paddybrown

I play a Blues Junior, and I find the best way to get a good distorted sound from it is not to bother with pedals and just crank it. Volume, bass, mid and treble all the way up, then turn the master volume down to suit where you're playing - about 4 is enough for most small bar gigs. Then use the guitar's volume control to decide how much distortion you want. It does make it a bit too loud to play at home without annoying the neighbours though.

Decided to do a honeyburst. Coming along nicely I think. Needs a little more yellow to smooth out the transition, and maybe a little more amber aaound the edge to darken it slightly, but I'm very pleased with progress.

Latest update - the pickguard I ordered has arrived! Next, I just have to decide on the colour. I've done a few mockups in Photoshop: I'm leaning towards either the pink or the burst. Any preferences?

This is my number one guitar, a much modified 2015 LPM. The finish is heritage cherry. I think the finish has faded a bit since I bought it. I might be imagining it, but I think the red used to be deeper. It has a nice grainy plain top that's only really visible when the light's right, and hardly ever shows up in photos. Here's one where it did: So my question is, does the cherry red dye Gibson uses still fade when exposed to sunlight, and is there any way to accellerate that to make the wood grain more obviously visible?

I quit my job at the helium factory. I won't be spoken to in that tone.

I have the 61s in my favourite Les Paul, and I much prefer them to the Burstbucker Pros in my other Les Paul. The 61s are smoother and brighter, and cut through better in a live setting. According to the spec sheet of my guitar, they have Alnico 5 magnets, and the outer coil with the screws is wound slightly hotter than the inner slug coil - 5000 turns on the slugs, 5261 on the screws. (That's the opposite of the Burstbucker Pros, which are also Alnico 5 but the slug coil has more winds that the screw coil.) The DC resistance is 7.75K ohms, which is a little less than the Burstbucker Pros, but they feel hotter somehow. Unlike most pickup sets, the bridge and the neck have the same number of windings. Gibson don't seem to sell 61s separately, and none of the ones they do sell seem comparable, but a quick search on Ebay finds a number of them for sale. Alternatively, you might want to apprach a local pickup maker and see if they can replicate them for you.

I've come up with another possibility. If I fill the screw holes with mahogany dust and glue, then spray the whole thing with clear sanding sealer, then the colour will take the same way all over because it'll be taking to sanding sealer and won't actually touch the wood. Hopefully that'll work. I have spray cans of clear cellulose sealer, cherry red colour and nitro clear coat on order from Amazon, I know where I can get wet/dry sandpaper locally, and I have some Virtuoso cleaner and polish to get it nice and shiny. All I need now is to rig up some kind of spray stand in the back yard.

For a number of years, Gibson made released a new line of guitars every year, like cars. The "T" suffix was just for 2016 and 2017 if I remember rightly. In 2015 every model, including the Traditional, had the G-Force Tuners and the zero-fret nut. The following two years every model came in two versions, HP ("high performance", with G-Force tuners and zero-fret nut), and T ("traditional", with regular tuners and nut). So you could buy a Les Paul Traditional High Performance, or a Les Paul Traditional Traditional. I guess it must have seemed to make some sort of sense at the time. In 2018 and 2019 they only had one HP model, and all the other models had regular tuners and nuts and dropped the T. And then later in 2019 the new owners took over and revamped the line again into "Original Collection" and "Modern Collection", and the HP model was dropped altogether. They now have a "Legacy Archive" that gives the specs for all their guitars going back to 2015, and you can find others on older versions of the Gibson website via the Wayback Machine. Les Paul Traditional 2013 Les Paul Traditional 2014 Les Paul Traditional 2015 Les Paul Traditional 2016 T Les Paul Traditional 2016 HP Les Paul Traditional 2017 T Les Paul Traditional 2017 HP Les Paul Traditional 2018 Les Paul Traditional 2019

The new diagonal mounts have arrived, and they fit rather well. I think the double-cut deluxe is the way forward. A little more work needed with the wood filler on the top edge of the bridge pickup rout, then final sanding, and then I have to choose a finish.

I've ordered two different styles of pickup mount. The flat chrome ones arrives first. I quite like the look. The standard mini-humbucker mounts with the diagonal screw holes are still on their way.

Very nice.

Yeah, let us see 'em!

