To justify any more of my GAS, I need to dump a few of my starter guitars. Planning on craigslisting them.
They need setups (truss, intonation, dirty pots, etc). Is it better to do that pre-sale, or just recommend it to the buyer and let them worry about it? They’re under-$200 guitars so I’d rather not spend the money on setup if it isn’t worth it.
An Alvarez acoustic and a Squire strat if any Puget Sound dopers are interested.
For $200? I can’t imagine anyone will expect pristine setup. OTOH, if they’re really way far out of whack to the point of being unusable, I can see nobody buying one either.
Dirty pots and switches should be easy to fix with some cleaner spray (don’t go too crazy with it).
Several companies (such as Fender and Gibson) provide good information - pick up height, distance from top of pick ups to strings, etc. Really it is less difficult than it seems. Just follow their recommended measurements.
|: wang chicka chicka ching 
where weach word gets 1 beat out of the 4 in a measure.
Play the G like this: 3x0003, using ring and pinky fingers, eaving the first and middle fingers to play the C/G (3x3013) on “ching”.
Don’t strum the whole chord each time. Hit the low strings on wang; middle and higher on chicka chicka ching. Wang is just a strum down, chick is down followed by up.
Regarding playing an F, usually don’t bother trying to play the whole chord. Depending on the role the guitar is playing in the song, you normally need only the bottom end or the top end (3 or 4 strings).
As someone mentioned above, keeping the groove is far more important than landing every finger perfectly. Play with confidence. Mean what you played even when you don’t play what you meant. (Hard lesson to learn.)
Good luck!
It’s a lot easier to sell a guitar in decent condition. If you have multiple guitars, you should be able to do a bit of adjustment yourself, so just do it yourself, the best you know how (and take this opportunity to learn & practice). Put on new strings. It’s surprising how much of a difference that can make in how good a guitar feels.
For the pots, spray some contact cleaner in them and work the knobs over and over and over (and over). Most times they’ll clean up reasonably well, even if they do need replacing. Then feel free to say that if you were to keep the guitar, you’d replace them, but they’re good enough for now.
There are a lot of really quite good cheap guitars new on the market right now, under $200. You’re competing with some good stuff (in electrics, anyway). Sure, the hardware is cheap, and the pickups leave a lot to be desired, but they’re decent playable instruments (especially strat and tele copies). Clean it off and dress it up to sell it.
This is definitely true when you have a bridge pup and neck pup connected out of phase. (I have a Les Paul copy I rewired to add the out-of-phase switch, back in high school. Whee, cool, almost never use it.)
But I don’t think it would be true for the two half-pups of a P-bass, because only one coil sees each string.
Still, I bet they’re reverse-wound, reverse-polarity (RWRP), as is usually done for the best signal and lowest hum. That’s how humbuckers are, and how SC pups are usually set up on say a telecaster, or the middle versus neck or bridge pup on a strat.
This means that with respect to the signal from the string, they would indeed be in phase as you say, because both the winding and the polarity are reversed. The string interacts with the magnet. The magnets being reversed, the resulting EMF is opposite, for two strings moving the same direction on the two different halves. But the coils themselve are out of phase (since one is reverse-wound), so any ambient EMF would mostly cancel out.
That’s in case anyone cares about the details. When I first read your post, I wondered how, if they’re “in phase”, they could reject hum. This page from Seymour Duncan answered my question.
Hmmm … according to some accounts, the P-bass sub-pups are not RWRP; only the magnet is reversed. If so, then they are indeed out of phase, but it doesn’t matter because only one coil sees any given string.
Yeah, this sounds about right I think, I’m comfortable cleaning up electronics, but anything else beyond lightly dusting them with an angora whisker is something I shouldn’t be trusted with.
Thanks for the feedback y’all 
Practice practice practice. You know, I have improved, but you couldn’t prove it by day to day changes.
And that’s the way it works with this art.
I was able to hear a recording my band did in (IIRC) April a couple of weeks ago while the keyboards were being overdubbed. One of the songs has a succession of very quick minor arpeggios that I’ve had a problem with flubbing the fifth on for probably a year. If we did the song at a sane speed, it’d be no problem, but these are modern times. Luckily, playing this fast, and in a band context, I doubt anyone but yours truly has noticed my mistakes unless they were staring at my face at the right instant. When we recorded this song, I was using an ESP, which didn’t have the scale of the Epiphone EB-3 I usually use with this band, but it is still a medium scale bass. Since I got the Danelectro Longhorn, the reach hasn’t been as much of a problem, and I’ve learned to nail it fairly consistently. I was sure I’d find a fifth I had boogered up on the recording. Surely the difference between now and a year ago was the bass, and not me!
Much to my surprise, I had nothing to re-do. The only punch-in that I needed to do, I did on a different song, way back in April. I probably have been about as consistent on that riff as I am today for at least six months, even with the 34" scale EB-3. My first impressions of that song being torture had covered up what I thought I played like 2 months ago, much less today.
