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The Know youw Gear Podcast. Today's episode of the Know youw Gear Podcast is brought to you by Patreon members, channel members and viewers who like and subscribe. Thank you for making this possible. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Know youw Gear podcast, episode 406. Hope everybody's having a fantastic week and ready for some guitar stuff. Right? It's guitar time. It's time to talk about guitars. Can I say that one more time? Time to talk about the time to talk about guitars. As always, I want to thank you all for joining me live. And there's no commercials during the actual live broadcast. So if you don't like the commercials, you can come watch it live every Friday or you can listen to it on audio podcasts or you can become a patron member for. You know, I saw all the rates you saw below. You can, you can see it for ad free if that's something you care about. Okay, so let's, let's talk about some stuff. We'll do Guitar of the Week this week. Kinda say kinda on the Guitar of the Week and we'll get into some subjects and, and topics. And as always, I want to thank the moderators and the channel members and the patrons for supporting the Friday show. See, I thought I grabbed an early riser question. Let's see what I grabbed because I grabbed a bunch of stuff. Let me just jump in this one first. Here's a topic that I had queued up from emails. So a lot of you guys been sending us a lot more emails lately. I told you, emails go in like, you know, ups and downs. Sometimes we get, you know, a couple dozen, sometimes we get a couple hundred. And it's just in one day and it just gets a little much. And so, so this week was a high week email list. So we kind of go through and I try to hit the ones I can. So let's see what I got here. I got a topic that says, it says, hey Philip, I really like your videos. Very informative. Anyways, he says, he didn't say. Anyways, he said, quick question. He says, I have an Ibanez bass with a Jatoba fretboard. Normally I use the F1 oil from Music Nomad, but I saw something about using baby oil. Is this true? I have never used baby oil on a fretboard. You know, I have heard everything I've heard. I mean, so you know, I'm just telling you what I heard. I heard people using vegetable oil. Vegetable oil. I've heard people using water. I've heard People using gun stock oil, tongue oil, lemon oil, you know, Crisco. I'm not exaggerating. Vaseline, Everybody's got a thing. I've heard some people say you should never put anything on the fretboard ever. I've heard it all. What I have done for years is there was a guitar tech that I knew, and for years, he just bought lemon oil. He just bought lemon oil and, you know, like, furniture lemon oil, like limo for furniture. And he. Because he could buy it by the gallon, it was really cheap. I kind of follow onto this kind of logic of I really like the idea. Look, I'm not convinced that a lot of the stuff that these manufacturers that are making fretboard conditioners are better than anything else you can get. It's just kind of like my logic is, I use a brand, I pick a brand usually that I like. Okay, there's a Lizard Spitz, a brand I really, really like. Music Nomad is a brand I really like. But so, you know, I've heard negative things about music nomads, F1 oil and Polish. So, you know, if you look on Sweetwater, they have a lot of naked reviews. I have not experienced that. However, I have experience with F1 oil because I would start. I started buying it in bulk that the. When it sits for a year or two, it does change. It's really, like, sticky. So, you know, so I just went ahead and just swapped it out for new stuff. I'm sure somebody's gonna have some suggestions, but let me just stick with my thought process. My thought process is I pick a product, I use it consistently. If there's an issue, I know exactly who to go and talk to. Okay? And that's my big thing. My big thing is I'm more, you know, find what you. You know, you gotta take your chance. Like I did. That's basically what I did. I looked at all the players involved. A lot of companies used terminology I didn't like. The guy at Lizard Spit literally would drink his products in front of you at the NAMM show. And I thought, well, if he's gonna drink it, stick it on my instrument. But mostly what I care about is this. And this is me personal. Everybody's not gonna have this same situation. I can get a hold the owner of Lizard's Pit, and I can get a hold of the owner of New musicnomad. I actually believe if you wanted to, you could as well. They don't seem like they ditch people. I cannot get ahold of the owners of these bigger companies and to be honest with you, when brands like Gibson or Fender, and again, I'm not saying anything bad about their finish, their polishes and their conditioners, they don't make that stuff. They outsource it. And they change all the time. When I was a dealer, those companies would change vendors all the time. It felt like, well, I say all the time. I mean, every few years. And so I just got to the point where I was like, you know what? I'd rather deal with a product where I know I can get somebody on the phone and. And say, hey, look, I've been using this on this $4,000 guitar for the last couple years, and here's the issue I'm having and have someone actually