WRGKMC

Sensitivity? Speakers are not microphones. They don't detect sound they produce it. I think you mean SPL which is an efficiency measurement used to determine how loud a speaker is. They measure the speakers by putting a 1Khz tone at 1 watt through the speaker and measure how loud it is at 1 meter. Most guitar speakers are going to produce an SPL in the mid 90's and up. You may find something really bad ay 90~93dB. There were a bunch of crud speakers produced back in the 70's which were horrible including the ones sold by Radio Shack. Manufacturers have gotten much better at making speakers these days, its unlikely you'll find many with really low SPL settings unless you buy something like Hi Fi or PA speaker. Years ago I bought some PS speakers on sale. The sound quality was pretty good but their SPL was pathetically low. I put them in a cab and use them as an attenuator for recording high wattage cabs. They can handle 125W RMS each 240W total and since they only have an SPL of 80 they are 2X quieter then my high end Celestions.

Someone beat you to it. Its called the P100. I put a set in my Gold top Deluxe back in the late 70's. I then bought this 40th Anniversary LP in 92 which had them.

If its not an actual Squier or Fender you should check the scale length and make sure you can intonate the instrument properly, Chances are the instrument may use a 25.5" scale length neck but generics can have unique necks that make using a standard Fender type neck difficult or impossible. You need to measure the distance from the nut to 12th fret, then double that distance to your 1st High E saddle. If you cant make the saddle match then you got problems. You may be able to shim the neck pocket to make the scale length longer or route it to make it shorter but going too far with either can make for real problems. I've lengthened scale length before using epoxy putty to fill in the neck pocket. you can also use it to create shim to tilt the neck back too. They way I typically do it is apply it to the pocket, then smooth it using a putty knife. I then put a piece of cellophane over the neck heel, then screw the neck down in place. (Need to make sure the neck is straight and properly placed before you let the putty harden) This can produce a perfect shim for the bottom and sides of a neck pocket. if you apply it too thick, you can sand it down once hard but I'd only apply it when I can quickly string the guitar up and tweak the neck tilt and alignment. I usually do this by installing strings, then I'll slack them and tape the strings in place at the nut. I can then remove the neck, apply putty as a a shim, then reinstall the neck and make sure the strings have the correct height and alignment before the putty hardens. Once hard you simply remove the cellophane and you have a shim that fits like a glove on all sides. I've used it on dozens or guitars, especially with necks that don't fit well and gotten excellent results. Its allot easier then trying to make thin wood shims too. Many times you only need a couple of degrees tilt to get the right string height at the bridge. If you know 3 or 5degrees will do the job, these work well. https://www.stewmac.com/SiteSearch/?search=neck%20shims%20for%20guitar Otherwise This is what I use. https://www.grainger.com/product/55FJ87?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIvre9l6Lt5wIVsY1bCh2jJQxZEAQYAiABEgLusvD_BwE&cm_mmc=PPC:+Google+PLA&ef_id=EAIaIQobChMIvre9l6Lt5wIVsY1bCh2jJQxZEAQYAiABEgLusvD_BwE:G:s&s_kwcid=AL!2966!3!267765006428!!!g!349604050014!

