GRcade

Thanks very much Gecko, done a bit of soldering in the past, but we are talking over 10 years ago.

I don't think the neck needs completely replaced, just that the truss rod needs adjusted so that it is not convex. The intonation is off slightly. The guitar has also been setup for lighter gauge strings, so the bridge is not fully flush to the body, and the tuning is a bit unstable. Hoping to get the pickups put in and then I'll take it to a shop to set it up.

Pacifica's are great instruments. My first guitar was a 012. I don't have it anymore, but I have a Yamaha BB424 bass and an AES420. Both are decent guitars.

My 1986 Japanese Squier Strat is still for sale Squinty.
Save yourselves the hassle

t:for-sale-my-electric-guitars-amp-multi-fx-unit?f=9

gooseberry fool, had I known about that a few months ago

Can't really justify something like this now, as I'm in the process of buying a house now. That is a cracking price however, bare knuckle pickups as well

I thought about getting it but upgraded the workshop instead. Looks like a great guitar.

Tried my hand at a bit of soldering. Practiced on an old guitar, took off a pickup and soldered it on again, no issues. Output fine.

Did the same with my cheap Vintage V6, replacing two pickups, and now I have no sound at all. It was complete disaster!

Check for cold joints, reflow solder, try using a desolder pump, use less solder not more, use contact cleaner before soldering / isopropyl alcohol / white spirit. Also there's no risk at all plugging it in to a transistor amp while working on it now and then.

Check there aren't any shorts in the pickup selector with magnifying loupe / macro lens camera and especially check the volume pot. Make sure the terminals are correct on the pots.

When taking it apart first time mark everything with a red marker or similar, a set of sharpies is great.

You'll get it working again!

Also make sure you're heating BOTH parts for 5-10 seconds before feeding in a solder, this is the main cause of cold joints besides a crappy iron.

Try some silver solder online or get lead on ebay. The old guitars will have used lead anyway. Mixing up different types of solder is a bad idea.

If you use lead it will all flow together nice. But make sure it's ventilated or wear a mask.

I've a 40w Iron, I was a bit rubbish at soldering that guitar (the practice guitar had bigger pots and a different design of lugs on them which was easier).

I swapped two pickups out, both mounted fairly easy on the scratchplate. Made a complete balls of one of the five way selector lugs (for the neck position). Gonna have to clean up the solder and hope the lug is still intact.

Very stupid question, the volume pot has the usual three lugs for Ground, Output and Input. The ground wire from the pickups, I assumed they were just wired to the back of the pot. Are these wrapped around the ground lug and then soldered to the pot?

I'm a total noob.

They're probably the same thing but Orbital is a good person to PM about it.

No problem Gecko. Cheers for the advice and the helpful links as well!

Stupid 17-string guitar.

http://www.kerrang.com/the-news/at-last ... ng-guitar/

Anything beyond a 7 string, I cannot understand the point. Super low tunings sound totally dogshit.

strawberry floating djent.

Guitarists are the strawberry floating worst.

I'm sure a guitar like that would just bleed into the bass frequency. I don't get the point.

I've been getting the guitar acquisition feeling again

Well, they all play the same chords.

I've been recording loads over the past few months, with some really rudimentary equipment. I'm starting to see how much a good setup can cost (more than I have access to!)

I really need good monitors for mixing stuff. I uploaded a cover of something and there's a problem with a lead guitar bit at the end of the track, where the volume is lower on some devices, and higher on others. It's driving me nuts trying to figure out what I'm doing wrong with it.

That just sounds like EQ. You perceive it louder on speakers with different frequency response. Also stereo stage. Is that track panned?

Yes you need monitors. Look at m audio and Yamaha.

You can do ok with some HiFi equipment as well. Just look for flat frequency response curves online. But the amp also effects that.

Headphones don't really work in my opinion.

Fortunately I got all this stuff earlier in life when I had any money at all.

That particular bit is stereo panned, seemingly has a bit more reverb on it than on other lead guitar tracks whenever I listen to it.

I'm gonna have to take the video down and test it. I'm proud of the track despite it being somewhat amateurish, so I don't really want to leave it like that. I won't be able to afford monitors any time soon, and I'll likely need a bigger desk to accommodate them as well.

If it's panned it will sound louder on a mono speaker like a mobile phone because the left and right channels are summed so total gain is louder than you perceive through two speakers. It will sound quieter on devices where the stereo separation is greater for example speakers in a room or anything with a virtual surround effect like televisions.

It would be a good idea to listen to your mix in mono (some utilities or effects have a mono switch) to check parts aren't significantly louder than you want them to be and A/B the difference to your ears. It's also possible you're slightly stronger hearing in one ear than the other and so panning too little or too much, so try flipping left and right or listening to the headphones or speakers backwards.

You may also want to apply a little compression to reduce excessive peaks and troughs which will be more noticeable in a mono mix as they can add up to some very loud moments even on devices that are stereo but the speakers really aren't very far apart so there's poor stereo separation.

Also make sure your listening at the intersection of two speakers or you're kind of hearing it wrong, some speakers are a lot more directional than others (monitors are highly directional so you need to listen to them at the right point for example).

Green Gecko wrote:If it's panned it will sound louder on a mono speaker like a mobile phone because the left and right channels are summed so total gain is louder. It will be quieter on devices where the stereo separation is greater for example speakers in a room or anything with a virtual surround effect like televisions.

Gecko, you are an absolute star

That makes perfect sense now that you've explained it. I should have realised it already!

I wrote more stuff

No problem part of mixing and mastering isn't about having expensive speakers it's about understanding the characteristics of different audio equipment and trying to achieve a good sound on most of them. In fact it's largely about that.

You can work with crap speakers so long as you understand their EQ curve and pressure level you can compensate in your mix. Actually some engineers deliberately mix on consumer HiFi, preferably both (that's why you see mixing rooms with lots of different speakers, they aren't all the same system lol).