Year: 2016

Been doing a little bit of research for a partscaster I’m building, and found some of the forums have mixed information about what is truly Fender’s medium jumbo frets. Anyway found that the fret wire they sell as medium jumbo is .103″ (2.62mm) wide and.046″ (1.17mm) tall according to this link on fender.com:

http://intl.fender.com/en-GB/guitar-bass-parts/misc-parts/standard-guitar-frets-medium-jumbo24/

This makes it pretty much spot on with dunlop 6150 fret wire unlike this post which is one of the top results on Google:

http://www.tdpri.com/threads/fret-wire-help.513926/

I recently swapped my the strings on my guitar from Cleartones to D’Addario NYXL. Here are a quick few thoughts comparing the two:

– Cleartone strings definitely lasted a long time with showing much corrosion
– Cleartone were definitely louder, I was surprised how noticeable this was
– Cleartone were louder in the fundamental, but NYXL had more harmonics
– Cleartone were much higher tension for the same string gauge and required a new setup in order to have correct intonation. The high tension also made it harder to play and felt like I was playing a higher string gauge.

Overall I think NYXL sound much more like conventional nickel strings, because of the balance between the fundamental note and harmonic content. I understand that for some styles of music, some might prefer the sound of Cleartone strings, but for me, I’ll definitely be sticking with the NYXLs.

YouTube recently changed the default settings for channels (including those that already had links enabled) so that social media links don’t show up on your channel banner. To enable these, here’s what you have to do.

1) Click the gear link under your channel banner

2) Enable “Customize the layout of your channel”

3) Add social media/website links as per before

I’ve been experimenting with some of the cheap class d amplifier boards available on eBay from china. This is the PAM8610 board with a Wampler Euphoria clone as a preamp. I added a footswitch that footswitches between clean and overdrive. It switches between two separate gain pots for clean and overdrive, removes the clipping diodes for clean, and adds a lead master in overdrive mode. I did some tests with this setup in separate enclosures, and there was very little hum, but as you can see from the video, there is tons when in the same enclosure. Maybe I have something poorly soldered, or maybe things are just too close together. Still it would be cool if a real manufacturer did something like this and sorted out all the issues because it doesn’t sound bad other than the hum. I might get another one of the boards and put it by itself in it’s own box. I’m powering it with a Mooer 2000mA power supply, but a one spot or anything over 1000mA should work, and it should take anything up to 12V.

Here’s some pics of the project. Notice I had to cut some of the plastic housing from the input jack, as well as bend the legs to make it all fit. The chassis is grounded, but the speaker output is isolated from the chassis. I kind of wish I’d used the deeper 1590BS instead of a 1590B so that there was a little more room.