Cool. I never broke a string. I used a Dunlop nylon .60mm pick and I squeezed it into a bend to make it harder. I can pick hard and soft with it.
Though I’m hard on necks and wear the heck out of em.
I use a 1.0 Blue Tortex, and play like I am Malcolm Young, Stevie Ray, and Pete Townshend. The heavy gauge strings, when spanked hard, drive a great old tube amp is delightful ways 
which I proved yesterday over and over again.
Do you use vintage tubes in your amps?
Nah. One of my Tweed’s preamp tubes was a new/old stock Telefunken, but for the most part I just use Groove Tubes or whomever shows they are matching the biases and checking the specs on the tubes.
WordMan, you have the right idea. While NOS tubes are nice, you are usually paying through the nose for them. Having the tubes biased correctly and , ideally, matched pairs is more important overall.
I started playing with V-Picks some time ago on my acoustics and Tele, and while it took me a bit to get used to the thickness I’m never going back.
I don’t know electronics, but I know what I need to know 
As a rule, the heavier the pick the better. Sorry, thin pick lovers - the are great for beginning strumminess - but it’s true. A heavier pick gives better tone. Also, as you get better, you can hold the pick a bit more loosely in your fingers, so a thick pick behaves more like a thin one.
Heh, I have picked up a habit of breaking bass strings at shows. It happens on this beautiful '86 MIJ precision. It’s not mine, yet. I’ve got to work out some sort of deal with my guitarist, because he won’t straight sell it to me.
As for pics of guitars that are actually mine, here’s what’s not in a case at the moment, or doesn’t have a case. My pedal steel, which is still frustrating my attempts to master it, is on the other side of the same room. And I’ve posted this pic before, but I love these two guitars. My wife’s '67 SG Jr., and my '14 SGJ.
I’ve got about a dozen more in cases, but I’m too lazy to drag them all out and put them away at the moment.
I use a thumb pick, which are about as thick as picks come, btw. That’s possibly why I’m breaking strings on the Precision above, but oh well.
The Decca combo you can barely see in the upper right of my pedal steel pic above and my Silvertone 1484 have the original '62 and '65 tubes in their pre and power sections.
All of my more modern amps are harder on power tubes than those are, especially the Traynor in the SG pic, so most have had the power section replaced at least once. The exception is the Super Bassman in the Precision pic, because it’s just a few months old. The more modern amps also generate more gain, so it’s easier to have more problems when a preamp tube goes microphonic. So I’ve replaced a lot of those, too.
I personally don’t think that modern tubes sound that bad in comparison to vintage ones. If I have a complaint about modern tubes, it’s that the ones that come stock in new amps seem to have a high failure rate. I’ve purchased replacements from thetubestore.com and had good results with the recent issues they stock from JJ/Sovtek/EHX/Tung-Sol. If you want NOS tubes, or high end European ones, they stock those too.
Speaking of tubes and speaking as a new-ish tube amp owner, I bought my Blackstar HT-20 amp used. What are the telltale signs of tubes needing replaced? I don’t slog my amp for hours on end, but I do play loudly for about 30 minutes a day-ish. I am sure that looking at the tubes themselves can indicate replacement with something like discoloration or some such, but are there audible cues as to when they are failing? Obviously I don’t want to take the back off the rig every so often to look at them, I’d rather find out if there’s something to listen for. Lack of saturation? Clipping?
Use the rubber end of a pencil and tap on the tubes while they are on and volume on. It’ll tell you what’s up.
True that some new production tubes can sound decent but they don’t have a life. Vintage tubes on the other hand can last for years and they sound mellow, creamy, brown, etc.
My Vox VT40+ had a Sovtek tube in it and I played with it for a while. I found the bass harsh so I put an RCA 12ax7 in it which is really a British Mullard but the core suggests an RFT tube.
It made a world of difference as the amp is more mellow in tone.
The vintage tubes are getting scarce so the prices go up. A shame.