say, okay, here. Here's what I think it could be, or here's what it is. So I just kind of. I just kind of keep it that way. And then. But there's. There's certain things. Like, for instance, what's the. I love D'Addario as a brand, but I don't use a lot of their. I don't use what product. Theirs. It's the one where it looks like it has red dye in it. And I just didn't like that. I thought it was weird. It stained my rags red, and I thought that was weird. And I was like, I don't know what was in it. And they don't tell you. And somebody mentioned Dunlop 65. You know, Dunlop 65 is a funny one, because I like, I used to use before I switched to lizard spit and music Nomad. Years and years and years ago, I used to only use Dunlop. And one day a customer came in the shop and asked me specifically what's in the Dunlop, you know, finishes and oils and stuff, the lemon oils and stuff. And I said, I don't know. And I looked in the bottles. It didn't really say. And I go, well, I'll reach out to Dunlop. I reached out to Dunlop and they said they couldn't tell me. Now, granted, I got an employee and then I got another employee, you know, but either way, I couldn't get an answer as someone who's actually a representative of that product. Otherwise I have to sell that product to somebody else. And I couldn't find the answer. So I kind of. That's what turned me off from that kind of stuff. It's like, look, if you're not going to tell me what's in it, how am I going to know, you know, if there's a problem? So that's kind of the thought process. But as to the main question. So he says, what about coconut oil? So he said, linseed oil, all that stuff. I've heard it all been used. You can use whatever you like. But again, it's your guitar. I definitely have a different mindset. It's not even that I'm like, you know, it's like, my guitars are special. It's. I. For almost 20 years, I dealt with other people's guitars. And so it became. I'm accountable to them. And I really wanted to know what I was sticking on somebody's guitar if there was a problem, you know, And I told you, it's like, it's why I'm very firm about guitar stands and how and the materials they're made of and stuff. It's like anything that I'm going to have to answer for. And if you've ever owned a business or had to work with the public, the worst feeling in the world, the most stressful, intense feeling, is someone with a problem and you can't help, but you're responsible, right? It's a very horrible feeling, right? Very horrible. It's like, I don't know how to fix your problem. I technically helped you cause it, but I don't know. And I can't find anybody to help me. And so I became very focused on if I couldn't get somebody on the phone. You know, this is funny. I'm gonna go on a weird tirade right now, but so, you know, this is the one thing I've learned over the years, many years of being on YouTube now and working with all these artists over the years, they tend to say the same thing about artist agreements. I used to believe, like, a lot of you. And look, and I'm not saying it's one. One's one way or another's a fact, but I'm just telling you my personal experiences with this is. I used to believe that artists jumped all the time for money. You know, this company will pay them more money, so they jump. That does happen. Don't get me wrong. That's. That's huge. But I have found more times than not, same answer I just gave you. If they can't get somebody on the phone, if they can't get help, they're like, look, I don't want to work with a company where I can't get help. You know, it's just that simple. An artist once said it was really funny that basically they had an issue. Fans were like, hey, I bought this product because you said it was good. I'm having an issue with it. And they're like, okay, I'll ask the company to answer the question. The company wouldn't respond to their emails and texts and calls. And they're like, I'm the face now of this and I can't help my fans. So I feel the same way. It's like, if I can't help you with the answer, then I don't want to deal with it. But I really do. Like I said very upfront. Like I said, musicnomad does have a lot of negative reviews. You should go out and read them if that's something concern you. A lot of them are really scary sounding to the point where I almost stopped using my musicnomad products on Sweetwater. In fact, you know what, I'll just share. So again, I have not had these personal experiences, nor have I seen anyone have this. But it's still. Let's go to Music Nomad. Because now the reason why I'm doing this is not to like, is to make sure I'm correct. Because I would really hate if I'm saying this. And then it's like, no, what are you talking about? They have great reviews. So let's look. I'll go look at reviews on Sweetwater. I'm pulling it up right now. F1 Oil. Oh, they got 34. I'll share with you. So here's it is reviews. F1 Oil. So I mean, it's got 34 reviews. Most of them are five stars. Looks like no negatives. Okay, so I'm probably thinking of their guitar polish. Let me go to the guitar polish. So there you go. I use F1 oil on my fretboard and there's a lot of reviews right there. Here's the polish. It's kind of creeping me out, guys, because their polish also has perfect ratings. I know for a fact I read tons of negatives because I was. Somebody sent me a link. I read