Chris Rea is an artist that has surely more than a few things in common with Mark Knopfler – playing a red Fender Stratocaster is one of them. Chris plays a lot of slide guitar, so his Strat is normally tuned to open E, and his sound is different for this reason but often his clean Strat sounds are still similar to some early Dire Straits stuff. I found this […]
This is what I consider good news for all of us guitar players – after severe CITES restrictions for trading guitars with parts of rosewood or bubinga that were introduced in 2017, these woods can soon be used for musical instruments again, without any horrifying paperwok that almost made many companies stop using these woods that are essential for e.g. fingerboards or bridges on acoustic guitars. An exemption for finished […]
With this blog post I just want to make you aware of a possible sound loss due to a wrong setup. This affects all Strat or Tele bridges with the ‘block’ saddles instead of the bent steel pieces of the vintage Fender design, like the American Standard bridge, or vintage Schecter bridges and consequently also the Dream Machine Tremolo and Tele bridges. I found that you need to make sure […]
The BOSS DR-80 is an astonishing little device with a vey high fun-factor. In short, it is a digital 8-track multitrack recorder with a lot of effects, and at the same time a virtual band with a great number of jam grooves. And maybe the most astonishing feature is the price which is just about 200 Euros. I already had a lot of fun with this little device. Here are […]
Recently I wanted to measure the neck thickness of some of my guitars. I was surprised to find something as trivial as this to turn out to be rather difficult job. The strings always hindered my calipers from lying flat against the neck surface, no matter how I tried. I solved the problem with the help of a little battery that turned out as the ideal tool to help with […]
Finally, I finished the second Telecaster-style guitar with Dream Machine brass hardware. You might remember my first build report about a Dream Machine Telecaster clone. Even back then when I started that first project, I already got the body and neck to start a similar project with these but never found the time to complete it. The idea behind the project was to assemble an affordable guitar that looks great, […]
With the following video I was trying to demonstrate the basic sound difference between a vintage Schecter Dream Machine and a ‘traditional’ Strat. The Dream Machine is from about 1980, it has a Koa body and a one-piece Pau Ferro neck. The three pickups in the brass pickguard are the tapped F500T’s. It has s a hardtail brass bridge. The Strat is a 1983 Japanese vintage Squier Stratocaster, unmodified. Of […]
It seems to be out of question that the pickups are an important ingredient that defines the sound of an electric guitar. Besides obvious contruction differences – like overwound single coil pickups, or single-coil sized humbuckers etc. – there are many details , like different magnet alloys or different wire for the coil, that make a subtle or even clear sound difference. And there are many ‘external’ aspects, like shielding, […]
For better hum shielding, the strings on electric guitars are normally grounded, which means they are connected internally to the ground of the guitar. For this purpose, usually a ground wire is connected somewhere to the guitar bridge, in the case of a Stratocaster with tremolo this is normally a wire from the case of the volume pot to the ‘claw’ that helds the tremolo springs. As the springs are […]
It is a while ago that I started my Tele Dream Machine project. The project advanced and got to a stage where I had a playable fine instrument some months ago (which can be seen e.g. here when I was demoing the Walk of Life pickups with this guitar). However, various parts were not finished yet, mainly as I was missing some of the required brass parts. Meanwhile I have […]
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