I used to use one for awhile. It was pretty much a band aid approach to fixing mis-matched gear that really didn't work very well together. Also used them recording back in my early days trying to get the best tone on tape from a mic or piece or gear recording direct. Where in the chain? Tried it in every conceivable location you can imagine, before distortion, after distortion, both before and after, First/last in an effects chain. Where you place it can make a big difference. Each position will produce different results based on what feeds in vs what feeds out. If you put it before an echo you can adjust how much frequency the echoes have. if you place it after you can only manipulate what made it through not what made it into the echo so the results are different. I still have my 10 band MXR from the 70's I used to use on a pedal board. Haven't used it other then check to see if its working in at least 20+ years. They were pretty expensive units back in the day. Mine is so beat up after 50 years there isn't even any blue paint left. Still works OK though. They used really good ceramic caps in their units that keep their value. Of course the Pots aren't exactly smooth any more. Once I got better gear dumped using additional EQ. Pedal board space is valuable real estate. Gear upgrades made it unnecessary to use additional EQ so it got replaced with other pedals that were more useful. If you have pedals with tone controls, an amp with an EQ, (plus amp/cab modeling) An EQ really isn't needed. If I want different tones, I simply plug in a different guitar, select a different drive pedal or use a different amp and I can get all the variety I need. When my recording setup was super basic I had a list of EQ settings to make guitars sound good. I's use a smiley face setting for acoustic guitar tones, A Frown face for boosted mid tones like a wah pedal that's closed (Boston guitar player tones) I did a series of recordings using nothing but a synth and an EQ. I boosted the lows for bass tones, Highs for string tones and boosted mids for the lead voicings. (some of my early recording experiments) The results were actually pretty cool considering I was using sound on sound to record multiple tracks. As they say, use what you got till you get better results with something else. I'm not a huge fan of overly boosted anything and you have to be careful not to over boost certain guitar frequencies or you may wind up with tine ear tones. Ears self adjust and block out offensive tones the more they hear them. Its like the man who can block out his nagging wife's voice. I try not to boost guitar tones beyond a certain amount unless I'm purposely using that frequency as a special effect. That song MTV is an excellent example of mids boosted to produce a special effect which you wouldn't normally get otherwise. If it works well in the mix go for it, otherwise be careful. You can get hooked on tones that make others cringe and that's never a good thing.

matching impedance using Resistance (pots) is not the same thing as matching it with actual coils. We measure DC resistance of coils to get some ide of how many winds they have but you actually have to match the Henry's of a coil and its magnet strength to get balanced output. Using DC resistance to match coil outputs only works in cases where the differences are mild. Normally a Neck may be 1K less then the bridge. Even less on vintage wound. Some even match in resistance and have similar outputs based on pickup height. You may not be able to balance a 3K different on hot pickups because the outputs are too hot for DC resistance to make much difference. You can wind up with a volume match with a pathetically weak sound quality. I did a bunch of experimentation on this not too long ago on a Bass guitar trying to get a Single coil to match a HP. The HB was about 10K and the single coil half that. The best option was using a 250K pot on the single and 500K on the HB. The only time they sounded good when blended is when the single was dialed back about 1/8 of a turn on the pot at a very specific volume level. Way too edgy for practical use. You could barely breathe on that pot and have it go from full bridge to full neck with very little in between. The cause being two different impedances, and two different dynamic outputs being paralleled. The window tweaking the pots for a balance is way to narrow and impractical for use. I tried a dual single coil after that. It got much closer because the impedance between them was a closer match. It wasn't a humbucker so it still didn't balance in tone or output. I finally found another Humbucker for it and the balance between the pickups was a perfect match. Turning one or the other pot down gave a wide variety of mixed tones. The potentiometers taper is correct for the impedance too.

Guitars with bound necks and bodies are typically a higher quality instrument using higher quality materials. If you're believer that hands on equals higher quality then bound necks require a lot of hands on compared to unbound necks which are mass produced at much higher levels often using lower quality woods or at least woods that see less inspection due to lower hands on percentages. The biggest point is, when you bind necks and bodies, the added routing isn't going to work out so hot if you have crappy wood quality. Knots and wood grain issues are not good candidates for routing because you wind up having to fill anything that chips away. Binding is usually reserved for instruments built with better woods, so you usually wind up with an instrument that sounds better and is built better. I agree with others when it comes to re-fretting however. I've done many bound necks and it typically takes twice as long because each fret needs to be custom sized before installing them. Cleaning the channels, in the fretboard trimming the fret tangs are all a big challenge. My Rickenbacker was probably the toughest bound neck I've done because it has a lacquered rosewood fretboard. Removing frets without chipping was dam near impossible and gluing tiny chips back using tweezers wasn't exactly fun. Luckily I could glue the frets in lacquer the edges which covers up allot of that work. I've done Gibson's too. I typically remove the Nubs and place the fret over the binding (same was a Les Paul does when he re-frets) I'll typically wait till the frets are paper thin first though.

