Oh, I can believe it, if it's anything like mine

I did buy new valves (from Rapid) as I decided against debugging a dodgy circuit with dodgy vales from my collection, and decided (for once) to play safe and buy new capacitiors for the high voltage bits - particularly the antenna isolator.

Who knows, maybe we'll be entertaining an IET conference with a Theremin duet one day Have you ever seen Bill Bailey's version of the Hokey Cokey on two Theremins?

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Andy Millar CEng MIET MCMI

http://www.linkedin.com/in/millarandy

You may be presuming too much about my musical ability!

Sadly, not. I wonder if I can find it on YouTube?

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Eur Ing Graham Kenyon CEng MIET

Hi Graham (and others of course!),

For aspiring guitar hackers I picked up a fun magazine 'special' yesterday, "Guitar Classics: DIY Electric Guitar Bible" subtitled "Build, Fix, Improve". It's a collection of technically reasonably detailed articles about building and restoring guitars, even including a section about how to build your shed to work on them in! (As a shed junkie, a magazine about getting up to naughty stuff with sheds AND guitars is top shelf reading for me )

I have no connection with Anthem Publishing or a well known station newsagent.

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Andy Millar CEng MIET MCMI

http://www.linkedin.com/in/millarandy

Thanks Andy, I'll keep an eye open for this.

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Eur Ing Graham Kenyon CEng MIET

If you are going to change the pick-ups on your LP Graham, I would be inclined to go with Seymour Duncans either a JB (or JB Antiquity) in the bridge position and either a '59 or Jazz model in the neck (Jazz Antiquity also available). Pricey new but if you are in no rush and have the patience and grit to stick to your budget, good used ones are fairly easy to pick up on ebay.

Regards
Alan Dominey
Elect. Safety Eng. / Surveillance Mgr. / Rock'n'Roll Hooligan

p.s. Boy did I start a ball rolling with this one . . .

Or do I go for the Bare Knuckle offerings, which I think in general I prefer to the Duncans (personal thing, this music lark)? After all this time, still not decided !

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Eur Ing Graham Kenyon CEng MIET

Moving from guitar to bass...

I dusted down (literally) my Dearmond Starfire semi-acoustic bass at the weekend which had been sitting more-or-less unplayed for a few years. I'd always been a bit unhappy about the balance across the strings of the neck pickup, but I had never noticed before that the pole spacing is just wrong! It sits under the A string nicely, E and D are a bit off, and G is way to one side of the pole. So I guess not surprising that the output from the G string is much less than the A.

So I'm now looking at replacing the pickups, which has begged an interesting question. Is there any difference in performance between 'blade' style pickups and 'pole piece' style? I'm assuming that 'blade' style are much more tolerant of string spacing? But why doesn't everyone use them?

Any thoughts?

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Andy Millar CEng MIET MCMI

http://www.linkedin.com/in/millarandy

Sorry for not coming back on this sooner, Andy - been v. busy recently and not a lot of spare time for the Forum.

Apart from slightly affecting the design of the pickup itself, I don't think it makes a lot of difference whether you select the right blade-type, vs correctly-spaced pole-pieces.

As well as my Les Paul, I've got a Squier Strat, and one of these: 2007 SG Standard with 3 Single Coils, which has 3 "blade-type" single coils - it sounds good to me!

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Eur Ing Graham Kenyon CEng MIET

You're just trying to make me jealous again After posting the above I also found that Gibson basses use the same string spacing as DeArmond (or rather the other way around!) so I might try fitting a pair of Gibson replacement pickups. (Ironic as by the time mine was made DeArmond was a Fender brand.)

Distracted from this at the moment as I've just bought a looper pedal for my son and daughter to use, so I'm sorting out some external switching and a decent PSU, and I also need to finally finish my bass amp as my son's six-string bass struggles through my old practice amp. And just bought some Germanium diodes to try messing around with designing distortion pedals.

All far too much fun

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Andy Millar CEng MIET MCMI

http://www.linkedin.com/in/millarandy

Edited: 06 November 2012 at 12:44 PM by amillar