On an unrelated note: After using the Danelectro for almost a month, I firmly believe the ultimate tone wood is either Masonite or air. The only reason I’d buy another bass at this point is for nostalgia. I’m now on the hunt for a bass head and cabinet with:
If I still had a pickup truck, I wouldn’t hesitate to forgo tubes and get an Acoustic 360/361 rig. It has power and tone for days, and the cab projects like no other. But, I don’t have a pickup, I have a hatchback. Without the refrigerator cabinet, the head (I think it’s really just a preamp) does not have the same magic. I know that the “secret” to volume is to get efficient speakers, but most cabinet manufacturers don’t list this. Anyone have a favorite tube (or a nice smooth FET) head for rock bass, and any rumors of cabinet manufacturers that use efficient speakers? A 4-8 ohm switchable 4X10 would be perfect. Price isn’t that much of an issue, but I don’t want to lug around Ampeg 8X10 cabs and 90lb heads, either.
How do you feel about acrylic?
Like a Dan Armstrong? They look great. I’ve never played one, so I can’t really say more than that.
I’m considering making another drop-in, populated pickguard for my American Strat. The stock Custom Shop Fat 50 pickups sound marvelous, simply lovely. But they are soo low output it robs some of the fun from the guitar.
Now, I like low output pickups, but I didn’t realize just how low output these Strat pickups were until I compared with my Tele, which has a Duncan Jerry Donahue bridge pickup and a GFS Fatbody neck pickup, both of which I’d consider pretty low output, absolutely not overwound. Duncan agrees with me about the Donahue, and markets it as a low output pickup. GFS doesn’t really say one way or the other, but trust me that Fatbody isn’t hot at all; it’s got spank for days, but not hot.
Anyway the CS Fat 50 Strat pickups are way way lower output than these, and I’d like to try some different pickups that are still vintage-level but punchier, and really just more fun. So my plan is to pull out the stock pickguard with the switches, pickups, everything, and put it away somewhere so I can go back to a stock setup by just dropping it back into the guitar in 10 minutes. Then I’ll just buy a prewired, but unpopulated pickguard from GFS ($20), and try various combinations of GFS strat pickups in it.
I’m considering among a set of '64 Stagger Grey Bottoms, or maybe 1963 Strat Vintage Wound Professionals, or perhaps Premium Alnico Staggers. These all seem to have a following online, and are vintage level. I might or might not get the “Texas” version of one of these, which means a hotter bridge pickup; I’m still thinking about that. I could certainly order a straight vintage set and get a hotter bridge pickup of the same or similar type later.
Anyway, that’s my current guitar tone obsession du jour.
Missed the edit.
Weirdly, Duncan lists the Donahue pickup as low-output on their tone chart (the ice cube icon), “moderate” here (again the with the ice cube) and “Medium output” on it’s product description page, but with the little “flame” icon that denotes high output. Hmph. I guess “moderate” is a fair description; it sure ain’t a hot-rails.
I love my Donahue - and yeah, just at the “hot end of low output” - warms up with overdrive perfectly - warmer than clean in a great way.
No clue how to translate that to Strats; the floating bridge never responds the same way as a Tele.
Yeah, that. Not hot, just hotter when compared to really not-hot pickups. That’s what I’m looking for.
Me neither.
So how come Strats have staggered (non-adjustable different height pole pieces) pickups and pretty much no other pickup style does? I haven’t seen a Tele pickup like that. Humbuckers have those little screws where you could fiddle with the height, but most folks don’t. Why are strat pickups different?
I think mostly because in 1954 Leo Fender thought it was a good idea. I guess the idea was it would equalize the volume across the different gauge strings. Nowadays, I think it has more to do with a vintage look than any actual advantage sound-wise.
A lot of geeks mess with the adjustable pole pieces on a 'bucker. I remember reading a multi-page thread on a Les Paul forum about how you are supposed to angle the slots in the pole-piece screws to orient a certain way. Sigh.
The short answer is that wound vs. plain strings have different volumes - the G, as always being the most conspicuous - it can be plain or wound, so respond differently. With bright, super-clean tones - which is what Strats were first designed to do - you’d notice differences in volume more. With even a bit of overdrive, that type of distinction becomes less obvious…
Why did Leo Fender introduce completely new pickups, new whammy bar designs, etc. when he introduced new models? Because he liked to tinker with new designs - and because new stuff attracts attention.
That was a problem I had with my Tele - the neck pickup had the chrome cover on it, but the middle pickup, some of the poles were too high to finger-pick well. The guitar tech warned me that ‘the following procedure may ruin the pick up’, but what he did was heated it to about 125 Fahrenheit, and then gently pushed the poles down. It worked. (And if it hadn’t, I would just have replaced it with another pickup that had the chrome cover.)