it. It was like a year ago. I remember reading them. Let's take a look. So maybe they've corrected it, but I don't know why the reviews would be gone. So I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe no issues in Music Nomad. Like I said, I've never had any issues with music. Nomad definitely have not had any issues with Lizard Spit. But now I'm not seeing any negative reviews. Let's say Guitars, Cleaning and Care. I'm just gonna double, double check just in case. Case I'll. Like I said, no, I can't find them now. And then we find them later. I'm not seeing them. I'm seeing mostly all positive reviews here. I'll share, you guys. Everything I'm reading is. I mean, there's some that doesn't have very many reviews, but. So maybe they've corrected whatever it is. Maybe it was the. Oh, you know what? I wonder if it was the guitar wax. Nope. That's got five. Five reviews and, like five stars. So interesting. I'm wondering if it was a product that was discontinued. That would make sense. Maybe it got bad reviews. Oh, here's one. Just got one star, so. All right, there you go. So I'll say, music. No, man. Sounds good. But like I said, because it looks like. I bet you, whatever it was, I read it because it was at least a year ago, at least maybe two. So maybe they just don't care anymore. So it says, hair grease. Use hair grease. I don't have hair grease. Robert Purdy says I stopped using F1 oil. It gooped up on the fretboard and made it sticky. So funny that you say that, Robert, because that's what I read. I read that it made fretboards kind of sticky. And. And I told you mine, mine. Mine did kind of. It didn't goop up. It just got thicker and sticky. And it. And again, you know, it could have been the age and it could have been heat. Maybe it was in the. In. Maybe I put it in the garage and didn't realize it. I don't know. So I just got new stuff, and I haven't had a problem since. But I stopped buying it in the bulk. I was buying the bulk bottle because it's bigger. You know, you save a little money over time. But I just, like. I just don't go through it fast enough. So anyways, and then what I will tell you to answer this question is, no matter what you use, everyone's going to have a very strong opinion about what it did. You know, how it's going to hurt your guitar. And it's always funny to me because it's not like I. So, you know, I don't want to sit there and go, I repaired a lot of guitars. And let me tell you, because I repaired a bunch of guitars, I know the answer. I can only tell you, like, here's my experiences. But you have to understand, like, who I hang out with. That's what they do, too. They repair guitars or they build guitars. And that's who I mostly hang out with. And they tend to have the same experiences. You know, there's some Experiences are different. Like, for instance, if you. If you're in Indonesia, you have a very moist climate to my very dry climate, those are going to be different. But when we talk about certain things, and the one thing I will tell you is I have repaired more fretboards without a question in my mind. I've repaired more fretboards from not hydrating them from. Than over hydrating them. I've heard that if you use too much fretboard conditioner or oil on your fretboard that the frets will lift out. I don't know. It's possible. Why not? Anything's possible. But what I can tell you is if you go through and I look at all the repairs I've done, I can tell you that I repaired way more guitars for fretboards cracking or having issues from drying out than I have from somebody over hydrating the guitar. And so I don't. I don't. Not saying you can't over hydrate your fretboard and stuff. I'm just saying it's not very likely. Who the hell are you out there? It's like every day I just go out there and oil my fretboard every day. In my experience, most people think they're oiling their fretboard a lot. You're probably doing it twice a year. I mean, that's. And if anyone wants to know, like, what's. What do I recommend? It depends on how often you restring and why I say that is if you restring once or twice three times a year, like, let's say once a quarter at max. I'd say yeah, if you oiled your fretboard every time, you'd be fine. I don't think that would be too much. I don't think you need to do it four times a year. But it wouldn't be too much if you change your strings like every week, that's too much. So I tend to oil fretboards when I restring guitars because I don't restring guitars more than, let's say once a year. It's not very common for me to change my strings that often because I can rotate guitars so. So I don't have to. I'm not putting. I'm not making the strings. I'm not wearing out strings that fast. Yeah. And then just for a habit, if anyone wants to know, my habit for oiling or treating the fretboard is I always treat the fretboard when the current strings are on it. So the strings I'm going to take off, I Just oil it underneath the fretboard. I get the strings all oily and stuff. I don't care. I just do it. It's just easy. Clean it all up and then, and then I yank off. If I'm doing a restring, if I'm doing a setup, that's different, but if I'm trying to be fast about it. So. All right, let's go to another subject. Amanda grabbed one. By the way, I see your super chats too. I'll grab those too. Amanda said this from KDub. KDub