Shane_B.

I bought a used Epiphone Sheraton II many years ago, so I have no idea how old it is. Ive had it about 13 years. It looked like nobody ever touched it. It was in mint condition and came with an Epi logo'd hardshell case. I think I paid $275 iirc at GC? I went to their website and downloaded their setup instructions. I did a setup on it and it plays like a dream. Not so much when I got it. The thing never ever goes out of tune. Same with my 83 strat. I followed every spec to a T, including tremolo height which didn't look right to me. It never goes out of tune and it has a generic replacement bridge I bought 30+ years ago. The original rusted beyond recognition from playing out all the time and sweat. The ad for the Gibson clone at Rondo's site says it has hand filed frets and comes set up. According to Gibson, all their guitars are factory Plek'd now. But yeah, I've seen new ones too that leave a lot to be desired. Kind of makes me loose faith in the Plek technelogy. I see guys, especially over on that popular Tele forum, talk about all their custom setup techniques, but I swear by the factory recommendations.

They have the (almost) exact replica of a Gibson I always wanted. I saw a right handed one in person and I loved it just for the color. I played it the best I could and it felt great. They actually have lefty versions of both guitars I've been looking at. Thanks for the info! Here's a Rondo version of the Gibson one I saw in a shop. Double tap coils and all. They didnt cut anything back on this. Its on sale at Rondo's site right now ... https://www.rondomusic.com/al3200oceanburstflmleft.html

I've been looking for a new guitar and have extremely limited choices of lefty versions. I stumbled on the world of cheap Chibson and other brand guitars. Most reviews I'm reading say these are as good of quality than the name brand higher end guitars, and in some cases they actually are the originals that sort of fell off the assembly line, or were rejected because of a blemish in the finish and were meant to be destroyed. I found this on Amazon and have been thinking of grabbing one. It comes in a right handed version as well. Gstyle Left-handed Electric Guitar Spalted maple top Okoume Body https://a.co/d/9xDYPAP I know a metal player who has played for a long time. IOW he's not some guy who is just learning to play and likes this guitar because it looks pretty. He said it's the best playing guitar he's ever owned. He said he paid $399. EART GW2L Headless Electric Guitar - Lefty. https://a.co/d/hw0GHBY Has anyone ever tried one of these inexpensive guitars? I'm sure I'd replace the pups and electronics. I'm a huge fan of EMG noiseless replacements. And since it's Amazon, I can return it hassle free. I have to say, the best LP style guitar I ever played was an Epi Studio, and I had a Gibson LP Custom Black Beauty for years. The Epi was stripped down, looked like it was rattle can painted, but played like a dream and sounded better than my Custom. It was $499 iirc. I didn't buy it because it was so inexpensive. In hindsight I should have snagged it seeing how left handed guitars are so hard to find in a store. I saw the exact lefty Gretch I've been wanting for $450 a few weeks ago but it was beat to hell and one of the pickups were broken. I just sat it back down and walked away.

Your post reminds me of when I worked in Des Moines IA. I had to service machines at the Federal building there as well as a bank, and an insurance company. The bank had an entire floor at the top of the business area of the tallest building in the city. The 2 topper most top floors were reserved and private. You had a shadow with you from the ground floor, till you were done, and back out. I'm not sure what they did there but it was a cubicle farm with huge monitors around the entire room. But, the place with the highest security was the insurance company. I couldn't get a security pass there. Most vendors didn't. They had extremely tight rules. Tighter than the feds and the banks which I thought was very odd. Years later W.F. built an enormous new campus there in DSM. They locked that down tighter than Bap's bass strings. You had to be escorted from your car until you were done and back to the car. When hard drives started becoming a thing in multifunction copiers, I had to install a lot of data encryption boards that would encrypt and wipe the drives because everything goes to the HDD on bigger machines. Copies, faxes, scans, prints. I really don't know how effective it was if someone really wanted to get the data though. I think once it's there, there's probably always a way to get it off no matter what you do. The safest way to communicate used to be by fax until everything went to VoIP. There are no true land lines anymore. At some point, somewhere, VoIP is involved and anyone with the knowhow can intercept. Kinda like a party line from back in the old days.

