Lunch Report for March 14th 2019

[Greenblues]

Gobusata sh'te orimasu. In Japanese, that means it’s been a while (more than five years since my last lunch report), so forgive my long silence.
It’s a genuine and appropriate sentiment that I share with everyone here on the forum in the spirit of sharing information.

We live in an information age blah blah blah. As I understand it, that means is good information has more value than something you can build. It sounds crazy that something you can only hold in your head or hardrive has more value than something you can hold in your hand or secure storage facility. However consider that the value of most physical things — be it gold, diamonds, computers or salt — is defined by the mind. Consider also that the value everything we can posses is limited either by our lifespan or the lifespan of the material. This is why gold and diamonds are valuable. They last a long time.

This means also that my G&L Legacy is very valuable to me. I’ve had it for over twenty-five years now. You might think that gives it sentimental value (in my heart), but it is still just the best tool I have for making music. However it’s not perfect, though. I’ve been struggling to get the high E-string resonate as loud and full as the other five strings since a lick I played at the end of a solo on a demo my band did years ago sounded weak. Since then I have tried adjusting pickups, saddles and the neck pocket to no effect. Upgrading the block and saddles with solid-steel didn’t fix the problem either. It only improved string-separation for chords and made the treble sharper than even I want, and I love to hear me some treble from my guitar!

Replacing the pickups with Bill Lawrence’s Microcoils did solve the problem thanks to the adjustable pole pieces. They sound a lot closer to the original Duncan SSL-2s
than other pickups I tried with adjustable pole-pieces. That means clean and neutral. They hear what the strings are doing. So recently I thought about putting the original hardware back into the guitar to get back some of that characteristic Legacy warmth.

In searching for posts from other people who have done this, I saw that the G&L Store is offering a brass bridge set. I immediately ordered this instead, and after mounting in on the guitar, I know it’s worth every penny. The tone isn’t just warmer, but woodier which really helps restore the funk to positions two and four in this guitar.
Some posters say that brass has a “zing” to it. I can hear a pop, but only hear a zing when my left/right hands are not in sync.

Installing a new bridge was a scary prospect because there are so many interactive variables to consider in a floating bridge. I’ve given up trying to set up the guitar according to the manual years ago, and searched Youtube instead. One Italian guy suggests using a book of Post-It notes for a bridge spacer, and another two CDs if you don't have a flat-handle toothbrush. After three or four rounds of adjusting the studs, springs and saddles I got the guitar playing and sounding perfectly.

The only really problem I encountered was the new-style vibrato bar.

The older, shorter and duller arm from the early 90s didn’t fit yet the shiny new longer arm wouldn’t stay in the socket!
Tightening the screw held it it, but then I couldn’t pull it out of the socket. So I took a closer look at it, and noticed some grooves in the shaft. It occurred to me these might help it to stay put, so I tightened the screw a bit BEFORE inserting the shaft. It wouldn’t go in so I loosed it, and tried to insert the shaft again because this is an action myself and most men particularly enjoy. Then I rotated it until it stopped, reversed direction and pulled it out. To my surprise, this created a perfect spiral groove just like the traditional screw-type vibrato! This demonstrated to me how soft brass is. I had to clean some brass sparkles of the bar and my fingers after removing the shaft. Now it’s screwed up because I screwed it, and that’s actually a good thing in this case (too.)

I got it set up just in time to use it at a local jam session, reminding me that the value of my guitar therefore also defined by my ability to use it as a channel for communicating emotional information which is for most people the only thing that is every real or matters. That can only happens when it’s set up right, though. Cool pedals like my old black-label Budwah, Field Effects Manifold Drive and Old Blood Noise Endeavors Dark Star help, too.

Now that I’m finished sharing this triumphant episode in my adventures with my G&L Legacy, it’s time for some lunch. Today I am suffering badly from my pollen allergy so it’s gonna be something spicy. My favorite spicy dish is rough-cut Chinese noodles but it’s messy, and I’m wearing a nice shirt today. So my alternatives some kind of Thai dish or curry with a special request for the kitchen to make it extra spicy for my sinuses.

So I’ll leave you all with two topics relating to my lunch story for today:

1) Do you also suffer from allergies, and how do you deal with them?

2) Does your guitar suffer from string imbalance, and how do you deal with it?

[Danley]

-I'm quite allergic to grass (which is not part of the natural SoCal landscape anyway.) I posted the superbloom in another thread, although there's a lot of pollen (and butterflies) the wildflowers don't affect me. I'm allergic to cats, but I also don't like being around them apart from the allergy anyway; I can tell instantly if there's a car in any household I enter, by the reaction of my throat and lungs being ripped apart by their glass-like hair and dander. Dogs are fine.

-I don't tend to play with pole pieces or adjustments specifically to deal with string imbalance; at one time I had issues with the high e-string sounding quieter than others, but my guitar teacher re-formulated my picking technique which fixed the muffled high-e to a far greater degree than any adjustment I could perform on the guitar (though my G&Ls didn't really suffer from that 'problem' as much as my Strats and Jackson Soloist did - chalk it up to the ergonomics of the bridge placement etc.)

[john o]

lunch was turkey and cheese on an onion roll, complements of the Mrs. we had our grandaughter today (11 mo) and meals are always alot of fun with her, she's starting to eat "real" food.

string imbalance: none of my g&L's suffer from this.
i had a strat once with this problem, D string. i switched out the bridge saddle and that helped somewhat. it was a MIM deluxe players strat with those clapton noiseless pup's on it, pretty nice guitar actually, body and neck wise, but the hardware was cheap crap. graphtek saddles helped. i was so impressed with G&L's DFV bridge/tailpiece compared to the Fender offering, it was one of the big sells for me, early on.

allergies: like Danley, i need to steer clear of cats. sneezing and wheezing within 30 minutes of exposure, then i'm screwed for a day or two. back when i was in school in Des Moines, one of my roomates had a black cat named Adam Ant. he was a cool cat, but my eyes would look like those of Renn, from Renn and Stimpy after I was around him for awhile. i had to move out.

[Greenblues]

-my guitar teacher re-formulated my picking technique which fixed the muffled high-e to a far greater degree than any adjustment I could perform on the guitar (though my G&Ls didn't really suffer from that 'problem' as much as my Strats and Jackson Soloist did - chalk it up to the ergonomics of the bridge placement etc.)

Wow, so it's not just my guitar or Legacy in particular. I always assumed the problem was pole-piece misalignment because it was mentioned in an early review of the Legacy in Guitar Player magazine when I was in high school.

A pro player I know with very dynamic picking technique once gave me some very Zen-like advice about the problem: stop hearing it. So I did attempt to adapt my picking technique in various ways and made a little progress but maybe I was too lazy to develop it far enough.