GFS sells mostly Artec pickups from China. I've bought many sets of Artec pickups and My advice is stay away from anything hot wound. The Chinese have low tech builds. They don't vary the magnet strength as part of the formula when wrapping coils like Dimarzio or Seymour Duncan does. They use only one magnetic strength for their builds which is why they hot wound pickups sound awful. The magnets are too strong for anything but vintage wound coils which typically sound pretty good with the Artec builds. I had to buy maybe a dozen different sets to validate that conclusion. Those are hot wound pickups so you may be OK to split. Not sure how well they might balance together however. The hotter 13K may work split. A single coil is half the total (6.5K) and may be as strong as a Strat pickup. How well it might work with the 10K? Its something you simply have to try. 4.5K even in parallel is still a lot so the 10K may over power it. Its even worse the other way. 10K split (5K) run with a 13K? Some of it involves tone too but you simply need to try them first. Best way is to install them, but leave the wires loose, then use jumper wires with alligator clips to wire them in the various configs to see if they will work that way. Otherwise you waste a lot of time and money wiring them into switches for those settings. This has nothing to do with the topic, but its important information none the less. As you can guess I'm not a hot wound fan unless they are premium pickups which incorporate the magnet strength and coil wire diameter and core permeability as part of the formula. I have allot of experience in this area having worked in electronics so long. When you only change the number of coil turns you throw the Q of the coil out of specs and unable to reproduce the full frequency spectrum. I have several sets of 13K pickups that top out at maybe 4KHz. Vintage wound pickups can produce strong signals as high as 5 and 6KHz. 10K on some bright single coils. I've collected dozens of Hot wound Artec/GHS stuff and that were pulled out as soon as I heard them. I only use vintage wind for generic pickup now because they sound the closest to high quality versions. Hot wound generics are the result of ignorance. The goal in building a good pickup is first get a great frequency response then decide how much of that can be sacrificed making the signal stronger. There isn't an amp or drive pedal out there that cant make a pickup output stronger, add gain, or reduce its tone range. What they cant do is work the other way reducing a pickup that's too hot or add the frequency response back that's been lost. The HF loss occurs as the magnet field is generated. Coil resists fast changes in AC more then slow changes so high frequencies roll off before lows do. The hotter the pickup the more high frequencies are attenuated for a fixed magnet strength. If the HF is gone before the signal is amplified, you aren't going to magically add it back using other circuits. dame thing with the higher gain. If the pickup is clipping the first gain stage, you cannot unclip it in other stages that have gain control. In summary. You can always limit a pickups frequency is its too wide using an EQ. An EQ cant invent frequencies that don't exist. Increasing preamp strength can add gain to a weak pickup signal. Turning preamp strength down cannot put the genie back in the bottle if the signal is too hot, yore stuck with it. There is nothing that can properly correct an impedance too high for a preamp besides reducing coil strength. You'll learn this on your own if you do enough swaps with different types. Hopefully you don't wasn't too much time in the money in the process. As I said, I'd try wiring those pickups using jumpers before deciding to go beyond a normal 3 way switch. Series/parallel doesn't work that great on hot wound because the signals too driven in both settings. If they were vintage wound you'd wind up with one setting that's cleaner and less driven then the other. Both setting still hum buck too. Split coils typically hum badly. Be sure you ground the covers or at lease the pickups base plate if thee are uncovered pickups, otherwise a split coil run through a gain pedal will produce too much hum to be of much use.