I wonder if they tried just one cartridge. The chips are readily available. And the people that make the generic ink and toner cartridges are aware of the chips and know how to replace or reprogram them. I run in to this once in a while. Sharp makes a larger color copier where you cannot remove the toner cartridge until it is empty. It will eject and you can't use the machine. I've had customers complain that their brand new cartridge would just pop out. Incompatible chips or chips that were flashed wrong will sometimes slip through. They just put a different one in and off they go. I can't believe HP would be dumb enough to do this. But stranger things have happened. Many many years ago generic supplies were a problem, but the industry has really improved. I wouldn't hesitate to use generic now.

I recycled my Sony DAT machine and my first rack mount guitar effects unit, an ART SGE Mach II. Made me sick to let go of them. The Sony would no longer recognize the tapes and the ART always added a slow flanger to everything. I always took my IDE drives apart and destroyed the disc's before chucking them.

I miss Mcq. I bumped in to him a few times on the S1 forum years ago. I remember he mentioned here that he was working on a diy laser needle for playing LP's. One that didn't cost $30,000. I always wondered how he made out with that.

We were talking about how to download guitar pics. 😁

Hmm. I should be up for 4th seat at the throne ... yet here I am ... Back to the topic at hand, as long as your power source (home) is properly grounded, I don't see a need for an extra wire. That said, pop the ground wire off your turntable and let the buzzing begin. So I dunno. Maybe there's something funky with that piece of gear and it's required. Try it without it. What's the worst that could possibly happen? The magic smoke comes out? 🤷‍♂️

Wow. You just triggered a lot of memories there ... I seem to recall a program, or maybe it was a function of Outlook Express, that would scan all the newsgroups you instructed it to and download any "attachments". You know, for, uh, pictures of wildlife, sunsets, guitars, etc. etc., MP3's, programs. Checksums were helpful for missing chunks of large files that were split and had some parts missing. It was no easy task getting a 3Mb Jpeg over dialup back in the day. There was nothing worse than getting a partial picture of a guitar with just the headstock and everything below just colored bands of noise from missing data. 😁

Hi John (Ampfixer). I was Bub on the old forum. I joined in 2005. I forget the original name I used. I think it was just Shane or ShaneB or something like that. Long story short, and I'm going from very poor memory here, I switched ISP's (dial up back then) and lost my email account through them. Forgot my password, couldn't reset it because my email changed, and that's when I created a new account. Several for that very same reason. I think I joined just after they went from BB to the old forum. It's seemed relatively new at the time and I didn't hang out there much. I vividly remember posting a Halloween song and DaveNY complete laying in to me telling me what a piece of garbage it was. It drove me away for long time, then I slowly started poking my head around again. The Song forum was fantastic back in the day. There were some really talented people there. Still are, don't get me wrong, but it was significantly more active back then. Hope you come back regularly John. It's slower paced than it used to be, but it's still the same great place.

He had 3 stores at one time. Flemington, Bethlehem PA, and the location that just closed in Phillipsburg. I also remember his original location on Rt. 57 before he expanded. I had dinner tonight at a restaurant in PA and as I was leaving I saw a guy with a D.P. t-shirt on. I stopped and was talking to him about it closing. He said he went in and bought all the old neon signs Dave got from the various vendors over the years that he had in the display cases. It was really weird bumping in to some random guy like that with that t-shirt on. Never saw one before.

Wow. I replied to this thread twice and I have no recollection of this thread at all. Funny how I can still remember the time my mom caught my belly in the zipper of my footy pajamas when I was 4, but I can't remember this thread, or even what I had for breakfast this morning. Of course, mentally I'm only 4 and a half now so there is that.

