Recent content by Koop

Are you speaking from experience? I just put a set of these in my Strat yesterday and I find them to be very rich sounding and definitely an improvement over generic machine wound pickups.

Pins 4,5 & 9 are the filaments (heaters), so the nominal value should be 6.3V. And yes, when checking voltage at the plates and grids you want DC. Edit - I should add that 6.8 with no load - tube not installed - is okay.

I've used D'Addario for more than a decade, but I recently switched to Curt Mangan. Are they better? I dunno, I like them but I also met Curt Mangan and he gave me tour of their little shop in Cortez, Colorado. He's a great guy, into guitar, not a big corporate entity and I like the idea of...

I disagree. The amplitude of the signal input to the grid of the power tube determines how many electrons travel from the cathode to the anode (plate). It doesn't matter what's connected to the output - it amplifies the signal and sends it out to the OT and on to the load. It doesn't matter if...

So, I've been playing this guitar exclusively for about an hour and a half daily. I'm really diggin' it. I still need to get used to the scale length - especially the spacing of the first five frets or so. The tonal variety is mind blowing. I took a little presence off of the amp (my Trainwreck...

BYO was great - they even sent a photo to my phone of the limba neck next to a maple neck so I could make my choice. The two-piece swamp ash body is book matched so perfectly that I thought at first they sent me a one-piece body. I had to look really close to find the seam running down the...

That sounds like a good plan. I reset the pickup height - they were too close to the strings - now I'm liking the clean tone.

Played around with it again today for an hour and half. Found I didn't like the set of strings that were included with the kit - too light and seemed like a weird combination of string gauges. Changed to my usual 10-46 set and went through the set up process again. Still not finding the tone...

I met Curt Mangan a few months ago in Cortez, Colorado. We had a great chat while he gave me a tour of his string factory. He convinced me that every guitarist needs a Strat or Tele in the stable. I haven't played a Strat in more than ten years. I bought my first Strat in 1976, I wish I still...

Great read, thanks for all of your posts and the perserverance to get the Strat you envisioned.

Off topic - in July of 1970 I saw Jimi Hendrix at a concert played at the San Diego Sports Arena. The band was Jimi, Billy Cox on bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. The opening act was a long forgotten band called Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys. I can't comment much on his tone that night...

2004 - Salon, France street concert.

Well, I guess it depends on how you define hand made. For example, I have several "hand made" western boots, but the maker employed a sewing machine and other implements. I visited Curt Mangan at his shop - factory would be a stretch of my imagination - where they used simple machinery all...

If I have the pictures correct - i.e. your restring versus his - it looks like you have the "G" wound over itself. That will be unstable. I suscribe to the "one over, two under" method and it works a charm for me on every guitar.

I love playing the eighth-notes in Funk #49.