says, hey, do you have any suggestions for a good but not expensive replacement base pickup? I got a hill short scale passive base. That is hilarious, K Dub. I can't tell you why it's hilarious, but I promise if you hang out to the end of the show, you'll have a good laugh. Anyways, replacement bass pickup. I got a hill short scale passive bass with a single so bar pickup. Love the instrument. Except for the pickup. Well, first of all, let's talk about that. So. So you guys are all aware, let's bring everybody up the same page. Let's go to Hills America. Hills America. That's the website you use if you're going to go to Hills. Let's hear it is Hills. Let's go to look at our home. Our no R story. Blog support. English Sis. Where's the instrument? Instruments. The instruments. Headless bass. Okay, so here's what he's talking about. This instrument right here, this has, oh, it's really hard to see. It's a black pickup on a black pickard. And they give you a close up. There you go. So one of the problems you have, buddy, is this is what's called a sweet spot pickup. That's a term used pretty often in the industry where it's one pickup in the sweet spot. You know, I think Music man was the first time I ever heard that, you know, putting a pickup in the sweet spot. But then bass players, our bass companies like Zaun and all kinds, start using the sweet spot logic. So that pickup, I'm not sure what shape it is. That's the question. It is a passive pickup. So the question to you is not should you change the pickup, but should you maybe put a passive or an active circuit in it that would be massively impactful to the bass tone, more so than the pickup. Because part of the tone, okay, so part of that tone is going to be what I call quacky. Okay. It's got a little bit of a mid range quack to it because it's not towards the back where it's bright and it's not towards the neck where it's going to be warmer. It's not a two pickup bass like a jazz bass and it's not essentially like a P bass because if you look at where it is, it's not really like a P bass either. So. So it's close to that. You know, there's a lot of things going on. So you can change the pickup if it fits. You know, I like Bartolinis, that's my, one of my go to pickups for basses like that. But I'd almost say get yourself a nice two band preamp. And one of the things you can do which is nice if you've, if you ever followed any of my crazier advice in the past is get yourself a nice EQ pedal. And that just, it doesn't matter like a boss or whatever. When I say nice, I don't mean expensive. I just mean like a EQ pedal. You can even get the Behringer one. People complain it's noisy, but I don't care. I think every guitar player, bass player should have a EQ pedal. If you have one, keep it. If you don't use it, keep it. If you don't have one, get one. Literally, it's how you figure out things. So that's a great pedal. You would plug that bass into it and kind of see if pushing the bass and the highs kind of let that bass have more of a snap. Because remember, think of it this way, that bass is going to be very mid range. It's every going to be very nasal like this. It's good. That's just how it is. Which is great because in a mix it's going to cut through, it's going to be in the mix beautifully. Right. Which is why some, so many, so many players like music man basses, they're really just in the mix perfectly. P bass is in the mix, but it is very mid focused. So you could change the pickup but because you're not changing the position. I mean sure, a better quality pickup will. Let me put it this way, a better quality pickup will have slightly more high, slightly more bass, slightly more something, more output, slightly more of something. But keep in mind, if the problem with the tone is the bass, you're going to be exaggerating the problem by putting a better pickup in it. Not, you know, kind of evening out the issue. So I would definitely try. Susan says do that again. No. So anyways, so. So back To I use an EQ pedal and see if adding a little bass and adding a little. And don't, don't, don't adjust it on your bass amp or whatever you're plugging into. Do it through an external pedal. Let your. Because you're shaping the sound that the, the, the amplifier will now kind of amplify out, right? Does it make sense? So do it from EQ pedals the perfect way. If it works, you could get yourself a very inexpensive 2 band EQ. Drop it in that tone control. I would say. Let's look at the back. Well, it's got a big pick guard in the front. What does it have in the back? It doesn't have anything in the back. Oh no, it does. Oh my God, look at that. Look at that big O cutaway right there. So look at that. Oh, that's a big, that's. There's more than enough room for a battery in there. And you could put a battery in there. I would say do that. And me personally, you know, I've given up. So you know, on, on something like a two band system. I mean you could put a three band in there too if you want. But like I said, we already know mids are in there. So I just did do a high and low EQ and get a cheap one. Stick it in there. You know, they're not that expensive and they're not that hard to wire in. It's going to be easier because remember, it just, I don't know. Sorry. Faz Freddy's like fill this recommended EQ pedal. That means the price is going to go up. Yeah, it's