Is it possible you have one of those Affinity Squire Tele's with the oddball sized top load bridge? I have one of those. They aren't bad players at all at all once you do a few mods. New tuners, definitely. The stock frets are a bit rough but you can get some playing out of them before re-fretting. You're stuck with the bridge however. I looked high and low when I had a saddle thread strip. Had to buy the same one as a replacement. Regular Fender bridge doesn't fit, they aren't long enough. I guess they did that so people couldn't turn them into regular Squire Tele's or simply save money. The fact they are top load isn't so bad as but the gap between saddles drove me crazy. What I wound up doing is I cut a Fender medium celluloid pick in narrow slices about 1mm x 3mm, then glued them to the side of every other saddle. Worked perfectly to get rid of saddle movement. I thought about making it a string through by drilling through the existing bridge, but since I built this other tele I haven't bothered. I got the new tuners in yesterday. They were much better then expected. Much better then the last set too. They have excellent gears with no schlock in them. They used the right kind of pressure washers between the buttons and housing too so the tuning is smooth too. That came with very little grease so I added some high quality silicone grease which I get from work designed specifically to prevent wear on brass gears like this, and wont liquify and leak given these are locking tuners that are semi exposed. I did find the pressure screw for the high E string didn't lock the string off properly. Looks like the hole wasn't drilled as straight as it should have so the pin cant bite down on a string so thin. When I change strings I'll swap it with the Low E string which is thick, problem solved. There was a slight difference in tone and the way the strings snapped down near the nut with these new tuners. Granted I had installed new strings but this is besides that. Probably not something most people would notice unless they switch from Vintage to modern like I have. Even then they might not notice or mind the changes. The strings don't wind as low because the pegs protrude above the fretboard higher then the vintage style. The breakaway angle from the nut is less on the 4 strings that don't have string retainers. Without the extra downward pressure on the nut the strings are a bit more flexible in the lower registers and I even had to tweak the truss to get rid of some string buzz on the lower strings. The tone has changed too. You can tell there is more mass at that end of the string, steel which produces a more generic sustain and less wood tone from the neck. I'll likely keep it this way for awhile. It does tune like a dream with those 18:1 tuners, but that small drop in vintage tone those vintage tuners gave me will be missed. I may have to price up some actual Kluson/Fender type that have metal worm gears instead of crappy nylon. Too bad. If it wasn't for that flaw they'd be more durable then the original Fenders which cost about $60.

I have a bunch of guitars with the stock frets and setting the intonation is easier compare to having really tall frets. The strings you use make a big difference too. I spend a couple of years trying out different string brands till I found ones that had the right tension balance so I didn't wind up with the low frets bending sharp in comparison to the upper frets. These are the ideal strings when using those frets. Strings get a real beating being bent at the frets and you need something that recovers without becoming bent at each fret. These retain their tone longer and are far more durable then anything on the market. I was reminded of that when I put a set of D'Addario on my Strat. They sounded excellent the first week. Second week they started getting dull and wouldn't stay in tune. 3rd week that sounded awful. Couldn't play a chord without sour notes. The high frets bend the strings at the frets too much. I should add, I'm a huge string bender too. Guess it comes from Playing a lot of slide (and playing violin before guitar) Strings need to come back to pitch instantly or you wind up with a bunch of sour notes. Even if you lube the saddles, those beveled angles that taper towards the ball end of the string produce several unnecessary millimeters of friction which prevent the string from returning to pitch quickly. A rounded saddle top has less friction so the string recoils more quickly to pitch after a bend. At least I hope they will. The bridge I bought allows top loading too so I could always try that too but I dislike how the saddles can move when you slam a chord so I'm going to try and make the through body work.

That's a really cool bridge design. Not available yet however. My guess is it will cost close to $200 for the aluminum version.

Those $40 ones are similar to the ones in the second pic I posted. Looks like they created the composition through the same method of filing back the center point of the barrel, except those copper ones only cost $10. They do angle the grooves to be on a tilt however so that extra $30 may actually be what's needed for that type to work. They are still fixed for the pairs of strings however tweaks between them requires a file. The tilt type I bought have no grooves so I likely need to add a slight notch with my nut files. Otherwise a slight nudge to the left or right changing strings can throw the intonation way out. As far as the type you have not working so well for me, its because of the super jumbo frets I use. Normal Fender type frets are about half as high and string bend is stopped by the fret board. The super jumbo have a fluted fretboard touch so string touch is a much bigger factor in getting the intonation right. Its darn close with the extra filing I did on those other saddles but not as close as I can get it with 6 movable saddles. I got those pickups in yesterday. I was able to install them along with the extra shielding tape I posted about in another forum. That copper tape was pretty thin but I layered it so it should be fine. I reused the old strings because the new tuners should be coming in today or tomorrow and I'll change them then. If the saddles take longer I can change the, without stringing it again but I'm likely going to wait changing them till the next set of strings is needed. I was knocked out by the tone of those new pickups. I wasn't expecting that big of an improvement. I set the bridge to 3mm and the neck to 4mm with the top fret depressed and I get an even balance on the selector. The pickups obviously have better dynamic range. You can play light for cleans and dig in for drive. The range is natural to the way your hands feel the notes. The tone was much better especially on the low strings. The bass was round and the output on each string was much more even. You'd thing it would be the other way around using a bar magnet, but the individual poles do something very cool to isolate the output of each string. The Alnico V magnets really do give the pickups that classic drive too. I'm going to be playing that one a lot. May even wind up being my favorite, thought that lightweight sister I built using the same kind of body is winding up being fantastic too. I have the intonation set on that one to perfection with a floating bridge that comes back to proper pitch. Used it recording this week and it really does the classic Strat thing nicely. Since I had a few days off from work I also swapped pickups in two other guitars, I moved the Mini HB's with their full sized HB adaptor rings from my Epi Dot to my Plexiglass Flying V And moved the 57 PAF Clones to the Dot. I was hesitant because that Dot really sang nicely with those mini's but I have 4 guitars with Mini's. Those 57's are ideal for that guitar. Again, the Alnico V magnets and classic wind gives them the ideal amount of drive without overdoing it. I can dial it back and get a clean jangle or add additional gain and get the notes to sound violin like while maintaining the pick attack. These PAF's sounded great in the V but Plexiglass has a very generic tone. The wood tones of the semi Hollow really were a much better match and the V does sound better with the narrower string nodes those pickups produce.

