I learned to play the mandolin on that one, but I never got very far.
At one point the cheap plastic nut broke and my mum said we’d just keep the mandolin as a decoration, but I didn’t want to accept that. I remembered that there is a guy running a repair shop for violins in our city, and I just asked him if he could repair it. He had never made a nut for a mandolin but was down for the challenge. He did a good job with that ebony nut.
And this is the Epiphone mandolin that we bought when we really got into Bluegrass music. Since we bought it we rarely play the other one, it is so much better. Also less awkward to hold because it has a flat back.
In my quest to understand PRS’ weird pickup behavor, today I visited a friend from University who, it just so happens, recently built a contraption to measure guitar pickup transfer functions (essentially a nail mounted to a loudspeaker driver to be able to excite the pickups at varying frequencies).
We did a complete measurement of single coil and humbucking circuits including DC resistance, complex impedance and transfer functions and compared the values to my other guitars (a self built quasi-PRS with conventional splitting humbuckers and a Gibson LP Classic i modded with Seymour Duncan Alnico II Pros).
Looking at the resistance and impedance values of the PRS, there’s nothing special going on with the single coil resistance being about half of the humbucker resistance. So my theory with the single coil being wound hotter went out the window. So far so good. When we measured the transfer functions, something odd stood out though. The PRS pickups in humbucking mode had a bit lower output at low frequencies than all the other pickups, but transitioned to higher output at high frequencies than all other humbuckers.
Our current theory how this all works together is that for the PRS pickups, when the second coil is engaged to form the humbucker, there’s probably a capacity in parallel to the second coil to form a high pass. This would eat up some of the output of the low frequency output of the humbucker and balance it with the output in single coil mode. I don’t have the heart to tear into the PRS pickups to see if there’s a capacitor somewhere in the pickup assembly, but I’ll visit my friend again some time and we’ll try to proove our theory by modifying a pickup he has lying around at his place and see if we can’t duplicate the behavior of the PRS pickups.
I know this is a geetah thread, but I thought I might pop in and say that I just bought a keyboard. Arrived yesterday - a Rockjam RJ461. I decided it was about time I learned to play.
I have a DVD course from a publisher I trust for this kind of thing, and also bought a Piano course about 15 years ago, on CDs, when I got myself a midi keyboard for PC. I could never get it to work reliably, so I gave up. This time I don’t need the PC.
Good: I have one more guitar that I can show y’all!
This is a ~40 years old little guitar made for kids or to take on hikes, made by Brüko (a company known for its Ukuleles) in Germany. (It says W-Germany actually. )
Its scale (string length nut to saddle) is only 53cm.
Most small guitars have nylon strings, this was made for and sold with steel strings.
Anyway. The bad thing is that it sounds bad. Like: something is wrong with it. The low E string sounds OK in the first few frets, but in the 12th fret it is almost a quarter note too high.
The other strings are also off by a bit, but not that much. Playable at least.
Does anybody know what to do with that? I am fairly sure that the strings are OK. I replaced them a while ago because I thought they were at fault, but the guitar sounded equally bad with new strings so I put it away.
…however now I think: maybe this can be salvaged in a way. And I went and searched for guitars like this and I found out that usually those were made as three quarter guitars.
So… might those just be the wrong strings and/or the wrong tuning, and it would magically work if tuned G c f b d’ g’ ?
I really like Telecasters. Strats are my favourites, but after I bought a Tele copy many years ago I quickly learned to really like its sound. I was hoping to buy a genuine one about 15 years ago but my circumstances changed with a move and I had to cancel.
I can barely play these days - seems fate is determined to take away all the things I use to help me relax, one by one. I try to play as i always did, but my fingers don’t listen to the commands very well!
edit: I’ll upload a video I made about 10 years ago. I played a lot of EA 7 Days To Die at the time, and when they updated from alpha 9 to alpha 10 I made a “Goodbyee” video to A9 and played an appropriate song in the video. Makes me laugh whenever I watch it now - I’ll dig it out and you can all have a laugh at my awful performance
I audibly said “f@$k it” and just tuned it to
G c f Bb d’ g’
as 3/4 guitars are often tuned.
…and it worked! The guitar is perfectly playable now. For ~25 years we thought that thing is just crappy, and now it turns out that we were the problem. The Internet sometimes just rules, the solution was a few clicks away.
The secret to scales seems to be that they are not linear.
You know how the lengths of the frets are changing over the length of the fretboard to match the tones?
That’s not as regular as one would assume. Half the length doesn’t quite double the frequency, and the string’s length and tension and the produced frequency aren’t quite linear either.
Especially not between different kinds of strings, which explains why the high e was OK but the low one was way off.
But to be honest I don’t really understand anything of that. It is all magic to me.
BTW @sobek IIRC that’s also the reason why the bridge on many guitars is not straight but angled, or like on electric guitars there are some mechanical thingies that have different lengths for all the strings.
Anyway, I’ve been reevaluating the guitar, and it seems to keep the tuning and everything. It has a bit of a weird sound (somewhere between a guitar and an ukulele) but that’s because of the size. I am really happy about it.
I’m actually quite familiar with the effects of the nonlinear behavior of strings (I also maintain the intonation on all my electric guitars myself), but never having fiddled with baritones etc. I greatly misjudged the magnitude with regard to string tension. Interesting, though.
There’s a few ways to do it, but what works for me:
Disclaimer: Neck relief and string height should be set up first. Changing the curvature of the neck necessitates reintonation. If you only ever adjust the relief to humidity changes, you should not have to ever touch intonation after properly setting it up for a certain neck curvature. Changing string height and neck curvature are more of a personal taste thing and a tiny bit more involved so I won’t go into the process here. If you have a floating trem, that adds another degree of complexity, floating trems also need to be set up first.
Compare the pitch of the 12th fret flageolet to the pitch when fretted at the 12th fret. Those should be equal. If the fretted tone is higher, you need to adjust the saddle outward (away from the nut). If the fretted tone is lower, you need to move the saddle towards the nut.
Easy peasy. Usually only takes an allen key, a screwdriver (depending on your bridge type) and 15-30mins of your time.
)
