Matt P

on the north side of the Tyne i've used Stoneham Amps for a few repairs, both valve and solid state, excellent work every time. he's somewhere Wallsend-ish https://www.stonehamamps.co.uk/ Matt

for smaller guitars the Yamaha APX range are pretty good, I've been impressed by some of the smaller Takemine's as well, there are also some great options from Freshman, the few i've played have felt and sounded like much more expensive instruments. one of the best i've played in that price bracket though was an Aria Sandpiper, not sure if they're still available but you might find a used one. my friend has one and it's always a pleasure when i get to play it. Matt

we've done a tip bucket once, for our first gig we booked an upstairs room at a pub and to get some help filling the room we asked a water charity to join in, they did some promotion ffor us and then ran the door and took the money, the room was free (as long as the bar took enough) the only expense we had was to hire in some speakers for the evening as we didn't own any at that point, so we had a small bucket on stage with a label "tips to cover the PA Hire" we got enough to be able to put the extra back to the charity and all was good. The gig was to get us some experience as we hadn't played together live (although we had all gigged in other bands, most of our friends turned up and it was a good night all round. Matt

We're a 3 piece, and started as good friends before we were a band, I'm in charge of the technical side (PA, recording kit and helping to source instruments, strings etc) and the Guitarist/singer is in charge of the gig bookings. Our drummer has some health issues so he's just in charge of looking after himself (he was my best man and he's been one of my best friends for over 20 years so i'm well aware of his needs and allowances are made for him) Matt

Bought a set of strings from Steve, arrived very quickly and well packaged. Thanks Matt

bought a neck from John, excellent communication, posted when promised and arrived safe and sound. thank you Matt

some sockets have quite a deep taper/radius at the open end to aid getting the socket cleanly onto a nut from odd angles, if the nut is very thin (as it often is for a machinehead) you are likely still in that tapered/radiused section so won't get any grip. the choice is either to use an open ended spanner or to grind the last few mm off the end of a deep socket to get to the parallel section. I usually go for the open ended spanner approach. Matt

Timber isn't too bad for weight but I was always building to fit the carrying case which was heavy, this was the main reason to go back to a commercial board. Having something to carry the board in was always the challenge for me as I like stuff to be properly protected. Matt

these cables are very useful providing you are within the power limits, I'm using a 4 into 1 cable to connect up my recording setup, only a single socket for the whole rack case, i went through each rack unit and checked that they had proper internal fuses and that the whole lot was well under the rating of the cable. my setup goes to an IEC socket as well which limits it to 10A but i'm well under that. Matt

I've looked at it a couple of times (I'm an R+D engineer so it's used a lot in our test environment) I couldn't find profiles that suited what i was trying to do, most of the easily available ones were too deep or just oddly proportioned. the profile isn't that cheap either so the build cost always snuck up past what was willing to spend. every time i ended up back with a commercially made pedalboard or making something from timber to suit a particular setup. Matt

that is an amazing build, I've never seen anyone hide the truss rod adjusters that way, so slick. It's giving me a real hankering for a short scale thunderbird now (maybe even a 5 string one) Matt