As SigMan says, tapping will help you find out which tubes are microphonic. If you can hear it, it’s not a dull thud, and you’re having a problem with feedback, that’s probably the tube to replace (or move) first.
Other than that, it kind of depends on the amp. Like I said, that Silvertone 1484 still has the original '65 power tubes in it despite practicing and gigging with it, and power tubes are more likely to wear out than preamp tubes. That Traynor has gone through a couple of sets of power tubes, and I haven’t owned it a fifth as long as I’ve owned the Silvertone. It runs its power tubes hard, the cases glow on its power tubes all the time.
I’ve never needed to replace a preamp tube that hasn’t gone microphonic. I’ve still swapped them out to see if any are tastier than the others, but those weren’t bad. If a tube is bad, you’ll usually hear it crackle weirdly or cut volume. If it starts doing that, I’d usually advise taking it to an amp tech than start swapping tubes blindly. I advise this because even my amps that still have the original tubes have had plenty of caps and resistors replaced. Having those replaced with good components has made more difference in my amps than any tube swap ever has.
This is link to a very very old server that I have no longer any access to, but still exists. (???) So spelling mistakes and all.
But this is a guitar I had made quite a while ago now. It is very nice.
Great looking guitar, Francis - so the nut is a bit wider vs Fender, but not a “wide flat” like a Super Strat/ shredder? What type of stuff do you play on it?
No, the neck is sort of a half-way Gibson/Fender hybrid, a bit shallower, and wider, but not all the way. The guitar was designed to play blues. Which is pretty much all I do with it. So I find the setup comfortable for all the usual blues licks. Sadly it hasn’t been played much in quite a while. Too much going on in life. Whether I would go for the same neck profile design or not again is hard to say. There are subtle elements, and there is an element of hill-climbing in finding a great feel. Sometimes you need to try something wildly different. But the fingerboard setup worked out really well for me. That I would keep.
The pickups are amazing, the rear pickup in split mode sounds exactly like a tele. Of course given the heritage of the pickups this should not be a surprise.
If I do build another guitar it will be a very simple tele.
Simple?! Simple?! Pistols at dawn, sir!
The Plank. With a mic jammed into it.*
I read that the pickup is a Barden, and he is known for his Tele Bridge pickup, but other than a 25 1/2" Fender scaled bolt on neck, it looks like it would get a floating-trem Strattier sound. You like the Tele it can deliver? Cool.
*FV, there was a thread a guitar board I can’t seem to find. One guy made the “a Tele is a plank with a mic jammed into it” statement and the other guy was tech-geeking about how a microphone transduce a fuller spectrum of sonic information. A pickup coil only picks up field fluctuations or something. ?? What do you think? Is the plank saying based on a reasonable analogy, or is it more of a metaphor? Can a guitar pickup be loosely described as a mic?
Finally got my bass back from the modder! I’ve played it live four times, but I still don’t really grok how it works yet. It seems to work really well the first five minutes, then it drowns in all the noise, but it might just be because of my setup.
http://instantinopel.org/senderom/IMG_0129.JPG
http://instantinopel.org/senderom/IMG_0132.JPG
Sorry for the bad pics.
In my opinion its a metaphor though its easy to say that the mic and pickup are most definitely “cousins”.
The pickup and most microphones work under the same principle. A disturbed magnetic field causes a variation in the current flow of a coiled wire.
For a pickup the moving wire of your guitar string disturbs the field of a magnet (the pickups poles) and then a coil of wire around the magnet has a fluctuating electric charge from that disturbance. That wire goes to your amp which is cranked up to 11.
I microphone is a reverse speaker. Sound waves hit a diaphragm. The sound waves cause the diaphragm to move a coil up and down in a magnetic field and that causes a a fluctuating electric charge in the coil. The coil wire goes to your amp which is turned to 3.5 to avoid feedback.
I get all that! Thanks.
Plumpudding - ??!?! What the heck is that? It’s a joke photoshop?
I would swear that is a door speaker from a BMW 740!
Not for nothing, but what’s the pick-up on the upper horn for?