Stub Mandrel

In that case it should be a choice between paid more now or paid less plus royalties?

Oops, mistyped... mine will be early 2022, it was showing as in stock within a week a few days ago. Now they say they have been told 29 December. GMT say "Estimated delivery: 26th - 30th May 2022",l that's six months... but they may have all their expected stock already sold.

A long, long time ago, I took about a dozen singing lessons that had a huge effect on my confidence and helped me improve my breathing and technique and discover that I have very good 'relative pitch' (but not perfect pitch!). Back then I did sing on a few home recordings and generally people think it's decent enough. <time passes> I'm way out of practice now. But both the bands I'm in are encouraging me to try some backing vocals, they say they are happy with the fact I can only sing and play very simple stuff at the same time. But my vocal performances in the past have been in the 'oohs and aaahs' category and the odd 'yeah' (although I once sang Motorhead's 1916 while playing Mandolin - thankfully, no record of this exists). I suppose what I need is not 'singing lessons' as such but help with: Confidence singing through a PA - when I hear my voice come back at me I go to pieces. Playing and singing at the same time. Pitch, as my playing has got better, I increasingly feel like my voice is out of control... I have wondered about doing some open mike stuff with a guitar or mandolin, as a confidence booster. 🙂 I'm worried that if I just turn up to a rehearsal with my mike and sing into it, I'll screw up and that will be the end of it. I suspect I need to do a solid few hours practice into a PA, but I doubt the bands have the patience to put up with this... Has anyone got any practical advice on how to address my worries, and if I decide on lessons, what to look for in a teacher?

Yep, I want Clown Vomit Wanderlust Green, no other colour will do. It's clearly superior, as evidenced by the complete lack of them! So annoying, I really want to use a twin humbucker bass, but my Hohner B2 doesn't fit the image...

Why can't I see the pretty pictures?

I see Axminster have some very nice bits of timber are surprisingly sensible prices, including Sycamore and Ash. Do you have an idea how well-seasoned their stock is?

My Epiphone Embassy won't be arriving until 2023 now 😭

Unicorn vomit?

Looks like the D-Buz is a supplementary ground wire (with a resistor in it, probably around 200K to 1M) as a supplementary ground to the player. https://d-buz.com/ I think you and I would probably agree that 'over shielded' instruments are unlikely to cause hum. There doesn't seem to be a patent. £55 seems a lot for something a competent electrician could knock up in a few minutes. This seems a bit of scare-mongering. Any properly wired supply would fail open circuit or trip if AC live is wired to ground. And for the lead to provide its putative protection, you would have to remove the 'death connection' bridge ground from all your instruments, conveniently ensuring that you need to use dBuz at all times to make your instrument playable...

I'm a believer in shielding, as I said I do it myself, there's a reel of conductive adhesive backed copper tape two metres away from me right now! My experience is that shielding helps with things like interference from 'noisy' bulbs. Buzz unless you touch the strings always seems to come down to grounding issues in my experience. I suspect that you are thorough in your work and make sure both grounding and shielding are done well, making it hard to prove which is solving the noise issue.

Mostly Fender and Stagg, which are good quality for the price with excellent jacks*. Best lead I have was a noiseless one bought new around 1980 for £££ and still going strong, I bought one for my brother too, and he still uses it for gigging! Wonderfully limp and soft after all the years, the strain relief tails have long gone, but as the cable is held in a long collet that is tightened by the two-part body this doesn't matter. The jacks have 'WK' on them, does anyone know what brand it might be?. *Except that loudspeaker cable.

Mains hum of the kind described is often an electromagnetic field (low frequency radio) effect. If the strings are unconnected to the guitar earth, they act as a very inefficient antenna and the current that flows in them transmits hum to the pickups. One solution is to put the guitar in a faraday cage - this works for the pickup connections when you shield the cavities of the instrument, but this is a small effect. This shielding also stops capacitative noise. The practical solution is to ground the strings, bridge etc. to the signal reference point i.e. the ground connection of the instrument. When the noise stops on touching the bass, this is because you're effectively helping ground the signal. Also, it frequently varies as you rotate the instrument - radio waves are directional. Another source of interference is magnetic fields. These are weaker but are picked up by large loops (e.g. ground loops when both PA and amp are grounded AND have their grounds connected via the signal lead. This can be cured with a ground lift switch on the SIGNAL line only). Small multiple loops (e.g. pickups) pickup this sort of interference as well, hence humbuckers.

Actually, I'd go further and say mineral oils are generally less biologically active than plant oils. Baby oil is typically 98% mineral oil and 2% perfume, a bit like fingerboard oil.

A proper Bass 🙂 But getting rid of the original stack knobs? Weird?!

As above, usually a poor connection for or missing ground wire to the back of the bridge. Pop the bridge off and see if it has pulled out.

One band I was in recorded a demo after I 'left'. They made sure to give me a writing credit for the song I helped pull together, which was fair.

My experience with instrument leads is that if they have a conductive plastic sheath inside the outer copper shielding they should be noise free. Capacitance issues causing loss of highs are more affected by cable length than anything else.

I bought a Stagg jack to Neutrik speaker lead and the jack is about 1/16" short, so it doesn't latch in place and can vibrate out.

I'm (not) surprised that no guitars were sprayed with British Leyland 'Limeflower'.

These days if the design is done well with parametric CAD you should only need to change one variable to the appropriate number of strings and that should propagate to the dimensions for body and neck and even create a purchase inventory for all the other parts and dimensions for the blanks etc. Possibly part of the reason why a Harley Benton Marquess-5 costs £2 less than a Marquess-4.

Too much analysis. It's simple enough where I'm sitting. The tone of the advert gives the impression that the person posting it may be difficult to work with. Simples.

On the one hand, you may believe the accessory manufacturers are paid to distribute guitar-killing products by the manufacturers in order to help promote future sales. On the other, that's something like white spirit to make the oil absorb quicker and dry faster. Unless you are concerned about releasing high levels of VOCs into the atmosphere, in which case you should go to the beach and pick up 127 micrograms of microplastics as penance each time you use it.

But not My Herpes. Best avoided for intimate use.