funny, you know, it's funny is the EQ pedal is a, it's a thing that I thought I had figured out. I thought it was so smart, you know, pre the Internet I was like, oh, I have an EQ pedal. I used to. My favorite thing to do with EQ pedal was to stick it in the FX loop of an amp I didn't like. So if the amp didn't have enough gain, I'd stick an EQ pedal in the effects loop and juice it. And if the amp didn't have the EQ settings, I would just run in the effects loop. You could really manipulate an amp with the EQ pedal. And then when I met people like Tim Pierce, right, You meet all these studio guys and they're all like, of course, that's what we use. And you're like, oh, I thought I was smart. It's like it's really. Everybody uses it all the time. But that's my suggestion for that. So try it. And like I said, get yourself an EQ pedal. Yeah, Max. Max says boss EQ pedal is very good. It's what I use everybody. In fact, speaking of which, of Tim Pearson, all the pro studio guys, they all have given me the advice to get the modded one. There's a modded EQ pedal. But my problem is that I don't really use an EQ pedal. I don't use it all the time. I use it to solve problems. Like, you know, try to figure something out. Like, hey, if how would this guitar sound if it had a little bit more higher output pushing to the amp, what would that sound like? And I juice it up a little bit and run the EQ flat. And then I go, oh, it sounds different, you know, or better. And then I just adjust from there. So Gene says graphic EQ and parametric EQ are two equalizer layouts that offer different methods of frequency control. So I have a parametric eq. I actually have a BOSS parametric EQ as well. I like parametric eq. I used to have a rack mount one forever. My personal kind of experience with graphic and parametric EQs is parametric EQs are really cool and they do a lot of cool things. But graphics are like, you know, they're dumbed down. It's just a lot easier to slide into something. You know, the parametrics, like when you're really trying to get it in focus right, you can really dial in some really nice in between, you know, kind of sounds, frequencies and stuff is really good. There's times in my life where I'm like, oh no, parametrics. The only way to go. But then I kind of find myself EQS graphic is just so basically easy. Okay, let's do another one. Todd0864 says, hey Phil, I'm taking a liking to the class A tube amps. Do you know of any that won't break the bank? Besides the Bujera V5? That's probably one of the best priced ones out there. Because most of all, keep in mind the class A tube amps, a lot of them aren't class A. They just say they're class A. They, you know, some are class still class ab, but I don't know. I would think depends what you want. I don't, I don't really know. I went through that road before, you know, when I had my car amp, you know, the Mercury, it was like a class A. And I had a. For a while I just started having a bunch of expensive hand wired class amps and I was like, oh, they're so reactive, so intense. And then over time I just found myself going, it's, you know, it's nice but I don't really care. So that's what happened to me. The more I try amps, the more I realize like, okay, there's amps I prefer and then there's amps that are like truly different. But I find that I'm usually I'm still drawn back to amps that are more. You have more utility. In other words, do more things than just one thing. I love class A amps. Do something I really absolutely love. But then I feel like I'm like once I'm down that road, that's the only road I could be on. Now keep in mind, if you do one kinds of music, that's where a lot of it makes sense. But for me, I'm always doing different videos and different sounds and different things. So it's constantly like how do I get a death metal sound and how do I get a blue sound and how do I get a different sound? I'm always trying to figure out something to make some kind of content with it so that my needs are different. Let's do a super chat. This one came from antique rocker. He says, I noticed some acoustic instruments with a piezo pazo. Just kidding. Got a buzzing hiss. Especially upright bases using a bow. What is the cause and can it be avoided? So one of the causes could be that you're using a passive transducer pickup. And what happens with a passive transducer pickup is you have to drive the, the mixer or the amp or whatever. You're using the gain on that very hard to. To get the sound. Cause you're just like pulling the sound from was nothing. And it raises up the noise floor. So that is very common in a passive transducer system, which is why very few instruments have passive transducers. Most of them will have an active system because of the fact that if you, if you bring the noise, if you have to bring the volume up using the amplified source, you do bring up the noise floor. So one thing you could do is use an EQ pedal. You can use an EQ pedal. I'm sorry, I'm laughing. I'm just like, I'm just good. From now on. My answer to every question. So how do I fix a paint chip? I would use an EQ pedal. No, you can use an EQ pedal. For sure. And then you could also get a active transducer pickup. It's up to you. There's multiple ways to do this. Keep in mind all the actual strips, the transducer strips, or all the components are passive