It’s easy to forget. You have to adjust the grip you use for a C (x32010) or Am (002210) using your fingertips to fret to a grip that allows you to use a finger pad for the barred strings. And the little finger tends to get in the way to mute the high E and the pad of the middle finger can mute the B string.
Ha! I’m cheating at something and getting away with it! I love it!
I got the Furrian in today. These days, $109 gets you a hell of a lot of guitar from china. Neck, finish, frets etc. are all blemish free. The wood is actually pretty, and the level of craftsmanship is pretty good, I can barely tell where two of the body pieces were joined on the back of the body, everywhere else it’s matched perfectly. The fretboard has some quilting to it! If the people who are complaining about the tuners are getting the same tuners I did, they are crazy. They’re fake Schallers, much better than the more-expensive Squiers I’ve played with over the years. The finish is thick, but it’s not like they painted it twice. This is about the same thickness of finish as the (also Chinese made) Epiphone EB-3 that I bought about a year ago. Not bad, but it is a heavy finish. I’ve certainly seen worse from the Japanese manufacturers in the 70’s. The neck isn’t any more grippy on my fingers than my other guitars are. The sunburst isn’t much of a sunburst, it’s more of a black-red fade (would a squirt of orange killed them? no, but it might cost $114 instead), but it does look better than it does on the website. It came strung with D’Addarios! My brand! Too bad they’re an almost invisible gauge. Half the time I unintentionally bend them when I’m playing a regular chord.
I’ve been home for the last few days with the flu, or I would have gotten out to GC and picked up some heavier strings and posted how it sounds. As it is, I don’t think I should expose the GC employees to my flu because I am bitchy about strings. I’ve got the wife bribed to go get me some in the morning, though. I will have to get some strap locks, too. It’s almost been dropped twice already. Every guitar needs strap locks. I’m hoping that heavier strings will fix the one actual complaint I have about this guitar, which is the pickups. They seem kind of high output and shrill when you are trying to stay clean. The bass side of the P-90 begins to break up easily on about 3 with my older tube amp. I haven’t plugged it into the one with a solid state preamp (with individual gain/volume controls) yet to see if it’s easier to manage. If you want some overdrive, it’s certainly ready to give it to you, and it sounds pretty thick. The Silvertone doesn’t have a master volume, so your only control of this is the volume knob. Anything above 3 is starting to break up on a full chord with this guitar. You usually have a little more headroom before that happens. The way it breaks up is also more treble-y than I am accustomed to, a little more than I’d expect even from a guitar favored by country players. To keep it pleasant sounding, I’ve got to have the treble on the amp at about 3-4, and the bass north of 5. I’m not sure if I like the roll off of the tone knob on the guitar, either. It rolls off the wrong frequency peak, maybe? However, with those tone settings, it howls nicely if you’re overdriving it. I’m hoping the thicker strings will take the edge off (and let me keep from bending chords out of tune). The nut could be filed out, too. It tends to grip the strings and makes it a little of a pain to tune. I’ve seen this on almost every new guitar I’ve had. Since it’s plastic, and I always put heavy strings on my guitars anyway, I think I’ll just let the strings file their own seats into it this time. If it breaks, then I’ll probably just get a graphite or bone replacement.
On an unrelated (maybe gross) question. Does anyone know what kind of bones they use for bone nuts? There’s a giant old cow femur in my mom’s backyard that the dogs have lost interest in, its been out there over a year. I have access to a band saw and sanders. It might be fun - or maybe even a bone slide! I wonder if i could fashion it into a tube? (Yes I know bone stinks when you cut it - oh, wait this is a stupid idea, in the extreme. I’m already sick. Why in the hell would I want to saw/sand a bacteria feast? I’ll leave my little diversion as a warning to others.)
tl;dr: Damn, it’s a good guitar at twice the price. Nice wood, worked well. Needs strings, maybe pickups/electronics work. We’ll find out for sure tomorrow.
ETA: Forgot to add, Rondo even sent a free gig bag with it that wasn’t in the listing. It’s not the greatest bag, but it protected it inside the box while shipping, and saves me $20 down the road. I like companies that send me free stuff 
I thought that was the reference. Never understood that debate: Ginger COULD NOT be worth the upkeep. Mary-Ann all the way. I always liked dark hair anyway.
Cool, now I can be happy for you as well! I was looking forward to hearing how you liked it.
I was under the weather myself, and did not practice. 
Probably will be tomorrow as well. Typical. It’s the kind of “under the weather” where you tend to drop or throw whatever’s in your hands and bolt to the bathroom, and I’m NOT playing that game with my brand-new Lucite beauty, with wires everywhere to trip over.
I appreciate the advice everyone offered. I’ve got a lot of things bookmarked and bits & pieces written down for reference.
FILB - congratulations and enjoy!
scabpicker - P-90’s are high-output beasts. Playing them with the guitar’s Volume on 10 should be the exception not the rule. Same with the Tone control - a great classic rock rhythm tone would be Bridge pickup, Volume around 7-8 and Tone probably closer to 5-6. When you want to play a lead, reach down and dial up the Volume to 10 and enjoy the boost.
