Any 80's guitar players out there?

cortico

Not an 80's player, but this is a good reason to showoff my early 2000 American series telecaster, alder body and maple neck, love this particular guitar has a great natural resonance and sounds a bit warmer that a traditional Tele. It has Lollar 52 pickups installed, which are a great match with the tweed deluxe amp I built 10 years ago... It's has been my mini rig ever since...

Mikey081057

SHA weeeet. telies don't get enough love ...

cortico

Tele is such a great guitar!

Polkie2009

Have a friend who has a blonde 61 tele. he loves it.

mantis

I think Tele's are cool but not for me. As a metal player they make no sense.
Even factory Strats make no sense.

Polkaguy58

Gee, I didn't even know there was any other area's on the site, never mind one where we could yak about guitars !
I've been a repaiman for 30 years now and a rabid buyer/seller.
Over the years I'd bet there's been a few hundred guitars through my hands.
Currently, I'm playing a 1963 Fender King acoustic, with the bolt on strat neck. (clay dots and everything)
I also have a Musicman Silhouette and a Steinberger clone that I modded to take regular strings, by pulling the zero fret and cutting a shelf to mount a floyd locking nut.
(no more double ball strings)
Here's an old Hagstrom I just sold.

Polkaguy58

One of the stranger guitars that I've worked on.
This was hand carved from a hunk of walnut by one of my custumers.

Mikey081057

BlueMDPicker

Polkaguy58 wrote: »

One of the stranger guitars that I've worked on.
This was hand carved from a hunk of walnut by one of my custumers.

Cool! How did it play/sound? Was the neck set or standard Tele bolt-on? Interesting PUP types/placement.

Polkaguy58

The rabbit was carved years ago and taken to another repairman before me for assembly.
Unfortunately, he installed one of the crappiest whammy bars on it, which was made of cheap pot metal and that broke.
The owner then carved another piece of walnut and filled the rout (very well I might ad) and we made it into a hardtail after this picture was taken.
It had a Warmoth neck I believe and played quite well, although it was a heavy and unwieldly beast !
Those Classic Vibe guitars by the way are awesome !
Here's one of mine, well it was anyway.

BlueMDPicker

mantis wrote: »

I think Tele's are cool but not for me. As a metal player they make no sense.
Even factory Strats make no sense.

Maybe you need to drink more happy juice like Eddie to get your Tele metal on?
(Yeah, I know, it's a Ripley with a bazillion mods)

BlueMDPicker

Uh-oh!

Polkie2009

Didn't Jimmy play a tele on Stairway To Heaven?

Polkie2009

Polkaguy58 wrote: »

Gee, I didn't even know there was any other area's on the site, never mind one where we could yak about guitars !
I've been a repaiman for 30 years now and a rabid buyer/seller.
Over the years I'd bet there's been a few hundred guitars through my hands.
Currently, I'm playing a 1963 Fender King acoustic, with the bolt on strat neck. (clay dots and everything)
I also have a Musicman Silhouette and a Steinberger clone that I modded to take regular strings, by pulling the zero fret and cutting a shelf to mount a floyd locking nut.
(no more double ball strings)
Here's an old Hagstrom I just sold.

Thanks for sharing with us, your passion for guitars, there's a few of us on the site. Loving the pics too. Haven't seen a Hagstrom in years.

Mikey081057

The solo on Stairway was the 1959 Tele...

Mikey081057

anybody got one of these?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5pXSEzUry0

BlueMDPicker

Wow! What wonderful artistry. Never heard Andy play before. That's going to change.

Mikey081057

He is amazing....

Polkaguy58

I've owned about 10 Hags over the years, some that I brought back from the dead and others that were mint.
One of my favorites was a Swede that I added Gretsch Filtertrons and rings to, then a Bigsby.
Somewhere I have a disc with about 250 pictures of some of my wilder pieces, like a clear Strat and 69 Ampeg Lucite guitar.
I cry when I think how much those thing go for these days.....(heh heh)

Polkie2009

I remember those clear Ampeg Lucite guitars, saw a used one backin '75 that was sweet. Those Hags were nice, didn't Ulvaeus play a Swede some?

Polkaguy58

A lot of famous folk played Hagstrom.
I recently found an ad with Frank Zappa plugging them and of course Jimmy Hendrix used the 8 string bass on his studio recordings.
I'm not a fan of the re-issues though.
I have the Hagstrom ll bass and there's no neck like it for ease of playing.

mantis

Grabbed a brand new right out of the box 2016 Charvel San Dimas HH HT in Snow White with White Pickups. They made some nice improvements over my 2013 San Dimas HS HT.
First off the HH design is totally killer. The neck Pickup is a 59 and it's warm fat and clear as hell. I love the way it sounds. In my 2013 , I installed a Lil59 in the Neck position and it's close to the sound of the full size Humbucker but doesn't have the same fullness and warmth.
The Bridge is totally better. It's a new design for a hard tail more like a Hip shot instead of a Fender like design. It's much better for Palm Muting and what nots.
I could care less about the Single coil push pull of the volume control but if you want some Strat tones, it's got it. It's just like a tipical American Strat tone. Not for me but it's there IF I ever wanted it.
The Tone knob is interesting as it feels like it magnetically locks itself into a no load position at 10. What it does is removes itself from the tone circuit and it sounds like you don't have a tone control. But if you want tone control again it's there.
The Wheel for the Truss rod is a huge improvement over taking your damn neck off to adjust. I know when I do a full setup, I'm gonna love this.
Overall I love this guitar.