by nature. So the active happens immediately afterwards. So what I'm saying is you just want to go from the pickup right into something like a preamp pedal or an EQ pedal, a preamp. Something that's going to bring up the signal so that the amp isn't driving from a very weak source. That's the again push. You need more going to the amplifier or the PA or whatever you're sending to the recording interface. Whatever it is that doesn't. Like I said, if you make that do all the work, it's going to bring up the noise floor. So that's how you'd really do that. But again, one way to test that whether I'm not right or wrong is to test with an EQ pedal. Throw an EQ pedal, drive the signal up and see if, even though the EQ will add noise, see if the noise changes. So, so it'll have noise, it'll just change. In other words, you'll, you'll, you'll notice the hiss is less. It's different and less. Does it make sense? Like it won't sound like what it sounds like now? Because what I sound, what it sounds like you have is a really high noise floor. In other words, because you're driving a very weak signal. It's, it's like what we talked about before with EMG pickups on, like on a guitar. The, the pickups, they use very weak magnets and therefore the signal going to the amp is very weak. Very weak. Magnets very underwound. And that's what they use the preamp for. They're boosting the signal because otherwise the amp would be working extra hard to get that signal. And again, it brings up the noise floor, brings up all the stuff. That's why EMGs are ultra quiet, because the amp is getting such a strong amount of signal that it doesn't, you know, it doesn't have to like drive that signal up. It's got something usable from the gate is what I would call it. KDUB says theme today, always use an EQ pedal. It is funny. It's funny. As I did a video. I'll put a link to timestamp now. I did a video with Tim Pierce on his channel where we talked about EQ pedals. That's what we talk about. Basically. It's the hidden gem that everybody needs. And I've seen everybody from, I mean every studio musician I've seen has talked about that and why they have them and why they have them on their board or why they have them in the studio. Brian says PRS needs to make a EQ pedal out of tone wood. It's the tone wood pedal. All right. Okay, let's go to another one. Let's see what else we got. This one came from Lee and he says is it okay to pair twisted telly pickups with a four way switch? It absolutely is. No problem that I know of. Okay, let's see. Quick question. This is from I'm gonna mess up your name. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say Talonzo. I hope I'm saying it right. Talonzo says, hey Phil, big fan. Always have fun with how many myths you have debunked for me. Okay, this is quick question. Any advice in a good quality priced cabinet? Well, with cabinets, a guitar cabinet, to me what's great about them is they're, they're constructed. Sometimes they're constructed very poorly to save money and sometimes they're constructed very poorly for sound. So it's funny that way. So a perfect example, I always like this one as my favorite example is Engel amplifiers use plywood, not plywood. I'm sorry, they use particle board for a lot of their baffles and a lot of the parts of their cabinets. Because the density is really sounds really good. They're not the first and definitely not the only company to do that. A lot of companies have used particle board and I've heard cabinets made of particle board sound fantastic. So I don't necessarily have a, you know, I have all the cabinets, so to speak. Like I have the pine cabinets. I have a, I have a 13 ply birch, you know, void free birch cabinet. You know, I have all these types of cabinets and I don't know necessarily that I really hear a massive difference in the cabinets, the materials. Like this is back to like the tone wood debate. Almost like the tone cabinet wood debate. I would say if you're asking me to assign a percentage to each thing that matters in the cabinet, I'm going to say just for, to make life easy for me, 60% is the speaker. So that's 60% of the sound regardless. So in other words, if you have a great cabinet, it's made of the most perfect wood, it's hand carved, it's mesh, it's magical and you put the worst, you know, dog crap speaker in there, I'm gonna say the spe. The cabinet's not gonna sound great. There's just no way. So I would say the speaker matters most. Then after the speaker, I would say the design of the cabinet matters next. By far. By far. Now, remember, we're talking guitar. If we talk bass, we have a different. We have to talk a little differently because definitely design of the bass cabinet is really huge. In fact, I would say it almost equals to the, to the speaker almost because of the fact that you know that because the, the bass is so intense, you know, the frequency is so intense. What does that cabinet do with it? But in a guitar, I would say the design of the cabinet would be the next thing that's important. And then the materials really have to do, in my opinion, with durability. Like, how durable is it? You know, a pine cabinet's great until you drag it on a tour. Right. They stay soft wood, it dents easy. You know, especially the ones that don't have, you know, metal corners. Somebody was saying, I think somebody