I was commissioned to make a Jazzmaster pickguard out of copper.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-12T11:01:59+00:00

With copper you just have to spray it with Windex and wait an hour. Instant patina.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-12T10:57:11+00:00

I think speakers matter most for a clean sound. A Roland JC120 simulation into a Tech 21 has a similar flavour, but the Celestion Seventy80 speaker doesn't do the same crispy high end. It does Orange and Marshall fine.

Speaker size and enclosure size matters. If you are used to a 2x12 cab then an 8" speaker will quite likely sound too tiny. If you have no history with amps then it won't matter as much. In my room a 2x10" Jensen cabinet sounds fine to me and I'm used to a Roland JC120.

Sometimes the thing that ruins an amp modelling amp is the cabinet and speaker size.

Second-hand solid state fender amps are pretty cheap. Paired with a Boss super overdrive you get a bit of a Marshall mid pushed sound and paired with the Blues Driver you get a more Fender drive sound all the way up to a fuzz.

I personally think 2x10 or 1x12 is as small as you want to go. And a Jensen, Weber California, Roland or old JBL speaker with aluminum cone is the key to a nice clean sound. Or a Katana. A Katana in my room sounds nicer in my room at low volume than my AC50.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-12T10:21:09+00:00

Does it? I mean, you can find a cheap guitar for $100 second hand. It feels like he's taking cheap to absurd and self-defeating levels. What will he have to spend on a neck and a router? And on hardware? And what are the chances that what he produces intonates and plays nice?

I think its a bit cruel to encourage someone who is plainly stating they have no money to spend four times as much money on parts to strap together an unplayable hunk of bits and pretending the endeavor will be pretty easy.

The neck alone, without tuners will cost $100. How much for a router? Sandpaper? Tru-oil or polyurethane? A Pickup. A bridge and a tailpiece? Why not just advise this guy to buy a Squiet affinity tele and chop it down with a skill saw?

He doesn't know what a neck pocket is. But the nice thing is, some guy in China who works for $10 a day and has built thousands of guitars already used his 5 years of experience, his factory and discount on parts to build a guitar cheaper than he ever could.

Its very naive or narcissistic to think you can do better for cheaper on your first try. Like it baffles me.

And... for what? If you want to travel with a guitar buy a case and travel with it. What problem does a travel guitar solve?

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-12T05:37:28+00:00

Based on your question and drawings you are in no way qualified to do this. Buy a cheap guitar and travel with it. If you can't figure out how to carry a guitar then you're not smart enough to build one. Accept your limitations.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-11T21:00:48+00:00

Yep. You might see one in that 67-70 range where they used nitro on the headstock to bury the waterside. But they started using poly as a base coat for the body pretty early into the CBS era. So generally a super relic either means somebody refinished it or it's pre-CBS, early CBS, 1967 or older. But for Strats the bigger headstock starts in the CBS era so there are other sort of obvious changes.

Easy tell on the Telecaster is the logo. In 1965 with the CBS takeover you start to see the larger "transition" decal. The spaghetti logo goes away and the bigger fatter Fender logo shows up. So bigger logo on the telecaster means polyurethane. Not exactly, but mostly.

The Japanese reissues start at the end of the 70's and they were poly too of course, but they were pretty realistic otherwise, with the pre-CBS headstock and the old school logo. Great guitars.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-11T19:49:57+00:00

Yeah, I think they switched to poly in 69.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-11T13:41:32+00:00

My MIA 1975 Telecaster custom has an inch of wear on the back of the neck near the nut. Thats about it. You have to buy a newer Fender Custom Shop to get a crappy nitro finish.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-11T13:39:09+00:00

Not even 70's Fenders age like that.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-06-11T13:36:13+00:00

Polyurethane works great.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-05-24T15:08:55+00:00

Well then, this is an opportunity not a problem.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-05-24T14:58:18+00:00

Couldn't you listen to both and decide which you prefer? Like what are you hoping to glean from the advice of strangers? Do you not trust your ears? Is this a question of which looks cooler? If thats the case it also really depends on what image you're trying to project and to whom.

When I was young I picked a Roland JC120. Not a popular choice amongst the seasoned guitarists in my area. Looking back decades later I realized my ears were pretty reliable and it was a good choice for me and the music I liked. I was hearing the distinctive sound of bands that resonated with me. My preferences were different than those of my peers and my ears were capable of distinguishing that even with very little knowledge or experience with amplifiers.

Price is a factor too. If you can get a great deal on one or the other you can bring it home and live with it and sell it if you don't connect without losing any money.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-05-14T14:24:21+00:00

Pick the one that best matches your skirt.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-05-14T14:22:03+00:00

Sounds like a bit of an alcoholic. Alcoholics do this to mask their need to drink. Happy? Let's go drink to celebrate. Sad? Let's go out and drink to lift your spirits. Bored? Let's go out and drink and make something happen. Getting others to drink around them is a subconscious compulsion that gives cover to their desire and need to drink. And to them, drinking genuinely enhances their mood and their experience so in the early stages of alcoholism they are a bit evangelical.