I'll let you know how the tilt type work out. The bridge is still new so I only needed the saddles. The lowest price I could find was $12 plus 3 shipping. The least expensive were the first two sets above. You can find both for under $10 with free shipping. As I said, the first set has at least a 3mm difference in length which is a bit extreme for the strings and frets I use. I could reduce that distance by counter beveling the cutaway. I got it close and anything below the 12th fret plays very well. Leads above the 12th aren't too bad. The tuner shows each saddle having either one string sharp or flat depending on which string you intonate perfectly. I cant stand flat notes so I wind up with 3 strings perfect and the other three slightly sharp above the 12th. I could continue to narrow the distance between peaks using a file but I'd likely have to remove the set screws. I may do that just to have backups using a Dremil tool with a grinding tip. I also got a decent deal on a different set of pickups. The ones I have in there now are just cheap squire pickups with ceramic magnets. Actually they don't sound that bad. Ceramic magnets give pickups a tight overdrive which can sound pretty good using drive boxes. Its not the same for tone or touch compared to Alnico V pole magnets however. The ones I got weren't expensive custom made, just generic no name. They look to be well made and the DC resistance looks OK so I'll give them a shot. Hard to go wrong for $20. The vintage style split shaft Kluson clone tuners haven't been working out so hot either. I like how they bring the string close to the headstock but they have nylon shaft gears instead of metal and they don't turn as smoothly as a modern tuner. I found some 18:1 locking tuners which aren't bad. I put a set on 2 Strats I built recently so I figured they should be OK on a tele. I'm not a huge fan of locking tuners. I learned how to wrap strings so they lock themselves off when I was very young and never had issues with string slipping. This seem to be the most popular lately. They are well made and only cost $20 too. The free Winder comes in handy too.

I been experimenting with my newest Tele build which I installed a 3 saddle bridge. The first tele I owned back in the 70' s had straight barrels. The One I've had for the past 10 years has a 6 saddle bridge. Compensated saddles for Tele's weren't available when I owned my First tele. Maybe some luthiers used a file on standard saddles to get better intonation but I hadn't seen any. Now you can find them for chump change. These are the first ones I tried. As you can see the Apex of string contact is moved by the beveling of the barrel. This definitely compensated but whoever came up with this design over compensated by quite a bit. Maybe they'd be ideal if you used 11's with an unwrapped third. For 9's the angle is too much you wind up with one string on each saddle sharp and one flat, or one correct and the other flat. After I figure out there was too much compensation, I used a needle file and reduces the distance between the two contact points. Still not perfect but better. Still not completely happy though. I checked out the following. These are similar to the ones above. They simply bevel the grooves differently to get different contact points. I was tempted to buy these because they were only $9 a set but I suspect I'd be doing the same thing filing them back to get the right intonation. These were the first compensated saddles I saw years ago. Someone got the bright idea to drill screw holes at an angle to get intonation compensation. These are the newest I've seen available. These allow you to tilt the saddles to any degree of compensation between the two strings you need. The mass is pretty good too so that should have decent sustain. I don't typically need a lot of angle on the first two strings, maybe 1MM increase in length between the 1st and 2nd then 1mm between the 2nd and 3rd. I set the 4th string length to match the 2nd string then match the 5th string to the 3rd and add one additional mm to the 6th string. It works out being nearly ideal every time and only small tweaks beyond that. Anyway, these look like the ticket for what I need. If they don't work out I may switch over to a 6 saddle bridge like my other tele has, but I do like the tone a 3 saddle bridge produces. There's more downwards pressure on the saddle screws so the saddles don't more around like they can on a 6 saddle. The strings sustain better in pairs of 2 each too