Polkaguy58

Rick88 wrote: »

Here is my pride and joy. A limited edition American Standard Telecaster. What distinguishes itself from most other Teles are the Sonic Blue Color, channel bound neck (maple neck has a channel routed into it, and a rosewood fretboard is inserted in the channel), and a compound radius neck. It, like all American Standard Teles since I believe 2012 have the Custom Shop Pickups and "belly cut" (may have come sooner). What a beautiful, great playing and sounding instrument. Certainly a much greater guitar than my limited playing ability probably warrants. But when I saw it I knew I just had to have it. It will be my heirloom instrument, the one that I'll never part with...

I must say, I've been teching guitars for over 30 years now and never saw one of those bound necks before.............But I like it !

Polkaguy58

That's the really cool thing about modern CadCam technology, you can custom carve out just about any intricate shape.
I'm guessing that they eliminated the "Skunk Stripe" on the rear of the neck and just put the truss rod in the front way before inlaying the board.
Nice jumbo frets too.
I'm a big blues bender and love nice high frets.
One thing I do for my customers is a custom fret polish.
You can do this by taking a dremel tool and using one of those wide felt wheels that usually come with it.
Put on the wheel and with the motor on it's slowest setting, run the center of the felt wheel along a fine, narrow, round metal rat taile file.
This will make a groove in the wheel, that will run along your fret wires for polishing them.
The next thing you want, is a small tube of Simichrome (yellow & red tube) chrome polish.
Put a small dab of the polish paste on the end of a Q-Tip and wipe it
across each fret lengthwise ( a little goes a long way), then, with the Dremel still on it's lowest setting, run the grooved wheel along the frets lenghtwise, back and forth about three times.
Don't press too hard, or stay in one spot too long, or you'll heat up the fret.
I've been doing this for years and can do it without much mess, but you might want to tape up in between the frets and along the sides of your neck first time out.
This method makes your frets shine like a mirror and your strings glide across the frets for really smooth bends.

Polkaguy58

Mikey081057 wrote: »

Here's one...of the most impressively well built guitars I have ever held...UNK guitar handmade by Paul Unkert of Toms River NJ... Unk worked on my Les Paul custom and my 76 Strat back in the day... You know who he is but you might not know his name... He is a master luthier and was the man behind the EVH Frankensrtrat.... If you ever fin one of the made in NJ models... grab it there are only hundreds of them... he is the finest luthier I have ever seen...

Speaking of Frankenstrats, Here's one I built for a friend about 15 years ago. (he did the paint)
He brought me a poster of Eddie's original and I replicated every scratch and even rubbed dirt into them to simulate road wear.
It even has the 73 quarter for a Floyd rest.

Mikey081057

Awesome...

BlueMDPicker

FrankenTele I built for my daughter. Body is from a 50th anniversary Squire, neck is a Mighty Mite Vintage V, PUPs are Lindey Fralin Blues Specials. Bridge, control plate, pick guard and jack plate are OEM vintage Fender. Went with American Standard modern tuners. She loves it (and it sounds/plays great) so mission accomplished.

BlueMDPicker

Polkaguy58 wrote: »

The next thing you want, is a small tube of Simichrome (yellow & red tube) chrome polish.
Put a small dab of the polish paste on the end of a Q-Tip and wipe it
across each fret lengthwise ( a little goes a long way), then, with the Dremel still on it's lowest setting, run the grooved wheel along the frets lenghtwise, back and forth about three times.
Don't press too hard, or stay in one spot too long, or you'll heat up the fret.
I've been doing this for years and can do it without much mess, but you might want to tape up in between the frets and along the sides of your neck first time out.
This method makes your frets shine like a mirror and your strings glide across the frets for really smooth bends.

I'll give this a go. Thanks for the tip! Normally, I polish frets every time I change strings. I tape off with masking tape above and below a fret, then move the tape to the next (re-use). I started using 3M machine polish several decades ago. I think it's about 4000 grit. I use a dab on my index finger, which conforms to the fret profile nicely, and give each fret about 3 back/forth strokes, then wipe with a clean cotton cloth. You can't really rub too hard/too much or your finger would heat up.

Polkaguy58

Here's another cool blast from the past.
This is Jay Mascis's famous "Purple Jazzmaster" that he brought to me after a house fire had blackened it pretty good.
I had to take it apart completey and buff off all the soot, without wrecking the finish underneath.
It came out nice (but still smelled smokey).
Unfortunately, it got stolen on him shortly afterwards.
I did get a picture though.

Polkaguy58

Those Chinese CV's are very nice.
They really nailed the feel of an old Fender.
That CV Duo-Sonic with the Bigsby that I posted was a dream to play.
I'd totally planned to replace the pickups and electronics when I bought that for 250 dollars, but when I opened it up, there was grey fiberboard, alnico slug pickups in there !
I just put some better CTS pots in and buttoned it right back up.
Funny thing was, that some band had come into my place for quick setups on all of their instruments (the recording engineer insisted that they do it before laying down any further tracks) and the lead guitarist started fiddling with that CV duo while they waited.
He said, and I quote: "Dude, I can't leave here without this axe" !
I gave him a dollar figure that I figured he wouldn't accept, but he whipped out his wallet and bought the damn thing !