Whilst I love my PRS SE Standard 24 I have never really used the trem. Maybe it’s a lack of practice but I never found the results pleasing when more than a light touch is applied. If I want a light touch then just moving the neck has been plenty. The tremelo is also a floating design, which means it is a balancing act of string tension and spring tension, if you change either the setup goes to pot. This means no 1/2 step down or drop D with out it affecting the setup.

One fix is a fixed bridge guitar, I don’t have one. The other is to block the tremelo, which literally is a block of wood that stops the bridge closing. You then use extra spring tension to hold it in. Simple and very reversible.

All of this should be the same for any SE or CE tremelo model as they all use the same import bridge, possibly an S2 but I am not 100% on that one. It will also be the same for any floating trem but the details of dimensions etc will differ.

I’ve got a saved search setup on eBay where I keep an eye on cheap guitar pedals in case anything interesting comes up cheap. A couple of weeks ago an Ibanez Soundtank DL5 Digital delay came up for under £15 delivered, “untested”. This translated to works fine but the foot switch is broken so it’s stuck on.

The soundtank range was a budget range by Ibanez in the 90’s with a distinctive black plastic case. One promblem with them over time is the foot switches tend to die on them.

After some research I found replacements on SmallBear in the US. Given the current climate (2020 for future readers) I wanted to avoid ordering internationally and used the part number (ALPS SPPB512300) and found them on RS Components and I could collect 5 from a local branch.

In theory anyway, these actually came direct from Japan 🇯🇵 so were not ready next working day when I arrived. Kindly the store offered to send them on on arrival and save me having to go back. This was done free of charge and was most appreciated.

The ALPS switches are tiny and so it’s not overly surprising that they fail. RS describes them as a Detector Switch, so more in line with a micro switch than the 3PDT footswitch used by boutique builders.

I don’t normally post about my troops but this weekend was MCM Comic Con Birmingham. During our first patrol we were out near the entrance by the escalators from the trains. An MCM employee asked me to pose for a short video, and after a quick practice he took the shot and moved on.

When the end of day video was posted I figured I’d missed the cut.

However today they posted the end of con video and about halfway on is a very familiar trooper.

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That’s a wrap on MCM Comic Con 2019! ✨ #mcmcomiccon

A post shared by MCM Comic Con (@mcmcomiccon) on Nov 17, 2019 at 9:37am PST

One of the tools commonly used for wood working is the handplane. These come in a variety of sizes from only a few inches long to 60cm monsters weighing several kilos. Their purpose is to level and straighten wood and prepare it for jointing. It’s generally thought that some of the best are actually old vintage models made by Stanley or Bailey. These are readily available used and usually have plenty of life left in them. Once you clean them up that is.

This was my Dads plane. It’s a Stanley number 4, which is a middle size and a very handy one to have. It also had seen better days. The rear handle (called the tote) was broken, the metal work was all very rusted and the finish on the handles was flaking badly. It was time to restore it for use in some projects I have in mind for the future.

A few months ago I was fortunate enough to win a Boss Katana 50 amplifier. One of the features of the amplifer is channel presets which can be switched via a footswitch. The default option for this is a 2 button item, one switching channels the other swapping banks. This means sometimes to change to a given channel you will need to push 2 buttons to swap both bank and channel.

For the 100W versions a 4 button footswitch is available allowing direct access to 4 channels on each bank, this is my DIY attempt to build my own 4 button switcher for the Katana 50.

My idea was to use an Arduino to read the inputs of 4 momentary switches, and then use this to set the appropriate connections for the channel switching and also an LED to show which channel is selected.

An initial design was prototyped on a breadboard. I didn’t have enough switches at this point so wires were simply shorted together to act as switches. This needed some tweaking but after a while I had a working design. The Arduino firmware was also written at this point.

Once I had a working design I used a free application called KiCad to first create a schematic, and then a PCB design. This took a few attempts but the docs where pretty good and after following a few tutorials I was able to pick up enough to bumble my way through. I really enjoyed this stage and I hope to be able to use these skills again and build upon them in the future.

I’ve used Schaller strap locks on a number of guitars and basses now. With the S-lock updates almost all my past issues were fixed, but one still remains: a 10mm thread doesn’t really fit in a 6-7mm strap hole. A bit of a shove gets it to fit, then cranking down on the nut works but the strap always ended up warped with the slot splayed open.

Rather than just put up with this I decided to do something about it and ordered a 10mm leather punch.

The idea was to enlarge the strap hole so the lock fits neatly removing the need to force the leather. This should make it look nicer and also stop the small splits you normally get.

On Friday we went to London Film and Comic Con to meet a few actors and add to our collection signatures.

Number one on my list was Lucius Malfoy aka Jason Issacs. After a bit, okay lot, of queuing we got to have a nice little chat with Jason who signed a Lucius Mask for me and also told me a brief story about the mask.

I’ve spent a lot of time on these masks: but there was no mask on set. For the 11 seconds the mask was on screen it was all CG! Jason was directed to just wave the mask away and “there will be a mask there or something” “they’ll make it work”. Which to be fair, they did and it was good enough to capture my imagination.

There are some beautiful hand made pewter Deatheater masks in the studio tour, which is what this one is trying to replicate. All I can assume is they were made and just not used on set, maybe used to help with the CG.

I’ve been meaning to write a post on how I made these masks. It’s rather involved so I keep putting it off, but I will do it soon.

The other week we went down to visit my Dad for lunch as we often do. After lunch, we decided to pop over to Andertons Music Co for a look for something for Middlest™ to earn as a reward over the next few weeks/months.

She’s been showing interest in guitar so we picked out a few Squiers and Epiphones for her to look at. She liked a pink Squier 3/4 Strat but ultimately picked a turquoise Epiphone Les Paul SL.

I was about to put the guitar back on the rack and give her the whole speil about she could have one once she’d earned it when “I can play a D chord”….

Sure enough she did, which was rather surprising as I didn’t teach her and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Turned out she’s been using her sisters guitar and watching JustinGuitar.

I submit the following as evidence of the D chord.

The guitar came home with us that day. The story doesn’t end there though.

Recently whilst tidying up I found a 2 things I though I’d either lost when moving or binned by accident. My 2 Danelectro pedals I bought when I was still at school (and played a Squier P-Bass¹). I had a T-Bone distortion and a Surf & Turf compressor.

Sadly I had left a battery, a danelectro 9v, in the T-Bone. There was no signs of any leaking so I was happy all was well and plugged in.

One of the worst things about playing guitar is changing the strings. Specifically spending what feels like a million years winding the strings off of and on to the post. Even with a winder it’s still a chore meaning I don’t change them as often as I should.

The solution: Locking tuners.

These allow you to feed the string through, a mechanism locks the string in place ¹ and then you just tune to pitch in less than a single turn of the post.

After a lot of careful checking I chose a set of Gotoh SG381 Chrome Magnum Lock tuners from WD Music. These looks near identical to the factory tuner with the same shape and size key, and they should fit the factory holes for the original tuners. Chrome was chosen to match the factory fitted items. Whilst the PRS Specs say nickel hardware it was clearly chrome but with nickel screws, you can see the screws are more yellow when you look closely. Though check your own guitar first, don’t just take my word for it.