy about where the knobs have to be set but I did have to kind of set the
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Bas in the treble uh kind of at extreme low and extreme High settings um yeah but uh enjoying it it
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sounds good I'm using in ears but also you know we have some monitors uh
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they're also and there's some coming through the monitors too but uh this is is a you know this is a good thing I I
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don't know that I'm completely sold it definitely sounds like they modeled the
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V channel on a deluxe Reverb while on the in the on the aridium on its Deluxe
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Reverb setting it sounds like the model the normal Channel which of course is the difference between it having a
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bright cap or not and so this pedal just seems to be brighter than the idium and
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tonally and then of course it has the advantage of Reverb and tremolo and the reason I really like it having the the
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effects on there is that I can use my regular pedal board that I would use
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with an amp and all all I have to do is add this while if I add the idium I have
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to add a Reverb pedal and a trimal pedal or you know a FL or what have you so
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this is a a a good box I'm I'm I'm liking it but uh I'm a little bit
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concerned about the uh the brightness of it the other thing that was interesting was going through all the different
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speakers and I really like the green back uh 25 sound the best on it but uh
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yeah sounds good as you get older and not to sound like old man talk
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but warming up your hands becomes more and more important and I think when you're when you're first starting
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out there can be a tendency to be like you'll hear a lot of guys say that don't warm up they'll be like oh it took me a
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song or two to kind of get into it well what really helps is is if you warm up your hands before you play but I'll just
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play very chromatic things you know just with a straight pick
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yeah is that something that a teacher maybe taught you to do or just kind of something you came into for yourself
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it's just something I came into you know on my own out of necessity because when
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my hand thing was was really high it was really necessary and now I just find
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that I play better starting off on the first song instead of it being like second or third song anywhere she like
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oh yeah now we're now we're into it but it's amazing how much you know athletes
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uh you know warm up all the time yeah and we don't think anything about it you're an athlete you're an athlete with
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your hands and with your voice and people need to you know get these things in gear and so then to get my pick and
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fingers kind of going I do this
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so I'm working on my coordination and my connection between my two hands and I'll just keep [Music]
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mov and sometimes I'll do a little I'll up that's a good thing it's another you
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know thing of like you know getting you know these things of just
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getting the hand warmed up so that when you get on stage and you do the first song it's not like oh what's going on
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and you know and then it's like second third song in you know you're saying oh man now I'm now I'm good so and you're
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also playing with the tape on the left hand this alter yeah just keeps it in a position yeah so this this is a
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kinesiology tape and I you know I like to use the flesh color that's not a tone
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secret or anything no it's not a tone is that where the secret weapon is is the tape the tape is the secret weapon no
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it's uh this this helps keep my hand in the right position throughout the day cuz you've had problems cuz I've had
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problem this is not a guitar player hack per this is not a guitar player this is for guys with that happen to have
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arthritis in the CMC joint so I do this and of course I prefer to have the flesh
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colored but I also have a bunch of blue ones which I I'll use normally around town but when I'm playing in front of
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people you don't really want to be calling attention to the tape so I try to use you know flesh color and then of
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course you've got um or my flesh color and then of course you got uh you know a
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shirt and stuff to kind of cover up the edge there but yeah those things really help me and then I ice my hand uh after
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we play so I usually uh if if my hand is getting sore in the middle like in in
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the middle of playing then I will get a bucket of ice and I will I will ice my hand in between sets but this is night
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four yes and uh and so and my hand hasn't really been sore so just at the
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end of the night I will just ice my hand
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[Music]
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where that's a really nice looking Johnny
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Smith
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[Music] the