As you indicate, you don’t like how the Tone control works when you roll it off - that is an indication that, like squeegee in the GOGT, you should consider replacing the potentiometers, capacitors and resistors in the control cavity. Those parts are the most likely to be absolute crap on a cheaper guitar. Typically they are rated at a certain level, e.g., a 500k may be as low as 250K or higher than 750k, and they are typically cheap components that don’t pass frequencies in a way that is musically pleasing. There are a number of kits you can consider from $30 to $75 or more. Totally worth getting some lower-priced-but-clearly-better-than-what-you-have and installing them.
My $.02
I don’t have time to find it right now, but WordMan wrote a post describing the different types of electric guitar. He said the Telecaster was Mary Ann, and the Stratocaster was Ginger. Now, I can kinda see where he’s going with that. But this was just when I was starting out (I consider myself to still be starting out), and I’d bought a strat. I was just a little more drawn to it. (Mark Knopfler on Sultans of Swing may have been an influence.) I could not completely agree with Word’s description. Hell, Buddy Holly played a strat and he’s a Mary Ann guy right down to his toes.
So my strat became Mary Ann. We’ve never been happier.
A Tele is typically considered the older, plainer sister to the flashier, curvier Strat. But yeah, many players have used Strats in a more “Mary Ann” sorta way - kinda like a Hitchcock blonde who keeps her glasses on 
Here is the “Guitar: the major Food Groups” thread:
A thread on twiddling the knobs on your guitar:
if the pattern from all those I know who play and by many who posted on your thread, once you become proficient you will upgrade. A brief lesson I learned recently.
The fella teaching my to shoot skeet had years of experience and trained many a shooter. At one point he grew frustrated with my inability to cleanly shoot station #2 high house. He took my 20 gauge that he never shot before, was not fitted to and had no problem exploding the clay from high house #2, oh yes forgot to mention, he was right handed and blind in his dominant right eye sooooooo.
Get the guitar that is fairly priced in your range, a package deal with an amp is better, learn to play it well and then like everyone else does…buy the one you really wanted but could not afford.
The other reason to dial back from 10 on a P90 guitar is that P90’s hum quite a lot at 10, but that’s okay: just set your amp a bit dirtier, roll the guitar volume down a couple of notches; the hum is gone and you have a great rock tone, as WordMan said. P90’s are pretty high output and you really don’t need to juice your amp as hard when you use them; just roll it back and enjoy.
Concur. I have a cheap (GuitarFetish, $135 on clearance) Les Paul Special with P90’s that I like a lot, but the controls became a lot more useful once I a) swapped out the pots and used a good quality capacitor, and b) changed the wiring from “modern” to “vintage” style (explanation and diagram here [PDF] ). Huge difference. Also add c) shielded the control cavity, that killed a lot of the hum right there.
And I was considering this possibility. In fact, I wrote up half of a really long post detailing a bunch of questions about 250K vs 500K pots and various caps, and was thinking about starting to ask about certain schematics. I was eventually probably going to get into questions about the materials they use to make caps. (This Seymour Duncan blog entry let me know it was more complex than most forum posts let on 
.
But before I got done, it was time to go to GC and get some strings. The didn’t have any roundwound .12-.52sets, so I got a set of .12-.52 "half round" wound strings.* Wow, I really hated those old strings. It sounds perfect with the tone knob on 10 now. I’ll record my lame version of Prodigal Son in a little bit and post it. If I get a chance, I’ll do the same with my wife’s SG so there’s a comparison with an actual P-90, albeit in the bridge position, in a mahogany guitar, with totally different electronics, and a different method of construction ;).
After re-stringing it, I do have my first complaint about the guitar’s build. The holes for the tuners are larger than the tuners need, so they are a bit loose. Loose enough that the extra tension from the strings caused the washer around the low E’s tuner to chip the finish. Not the biggest complaint, because real Schallers will have larger shafts, and that will save me taking the neck to a drill press. I break tuning gears pretty regularly, anyway.
*And I’m such a bitch about strings, I was upset they didn’t have the ones I wanted. I now wish I’d bought a box of these strings.
Ok, so you can compare the $109 guitar to one that would probably sell for a couple of grand if you could get me to part with it, here’s an mp3 of each. Everything is set the same for both of them, totally dry, no reverb, no post processing. Don’t mind my multiple mistakes, the rattle is the snare drum that I didn’t disengage the snare from, sorry.
The Furrian, it starts on the bridge pickup, then both, then just the P-90.
The SG Junior. Only one pickup, so only one sound.
The sound different, but personally I’m stuck as to which sounds “better”.
Yep, they both sound good. Sounds like you are on your way. Cool; enjoy!
Minor nit that should not matter to you right now: how they sound is of course a key comparison - if one guitar sounds obviously better, that’s a big deal. But sounding decent is only the start of a comparison. It doesn’t speak to how the guitar plays and, most importantly, how responsive it is.
