We all feel stress from time to time. In this book I go over what stress is, how it can affect us, and some things you can do to help deal with it. The methods outlined in this book are based on research and personal experience. I am hopeful that everyone will get something useful out of this book. Many times people view stress as a weakness. I assure you, it is not. Everyone experiences stress in different ways and different coping methods can work for different people.
A good friend and colleague of mine, dusty Treadway, has written a book on the topic of stress. There is information in the book to help identify different types of stress with tips and tricks on how to manage it. the book is available on Amazon in both digital and physical formats. You should give it a read if you are finding yourself stressed and would like some advice on how to cope and manage your stress levels.
Another new release for the upcoming “Stress Fractures” album. It may look like the song title is misspelled but it’s in reference to a subject referenced in the documents below.
Open Sessions presented by Weathervane Music offers insights into new indie artists and gives a glimpse into the recording world. This non-profit organization also allows multitrack downloads of the projects recorded during the series.
I discovered Weathervane Music through a home recording podcast that I used to follow. In particular, I enjoyed the organization’s series entitled “Shaking Through” which not only allowed me the chance to check out new indie music but also get a glimpse into the recording process with each artist they featured. The “Shaking Through” series is now discontinued but a new series, “Open Sessions” is active within the Weathervane Music organization. It offers more detailed insights into the featured artists. Both the “Shaking Through” and “Open Sessions” series are worth a listen if you love recording and want to hear some new indie music.
My very first electric guitar was a Shane Targa. It was a red and black Super Strat style guitar and featured a rosewood fretboard and high output pickups in an H-S-S configuration. It wasn’t a top of the line guitar by any means but it was awesome to me and allowed me to play Van Halen songs which was a huge step up from the acoustic guitar I was playing before it.
Recently, my daughter has shown an interest in learning to play guitar. To get this guitar restored in order to give to her for her first guitar would be fitting. It brought me a lot of enjoyment and I believe it will her too but this guitar needs a lot of work to become playable again.
At one point I’d had a brass nut installed on the guitar when I was a kid. Due to the angle of the low e string’s tuning peg, I’d broken the original plastic nut one of the first times I ever tuned it. Not only is that missing but its pickups are not connected. Among other things, I’m not entirely sure of the electronic’s condition and some of the bridge saddles are missing.
Before getting into any restoration I took the pick guard off to take a look around. The pickups are trash at this point and I’m still not sure about the pots and switch but they don’t look that great. The electronics are really low budget and I won’t know if they are in working condition until I start working on it.
The restoration project started off easy enough, I took the sticker off the pick guard and got the lowrider man sharpie drawing off. Well, mostly off. After so many years being on the guitar, the sharpie has permanently stained the clear coat, but it’s not too bad.
After having a look under the pick guard and the rest of the guitar I’ve got an idea of the direction I want to go with it. I plan to change the pickup configuartion over to an H-S-H setup. I’ve not got a lot of money for this project so all of the parts for it will have to be budget parts. I’ve ordered a set of Seymore Duncan Invader style hum bucker pickups off of Amazon along with some very in-expensive, black colored bridge saddles from eBay. For the nut I’ve gotten a decent quality Tusq nut from Sweetwater.
In order to get the frets cleaned up some I taped off the fretboard with painters tape and then rubbed each fret with some fine steel wool. I was able to get the frets cleaned up and add some shine back to them.
To get a humbucker to fit in the bridge position I had to route out the body. In order to get this area cut right the first time I cut the pickhaurd so that the neck humbucker fit in the guitar. After getting the pick guard cut out to fit the pickup I then traced the area out on the body that will need to be removed.
The cut I made in the pick guard could have been a lot cleaner but all I had available to cut it was an oscillating tool, the type you would use to cut baseboard trim with. After marking the body for my cuts I pulled the pick guard again and then made my cuts. The cuts were quite easy to do with the oscillating tool. The ease in cutting was probably aided by the fact that the body is made up of plywood.
This routing certainly wasn’t my best work but it got the job done and after confirming with a test fit with the pickup now I know the pickup will fit.
Now on to the part I was most worried about, the electronics. After getting the new pickups soldered into the circuit I have the guitar a test run. Plugging the guitar in and tapping on the pickups’ pole pieces produced no sound. Zero sound. Nothing at all in any of the pickup selector positions or no matter which way or how much I turned the knobs. The bad thing about this is that I’m not confident enough in my soldering abilities to know whether or not I’ve hooked things up properly or if the electronics are worn past their ability to work.
After a couple of hours messing with the guitar I made the decision to purchase an inexpensive, loaded HSH pick guard and just transfer the electronics and pickups from it to this guitar.