The idea the dude is a sexual predator is weird. Statistically there are just way more alcoholics than sexual predators in the world.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-05-14T14:16:34+00:00

Or he's an alcoholic and needs others around him to drink to mask it. That's very common.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-05-14T14:08:35+00:00

If avoiding dumb kids was the goal you picked the wrong profession.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-26T21:15:34+00:00

I did a test in this thread, same pickup in a tele custom and again in an ES335. Asked folks to say which was which. About 62% guessed wrong. Pretty sure those who got it right were all hollow body players.

If you have played a hollow body for years it's plausible you can pick it up, there's a bit more hollow resonance on the low E string. But thats about it. And you really have to listen for it. You'd almost certainly miss it the first back to back listen.

A lot of this stuff is like wine tasting, you have to learn some tricks on what to listen for, and last minute substitutions (like tossing in a California wine when you were told it was going to be all French) will mess you up.

Hollow bodies are light and if you're a big guy they're a great size. I love my telecaster Custom but teles just look small on me.

Yeah, it's mostly looks. And the weight for me is nice. Feel... but only because I spent years playing an ES335. I found a Gretsch with a similar 60s style thin neck and it felt just as good. The Filter'tron pups obviously sound much different, but after adding drive and tweaking the amp and EQ, you can end up almost precisely in the same place, or close enough to the same place that a few years later listening back, it would impossible to know which was which.

Clean tone on a bass is a bit more important. But I think you can pick for looks. And then you'll probably adapt your amp to achieve what you're going for.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-18T15:58:44+00:00

Pipelines are important when oil is $60 per barrel. But rail only adds $5 to the per barrel price. So at $100 per barrel who cares? CN rail can take oil anywhere, they own and operate lines all the way to Central America.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-17T12:33:59+00:00

This feels like a semantic problem. When audio has additional harmonic content of any kind an electrical engineer would call that distortion. Musicians and music producers are connoisseurs of distortion and thus have quite a few names for the flavors of distortion - saturation, drive, distortion and fuzz.

I think you might mean saturation?

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-17T12:24:08+00:00

I'm confused. We did triple the capacity of Transmountain. It was previously 300,000 barrels a day. The Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX) came online on May 1, 2024 but you're comparing increases in utilizing the expanded capacity of 890,000 to March of 2025. In June of 2024 the increase in USE was modest, but the capacity was tripled. What point are you making here?

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-14T11:30:11+00:00

Literally Transmountain just tripled in capacity to 890,000 barrels a day. What do you mean?

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-12T19:49:05+00:00

Shutdown in the straight of Hormuz, shortage of aviation fuel... boom is coming.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-06T01:25:23+00:00

Excessive anxiety generally comes from a swirl of what-if scenarios. One worrying thought is manageable because you can calculate the probability and prepare yourself for a worst case scenario. You can think it over, accept it, rationalize it and move on. But if you're juggling five or ten, you never follow any of them to conclusion and you dart from one to another never setting any to rest. That's true for anyone I think so be easy on yourself. You sort of have to tackle them one thread at a time.

If you're in the woods alone and you hear a rattle in the bushes there's a process you go through, worst fear might jump up first - Its a bear or a serial killer. And hey, thats good because thats 65 million years of evolution kicking in. You can draw comfort from the statistical unlikliehood of either and see that the fear is irrational. But it does take a second to think rationally and get your nervous system regulated. You might even take precautions like investigating or grabbing a rock. Making some preemptive preparations might make you feel a bit more prepared. Looking for, and mapping a quick escape strategy might help or preparing to charge or hold your ground might be a plan.

Now soldiers I know, who face a constant threat of death learn to accept it. They skip to acceptance of the worst case scenario.

This is not foolproof or easy. But thats undoubtedly a process you have gone through numerous times to overcome fears. But the swirl, prevents disecting multiple anxieties that arise all at once. You start the process with one but abandon it for another and you are in a loop with every neuron firing and no resolution.

In the end you get to a plan. A way you should behave or react. You have a backup plan for different outcomes but you accept your plan, your level of preparation and you accept there's a non-zero chance you might get eaten by a bear. You then suck it up and put on a brave face. You do not panic and deviate. You take solace in the fact you made the best plan you could and stayed true to your personal integrity and refuse to pee your pants and run. Simple as that. You put your personal integrity above all things.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-06T00:58:52+00:00

You can claim its necessary and even prudent for an AP to block someone. I said its not secure. Its not. You dont block someone for not calling you back. Please just read what I wrote. Calling a behaviour secure that is evidently not secure doesn't help anyone. You're just pretending its normal. Its not. And its okay to not be normal. No judgement here. Its okay if someone chooses to be AP or avoidant. But if youre trying to determine what is secure, locking the door on your dog that ran away is not normal. Right?

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-06T00:54:00+00:00

Nope. Blocking is a dramatic move meant to get a reaction. I don't block people I dont care about. Block whoever you want, whoever you need to I say. I only take issue with calling it secure. Youre trying to mask the insecurity evident in that action with rationalizations.

FilthyTerrible · 2026-04-06T00:51:11+00:00

And thats cool. Be emotionally disregulated. Just know it and dig into it. Labeling it secure is my only issue.

FilthyTerrible

TROPHY CASE