Pro musicians often/usually do NOT use their favorite gear on stage because a decent modern Les Paul or Strat easily sounds good enough to carry a gig. But if they are on their own, they will use their favorite because of the feedback they get when they play it - not amp feedback; the direct responsiveness from their hands. Great guitars provide better, clear feedback to you as you play…
Minor observation that is no big deal in this case…
Minor nit that you had no way of knowing. I may be a hack with a day job, but I am a “pro” in that I’ve been a paid performing musician off and on for about 20 years, almost all of it guitar. To be quite honest, if I’m not good enough of a guitarist to really appreciate the nicer guitars by now, I’m probably never going to be one. I’m too much of caveman. However, being one has furthered my career. I’ve been told more than once: “If you’re willing to show up and beat on the guitar like that, you’re hired”.
Cool - what type of stuff? If you’d prefer not sharing, cool; or offline via PM.
Sounds like you get what I am talking about.. 
Hehee, I am flattered you asked. I actually started as a bass player, but most of the bands I had a chance to join needed a guitarist instead 
. The one that’s gone the farthest was a punk/psychedelic/art rock band I was in years ago named Duck Duck Annihilation (think somewhere between the early Flaming Lips and the Crucifucks). You probably never heard of us, but you might have heard of the singer’s later projects.
Since then, I’ve been the guitarist for a few surf or garage rock type bands of no note whatsoever. However, currently I’m playing bass for The Apehangars - the surf rock band that the website above (that’s hosting those mp3’s) is for. Even though a good bit of the set is covers, we do several originals, and everyone in the band is better than I am. So, it’s probably the most rewarding gig I’ve ever had. I’ve got some mp3s of our last show that I need to put up, and update that page with the info for the, umm, last show..:rolleyes:…I’m a terrible webmaster…ok, I’ll do it today…ok, fine, as soon as I hit submit.
Other than that, I’m trying to rook the relatives into backing me in some sort of country-rock band. That’s what I’m working up Prodigal Son for.
What have I learned in this time? If you think you’re no good, don’t worry. If people aren’t looking for the door when you pick up the instrument, you’re probably better than you think you are. As soon as you can muddle through 30 minutes of songs, get some sort of show, even if it’s an open mic night. It’s too much fun to play in front of a crowd to not do it, IMHO. Now, If you follow my advice and take this route, you will make mistakes. Unless your mistake is that you have accidentally cut off your own hands - DO NOT STOP! Almost no one will notice, and the end of the song only comes one way. Get back on beat or back in key, and keep playing.*
And I think I do know what you’re talking about, but only a little. I’ve never met a Peavey guitar or bass I liked, for example. On the other hand, I’d never leave my Goya at home because someone might snatch it at a gig, heck it was only worth $75 to the guy I bought it from. But, even though it’s electronics need some fixing right now, and I own 13 other guitars - it’s the one I go looking for when I’m home.
And WordMan - you seem to be too well versed to have never been paid for your night’s practice in front of a crowd - am I guessing right?
tl;dr: Mostly primitive rock, some instrumental. What do you do, WordMan?
*Absolutely true story: The second gig my first gigging band had (three days after the first gig, don’t even ask about the first one, it was surreal), we had been practicing together for a month or so. The set was all originals, collaboratively written. We hadn’t even agreed how long the songs would go on, much less had written endings for them. Sooooo, they just wound down when we were tired of it. This wasn’t jazz or really a jam band, so this shortcoming was really obvious. No one left the show, (10 people at the start of the set, 10 people at the end), and we got applause after every number. The touring band we were opening for volunteered: “Well, we’d really like to see what you guys are like in a year.”:D.
All cool - thanks for the stories. And yeah, been playing for 35 years, semi-pro in bands for most of it. Business guy with a mid-life crisis band - nothing active currently. But I am a huge guitar geek - if you search on threads I have started or contributed heavily to, you would see over-detailed commentaries on tube amps, Jeff Beck, building a Telecaster or two, etc…currently focused on acoustics; have a few nice old ones.
Update:
FLIB - over in the Great Ongoing Guitar Thread, E-Sabbath has posted a link to a GFS Blemish sale…
So, I bought a cheapo SX Telecaster clone to use as a mule for experimentation. First thing I wanted to try was putting a humbucker in the neck position, so I bought a Tonerider Alnico 4, which I understand is a decent pick-up for the money.
A new pickguard and some amateurish soldering later, I had a humbucker in the neck. The problem is, the humbucker sounds very muddy. It’s all bass, no treble. I have tried adjusting the height of it up and down, to no obvious effect. It seems to me that I may need to get into the mysterious world of guitar electronics, pots and Ohms and all that, which is all way over my head.
So my question is, is there something else I need to do to make a neck humbucker work in a Tele-clone?
Oops, that was supposed to go into the general guitar thread.
I’ve built two Teles, each with a different neck pickup, but don’t know how to diagnose problems. If I ran into problems I just retraced my steps. I went to Fender and to Seymour Duncan’s websites and downloaded schematics…