After transferring everything from the new pick guard on this guitar I’m fairly pleased with the fitment and aesthetic look. Luckily going this route only required me to solder two wires which are the positive and negative at the input jack.
After getting everything put together and tuned up I gave my daughter her first guitar lesson, “My Own Summer” by Deftness. I thought it was cool that she picked that for the first song to learn since I used to play along with that song on the radio with this exact guitar. I hope that her journey into learning an instrument is as rewarding of an experience as it was for me. I think it will be.
Recently my father was cleaning up his workshop and came across a bunch of old guitars and amps that I had as a teen. The one thing I was most excited about was this Washburn MG43 guitar.
I’d gotten this guitar new in 1992 for my birthday. It’s a superstrat style guitar but the big difference than most is that it’s got 3 single coil pickups. Even with the lower output of the pickups I had no issue playing Pantera and Metallica songs on it.
When I got the guitar back I wasn’t sure what to expect The Washburn had been in it’s case since 1999 and the area it was stored in didn’t protect it from the heat or cold of the seasons. Much to my surprise, and excitement, after looking the guitar over I couldn’t find any major issues visually.
First thing that I did was pull the strings off and wipe down the guitar and start trying to get the stickers off of the body. The stickers had other plans though. It turns out that after 20 or so years of being on the guitar they weren’t going to give up their grip quite so easily. This part will have to wait until later.
I turned my attention to pulling the pick guard off in order to access what the electronics looked like.
As you can see from the photos above, while everything under the pickgaurd was surprisingly dusty it was in over all good shape. I fully expected everything to be covered in surface rust but luckily corrosion was at a minimum. As I was getting the pick guard off and moving it around I found a feature that I never knew the guitar had. I never realized the tone knob was a push pull pot. I’m really interested to see what things sound like with the pot pulled.
I didn’t have any electronic cleaner on hand so I settled for some MAF cleaner out of my garage. I believe it’s essentially the same thing and nothing melted so I’m going to call it good. After cleaning things up it looked a lot better.
After getting the electronics cleaned up and the pick guard back onto the body I turned my attention to the neck. The maple neck feels great but it’s fairly grimy and the jumbo frets are corroded.
I got started wiping the grime off of the maple fretboard. The more work I do on the guitar, the more age I see in it. Not in a bad way either. The pick guard has become more of an off-white color and the neck has darkened into a rich color. After getting the maple cleaned up I taped off the fretboard with blue painters tape and then polished the frets with some fine steel wool. I think the results are great visually and I’m positive it will help with playability once strung up, especially bends.
After oiling up the Floyd Rose with some 3-in-1 oil and stringing it up I was finally able to get a good look at the guitar renewed once more. I also went ahead and took the time to completely remove the stickers from the body.
Finally, the time came to plug the guitar in. I proceeded to plug the guitar in and noticed the cable jack was a little loose, it was still tight enough to hold the guitar cable in though so I proceeded to turn my amp on and turn the volume up. It sounded wonderful, for about 20 seconds that is. The sound just cut out completely, no crackles or static sound, it just went silent. After moving the guitar cable around a little bit the sound came back but I found that sound would only come out of the guitar if I was holding the cable into the jack. I toned down my disappointment and then pulled the input jack from the guitar. Once I got the jack out, it felt like I might be able to bend the contact slightly to put some pressure on the cable jack but as soon as I tried, the contact broke off in my hands.
I ordered a new jack and after a short wait for it to reach my mailbox I was able to brush up on my soldering skills and get it into the guitar. I was able to get a picture of the new jack but didn’t get a picture of it after soldering it in because in all honesty, I thought for sure my soldering skills wouldn’t hold up on the first attempt. Luckily I was wrong.
As soon as I could get the jack into the guitar I was able to plug it in and record a solo for a song I’d been working on.
The first thing I’ve noticed about the sound of this guitar after being away from it so long is that it most definitely sounds like a Strat. Not just any Strat though, the pickups seem to be slightly overwound with a little extra gain. This might explain why I didn’t have much trouble playing metal through it when I was younger, albeit with a boost pedal in from of a pushed high gain amp. My little surprise discovery of a push pull tone pot opened a whole new world in the guitar tone. When pulled while the pickup selector switch is in the bridge position it activates the neck pickup as an addition to the bridge pickup. While I admittedly couldn’t hear much of a difference with a pristine clean tone, when some gain is added, even the slightest amount it gave so much body to the sound of the guitar. The solo I recorded above is using a slightly distorted 5150 amp with the tone knob pulled. The overall feel of the guitar is as if an Ibanez and Jackson where melded together. I’m very glad to once again have this guitar in my collection.