Well, I'm committed now. Started rebuilding the pickup cavities with wood filler. I'll see what it looks like when I've built it up and sanded it flat, but it looks like it'll have to be an opaque finish. Or perhaps a kind of reverse burst where it's dark in the middle and lighter on the outside. Or maybe I can make a custom pickguard that'll hide it. We shall see. I've also discovered and ordered some mini-humbucker rings where the screws go in the opposite corners, which will alow me to install the bridge pickup even with the wiring channel being where it is.

A while back I found this thing in a local second hand guitar shop. It started life as a 2005 Les Paul Double Cut Faded - essentially a Les Paul Special with a tuno-o-matic and stopbar rather than a wrapover bridge. A previous owner had repainted it white, replaced the P90s with EMGs, wired a master volume and a master tone control, leaving two knobs that did nothing, and chopped up the pickguard. I decided to have a go at restoring it. I started by stripping off the finish. I tried to take off the white paint and leave the original cherry finish, but that didn't work, so I sanded it down to the wood. Then I forgot about it for a while. Recently I acquired a pair of mini-humbuckers and thought they'd suit this guitar - after all, mini-humbuckers fit in the same routs as P90s. Unfortunately, the previous owner chiselled the routs a bit wider to install full-size humbuckers, so the cavities are uneven, and the screw holes for the humbucker mounts are visible. Also, one the screws on the bridge pickup is above the channel for the pickup wires, so won't go in without cutting the channel wider and gluing in a bit of wood. So I've ordered some mini-humbucker rings that I hope will allow me to fit them and hide the unevenness of the cavities. We'll see how they look when they arrive. Next question is how to finish it. I like transparent finishes that show off the wood, but there are visible screw holes, and some visibly filled screw holes. Anybody who's done this, if I fill the holes with mahogany sanding dust and glue, will they still be visible under a transparent finish? After that, the electronics. What value of pots are best for mini-humbuckers? I'm also considering a treble bleed, and wiring the tone pots as bass roll-off. I'll try and keep the forum posted. Any advice would be appreciated.

When I was in Mr Potter's P6 class (Northern Irish primary schools in my day went from P1 at 4-5 to P7 at 10-11. I was in P6 in 1978-79) I got it into my head that I wanted to learn the guitar. My dad bought me a small nylon-string guitar - I remember breaking a string by overtightening in the car on the way home from buying it - and enrolled me in classes in the evenings in the back room of a local music shop. We learned from The Complete Guitar Player, strumming along to songs by John Denver and Ralph McTell that I didn't know. I didn't stick at it. No idea what happened to the guitar. Fast forward ten years. I'm 17, during my misspent youth as an evangelical Christian. My school's Scripture Union runs what they call a "house party", where the eleven-year-olds are taken away to a house in the country under the supervision of the 17-year-olds and a couple of teachers, to do outdoor pursuits during the daytime and be terrified with the prospect of going to hell in the evening. There is, as is customary at such events, singing, accompanied by a couple of the 17-year-olds on the guitar. One of them shows me some chords and teaches me to play some of the songs. At some point after that, I get hold of a cheap acoustic and start accompanying the singing at church youth groups and Scripture Union meetings. The songs were terrible - I cringe at some of the stuff I played back then - but they were a very good way of learning the basics, so even though I've long since run off to join the cult of Dawkins, that period in my life did teach me some useful skills. My first electric guitar was a really cheap black plywood strat copy I bought off a kid at school. I dismantled it, repainted it, and never got round to putting it back together. Then, when I was at university, I bought myself the first guitar I can actually identify: a red Westone Thunder I T. Not actually this one, but it looked just like it. I also borrowed enough money to buy a Marshall JCM 800 amp - figuring a cheap guitar through a decent amp would be better than a decent guitar through a cheap amp, but it was too loud to play at home so I didn't get much practice. I made my first tentative attempt at forming a band, but I didn't really have the confidence or organisational skills to make it happen beyond a couple of rehearsals. Eventually sold the guitar, but still have the amp. The first acoustic I owned that I can identify was a Takamine G-series EG10, which I got in my mid 20s. It did me proud for a good 20 years until I upgraded to a Taylor a few years ago, and I still have it. I've just dug it out, cleaned it up and restrung it. It may be covered in dings and scratches, but it plays pretty good. I think I'll look for someone to pass it on to.