I've run multiple amps since the 70's playing live. I'd often run matching Fender heads playing larger shows. I got into running them in stereo mostly for recording (actually pseudo stereo given the pickups are mono) Last time I used two amps live was playing in a 3 piece where the other guitarist and I would switch from playing lead to bass. I had to guitar amps and two bass amps setup and had the inputs wired so we could simply pickup a bass on either side of the stage and switch inputs with a pedal. Same for our guitar pedal boards. Saved having us switch sides of the stage plus having a guitar and bass cab on each side made it wasy to hear both instruments when playing. Beyond that I gave up hauling two amps to gigs. First, its allot of extra work and its not like you're being paid double to haul it. Second, stereo effects really cant be heard by the audience on stage amps unless they are right in front of the stage. If you're going to haul more gear, bring enough PA gear and monitors then mic the amp. You can then run stereo effects through the mixer and use stereo effects the audience can actually hear. The spread between two PA cabs up high with horns is much better then stage cabs. Of course you can do whatever you like if it inspires you to play well. For recording I practically always use two amps. Not only for the differences in tone but for running pseudo stereo effects like Chorus, Echo and reverb. It opens things up for wider sound and can fill things in. Here's one combination I use a lot. The Marshall cab has 75W Celestion Cream backs and the smaller can has 10" Jensen Alnico speakers. I'm able to record British and American tone at the same time. I use two amps for my guest rig too. Here I have a 1976 200W Sunn Concert lead head on a Peavey 4X12 and a 100W Fender M80 head I mounted in a 4X12 cab. I have several other heads and cabs including smaller amps too so I can get quite a bit of variety. Many for small jams I'll simply bring my two 15W Marshall amps and use a stereo multi effects pedal with them.

Using a drive pedal for rhythm and lead is tricky combination. You should realize most drive pedals use 2~4 Solid state gain stages. Neither High fidelity nor linear tone is typically very good from any of them. Most have a targeted midrange bump where you'd expect the guitar to sit in a mix when played with other instruments. You really cant expect a high gain sound that targets single notes to work for multiple strings without plenty of of noise and string beating. You wind up with some strings too loud and others masked. You're better off setting up a loop switch which allows you to switch from your lead pedal chain to your rhythm pedal chain. You can use something like a Compressor, Tube screamer, and Chorus. Maybe add an overdrive pedals in place of the Tube screamer, something which only breaks up a little much like a tube amp dirties up when you dig in and cleans up when you play lightly. Ideally, if you set your guitars volume to 8 you should be able to get clean tone, 10 chords that are half driven, half clean, then you can switch over to overdrive pedals which compress more for lead tones If you have fewer pedals I like using a mild compressor to drive may saturation boxes. I typically use one low gain overdrive pedal for rhythm and a medium drive for crunch. I can combine the two for high gain. then when you put the compressor before them in order to drive them a little more and add compressed sustain, it gives you a total of 6 different drive tones which can typically handle just about anything you'd play. You way you set them is Compression followed by low gain, the medium gain and set them so when all three are on your notes wind up sustaining the strings as long as you hold the fret down without any microphonic feedback. Rhythm will typically be the low gain with or without the compression. Power chords will be the medium gain with or without compression. The choice of pedals is the real magic to making it work. I used a Tube screamer followed by a Marshall Governor. Lately I been using a Joyo Sweet baby followed by a Govornor or a Vox Distortion. I've used many others. Some work better then others. As far as compression goes you have to watch out and make sure it doesn't add allot of unwanted noise or hiss. Something like an MXR compressor for example wouldn't be my first choice due to the noise they can add. Something mild and warm is your best bet. I like using The Edwards Compressor because its got a tone control plus an attack and release knob. A Boss CS-3 isn't bad either. Just need a little lift and sustain from it. You don't want a big squeeze or you'll wind up having no dynamics at all for the drive pedals.