Happy New Year to all. I don't know exactly why, but this song felt fitting to share. I always look back when I start to think it was a bad time or year and say to myself, well dumbass, you're doing better than you should be, so chin(s) up.

https://www.davephillipsmusicstore.com/blogs/news/the-end-of-an-era This was the place I bought my first guitar. First 3 actually. I still have them. I bought my first 2 amps there, my band got all their PA gear there. My first guitar rack gear, mic, keyboard, 8 track recording machine. Countless strings, cables, and a 100 other pieces of gear over the years. Basically from the time before I was in a band, all through my 16 years playing out, till the day I moved away, everything I bought that was music related came from there. The first time I went there was with my brother when I was a little kid back in the 70s. We went together one last time on Friday. They were selling the guitar racks off the walls and everything else was gone by the time we got there. It was the last music store in our area. Oh well. I still have Sweets I guess.

Merry Christmas everyone. There's so many albums it's hard to choose what to postas my favorites. I seem to play these a lot. I have over 40 albums I shuffle in my Christmas playlist.

CbB - Chafed bapu's Bass

CbB - Causes binaural Bleeding

Yeah, a lot of people are doing that now. I've been trying to buy a house here in NJ. In my old hometown. The realtor I talked to said 100% of the sales she's made there in the last year were all to NYers that are now working from home. They are using their NYC salaries and coming in and bidding at least $100K over asking and paying cash. Houses that should be going for 300K are going for 400K and 450K and up and a lot of people that are from this area making local wages are leaving the state because it's raised the cost of living and taxes so much When companies start to equalize the WAH/salary ratio it's gonna get real fugly. I don't think I could take working from home. I sort of do now. I do all the maintenance and remodelling work at the apartment complex I'm temporarily staying at. I get in my truck and drive around almost every night just to get away. Lol. I'd like to set up some kind of makeshift recording rig but I'd be restricted to headphones and it's not the same, for me. My ears get tired using headphones really quick and I end up increasing the volume more and more to get over the ringing in my ears. It's a viscous cycle. 😄🎧🙉

You need to spend more time in the studio, or on the forum ...

It's got, uh, well it has, oh, and ... wait, there's a uh, hmmm, I'll have to get back to you on that. Ooh! It's 64 bit. I hear it really matters. Gloss?

I'm sure I could fly around CbB just as fast as I always could if I started using it regularly again. I didn't mean that as a slam on CbB. I guess a better more PC way of saying what I did would be to say I found the transition easy and I had no trouble with the differences in workflow. But yeah, it is always difficult switching software we're so intimately involved with. 👍

The hardest part of switching from Sonar to Studio One is still, to this day, the visual aspect of S1. I simply hate how S1 looks and the convoluted way they force you to change the limited color scheme. I'll trade that though for the stability. I can count on 3 fingers of 1 hand the number of times S1 has crashed. And at no time did I ever lose any tracks. I remember at one point I had set X2 to auto save ever 5 minutes iirc? It's not that way now with CbB, but back when I switched, losing the visuals was well worth the gained stability. I don't know how in depth of a Sonar/CbB user you are, but in the end I found S1 to be far easier to use, once I learned where everything was laid out. Then I added custom macros, and well, I'm happy. And I'm not a happy person by nature. 😁🤪

Thu-thu that wuh-wuh was a fa-fan-ta-tastic joke.

I had very good luck selling through an actual music store. I sold through a local shop near me in the KC area. I don't know what state or country you're in. The place I used was in Lawrence Kansas. I got away from buying and selling on places like eBay and Reverb. Places where scamming is almost encouraged. My suggestion would be a local place if you can or Facebook marketplace where you have total control over the transaction, where and when you meet, and getting cash with no refunds in hand directly from the person. That said, the shop I sold through in KS is large and well known. I don't know how many places like that are left. They took a lot of great photos, set up the guitar and verified it was 100% original and did a very professional online ad on their website. I forget what their cut was, but with all they went through to sell it for me I thought it was fair. They took care of shipping and everything and it actual sat in their shop for walk on traffic too. Good luck!