JellyWheat

Band on the Run/ Paul McCartney and Wings

I once owned a 1996 ES 335 TDC. It had no quality issues, per se, but it was sort of nondescript and soul-less... sorta like a Yamaha. The neck shape was plain vanilla, the joinery and detail work were excellent, the wood was pretty, but I never really "bonded" with that guitar, for whatever reason. I agree completely with the comments about guitars coming out of the Memphis shop. I love my ES 137 C probably better than any other Gibson I have owned or still own, but I have had another 4 or 5 that were nothing to write home about. Don't buy the specs is my advice. Let the guitar talk to your soul. If you hear music when it speaks, open your wallet! My $0.02/FWIW/YMMV J/W

I posted a thank you for the explanation, Al, but it disappears. Thanks again. J/W

Well, I actually knew that already, but I was wondering why the OP didn't just Google it like you did and answer his own question in jig time! There is a wealth of information available when you search "guitar string dampers". Regards, J/W B)

Looks like ol' Yo-Yo uses this kind, at any rate! http://www.dampits.com/ If it's good enough for Yo-Yo, it's good enough for me! J/W

Thanks, Nick... I tried to post a proper thank you earlier this morning but the forum software ate it, I think. I'm tied up right now getting the house ready for the New Year's Eve Jam! Sail on up, buddy! Thank you for the additional links... the ear question has always intrugued me. J/W

That's what I would like to know. I had an old ('62?) ES 330 with the pointier horns and pronounced surface contour of which you speak, but I had no idea this was a later attribute... My old guitar had a nice, wide neck, but it wasn't thick through like a 50s style. There were no dating tools when I owned it back in '67-'69, so it may have been more recent than a '62 vintage. Thanks for this info. J/W

Does anybody have an explanation for why the surface contours in the horns of current models are so different from the originals? I know it was old Kalamazoo tooling, but surely they could build a new lamination press mold that preserves this most graceful attribute of the old 330s and 335s? Just askin' J/W

I understand... I did the same circuit, pretty well and moved from power trios to a solo instrumental act. [You and I should get together and throw a couple of bolts and some spikes on the Bar-B, with a barbed wire salad on the side and some battery acid to wash it all down!] J/W [Oh, and BTW: here's a tip for you... On your first gig at an out-of-town biker bar, do NOT wear a black tee shirt with white lettering that says: "For a small town, this one sure has a lot of a$$holes." ... just a suggestion... ]

You got THAT, right, mister! J/W [HEY! Somebody has started a "Gibson Quirks Thread" for the benefit of new Gibson owners! ]

OOPS! Sorry... I didn't mean to put you into information overload! Look on the positive side: the more you know about these little "quirky" things about Gibson, the less gullible you will be to a less-than-scrupulous guitar tech who might take advantage of your inexperience to sell you something that won't cure your ills. You can put a little soft pencil lead dust in the nut grooves as a starter, to prevent string binding, and - at the bridge end - slide your strings (while they are tuned up to standard pitch) out of the saddle grooves a few times. Slide them alternately out of the grooves on either side, and let them "snap" back into place. If there are any little burrs in the grooves, this is often enough to make a noticeable difference. The worst negative side effect of the above is a dirty nut, which you can clean up with a rubber pencil eraser... J/W

This sounds like an issue of poorly-cut nut or saddle slots, which is a very common complaint of owners of new Gibsons. Good diagnosis is the key to a successful cure... If each string is not correctly "cupped" in a slot of the proper depth, width, and radius, it will pick up energy sympathetically and "whine" or "buzz" like a sitar. If your problem sounds like a sitar, then it's definitely due to the nut or saddles... [Don't feel bad... I've never had a new Stratocaster yet that didn't suffer from "Strat disease", and this can be much harder to fix than Gibson woes!] J/W

Thank you for a context within which to interpret your posts... FWIW, a lot of us have felt the same "angst" about first touching our instruments with anything other than a pick or polishing cloth! I hope some of the others will chime in to reassure you that if you are in the least prudent and reasonable, the odds of your doing irreparable damage to your Gibson are infinitesimal. Most damage is caused by inappropriate tools, poor work surfaces, dim light, or one too many Courvoisiers as pre-setup "bracers"! You are a smart man, so you'll soak the info up like a sponge. You are careful, so you're unlikely to damage anything by using brute force. You sound fairly conservative, to you're not apt to ruin a perfectly good Gibson by modding it irreversibly. Best of all, you are "one of us" now, and you have access to great information. Most of us are not "know it alls"... we have our areas of strength and of weakness, and we tend to defer to one another, especially when a Member's area of expertise is well known. As you have already found out, subjective areas tend to be subject to greater variances of opinion... Congratulations on your decision to "cross the line" and join the ranks of we players who prefer to entrust the adjustment of our "babies" to our own loving care, rather than to some shill behind the counter of a GC somewhere! Good luck! J/W

FWIW... I say YES to these three posts: ... and a respectful NO to this one: There are 2 reasons you should ask Santa for a copy of Dan Erliwine's excellent book on guitar setup and repair. Firstly, and the reason I say no to guitarest's suggestion, is that IMO, a large number of so called retail store techs don't know what they are doing, and don't always take good cosmetic care of your instrument while it's on their bench. Secondly, as guitarest said, it's not rocket science. I realize that it scares the bejeezus out of you right now, but that's because you are not yet familiar with the basic principles at play... This too shall pass! Once you know how to set up your guitar, it will become a source of pleasure and delight, rather than of expense and anxiety. If you are careful and reasonable in your actions, and if you have the right tools, a good written guide (NOT a video, necessarily, but something you can study on), a good working surface and good light, you are very unlikely to do any damage to your instrument. To the contrary - rather than causing damage, you can make the instrument "your own". Another opinionated view of mine: I don't believe in so called "hybrid sets". If you visit the D'Addario site and check out the tensions of individual strings, you will see that hybrid sets can put more tension on one side of the neck than the other. Since the neck has a truss rod running down the center, providing a rotational axis, conditions are created that can lead to the neck actually twisting or warping around this axis. Buzz is not caused by string gauge, but by lack of clearance. There are two types of clearance: the hollowness of the neck ("relief"), and the angle of the string as it goes from the saddle to the nut or to a fretted note (bridge height determines this 'angle of incidence' of the string's intersection with the fingerboard). After an hour with Dan's book you'll be an expert, and your blood pressure as you are working on your own guitar will begin to come down. The thing to remember is, you can't fix or adjust what you only understand in part... you need some (easily-acquired) knowledge. And there are lots of members accessible to you through this Forum that know WAY more than a lot of these self-professed "guitar techs" in most retail stores. My $0.02/FWIW J/W B)