says, don't get fast. Freddy33 said, don't get particle board wet. Perfect example. Right? Well, not even, don't even worry about getting wet. Just. It can get moisture. You know, it could all. All kinds of things. And the particle board could start falling apart. You know, everybody's seen like chunks of particle board come off where screws went in and st. So yeah, I think the material, the material matters. But I would say definitely, to me, it's. I would say in an order. Okay, this is why I'm laughing. Because the third, the, the fourth thing always makes me laugh. I've been asked this question so many times that I can't believe it's a thing I get asked which is like, hey, Phil, does a hand wired cabinet matter? And I'm always like, oh my God, this is so funny. Like in other words, clipping it onto the tab of the speaker versus soldering onto the speaker. You know, I have heard some people say, yes, I've heard them say, yeah, it's better. It's stronger signal path, it's better, whatever. I definitely agree with the whole. Hey, soldered connections are. They're stable. More stable than a clip, because a clip could vibrate loose. Because remember, the speaker's vibrating all the time. Everything's vibrating. So of course, you know, a connection can come loose. Right. I've said this before. The first thing you do as a guitar tech when you get a guitar in for repair, doesn't matter what it is, is you Check all the screws. You tighten all the screws. It was one of those things. Like, I definitely wasn't the first. Like most of my ideas, I didn't come up with them. I just found somebody with a great idea and I said, okay, I'll follow their lead on this. And so one of the things on my repair sheet was tighten all screws, yes or no. And customers would laugh because I would check it and they're like, oh, you tighten all the screws. Like, oh. I'm like, yeah, it's very important because your guitar is vibrating. It's vibrating. All the screws are coming loose. That's how it works. Everything's coming loose. It's, it's vibrating. So same with cabinets. So I think a soldered connection is more stable. However, my point is, let's say there's four things. I don't know why I got my thumb out. Four things that matter to a cabinet. I'm going to say in order. To me it's speakers first, cabinet design, cabinet material, and then whether or not it's hand wired or not. Those are the four things. And then, and then actually here's what's even funnier when we talk about cabinet design. What's almost as important as cabinet design sometimes is whether or not the cabinet's on the ground or not. If it's on wheels, if it's flat on the ground, if it's touching the surface or if it's suspended off the ground. You know, massive difference. But so to answer your question, I would say unless you're hyper focused on durability, the cabinet material is not as extreme for a guitar. Like I said, in a bass. One of the things I always liked was Mesa Boogie would make sealed bass cabinets. And they. One of the guys at Mesa Boogie showed me this years ago where he took a lighter, like a, like a, you know, it had a good flame on it, like a three inch flame. And he would, they would play bass to the cabinet and he would run the lighter around the seams and all kinds of spots on the cabinet to see if the, like almost like a Indiana Jones movie to see if it flickered from any air escaping. They wanted zero air to escape this cabinet. It didn't have any ports or anything. It was just sealed and then. And if it did have ports, they wanted all the air coming out of there. They didn't want any, any loss that. So again, I know there. And materials in a base cabinet can matter. They can be more very important. And again, I'm saying I'm not saying materials don't matter. I'm just saying in my, in a hierarchy, it's like a guitar. It's like this tone would matter. Yeah. Can we, can we shuffle that down a lot lower than let's say pickups and strings before we get there? You know, So I don't know. This is my, that's my thought for there. This was from Eric who says, hey, what are good indications of worn strings? The, you know, it's funny is strings not only a lot of players say the word, the term dead, you know, strings are dead. As a bass player, every bass player can answer this question way better than every guitar player. Every bass player can tell you. You can tell if you. For all you guitar players I know a lot of you are not bass players or dual role musicians. Right. Where you play bass and guitar. If you're a guitar player and you're a band. If you want to see how dead your bass player strings are, here's how you check. You walk up to their amp and look at their high frequency control on their amp. If it's on 10, their bass strings are dead. Is it bass player? As your strings go dead as they. In other words, as the highs dissipate because they're just kind of more muted, you just keep driving up the high frequencies. Think of this. That's why so many bass amps have multiple high frequency adjustments. You can, you can really adjust the highs. You can just keep adjusting out how dead those bass strings are. So guitar player, you know, if you find you have to drive your highs a little bit, a lot of guitar players, I find if you're definitely playing rock or metal, pinch harmonics become harder on dead strings for sure. To the point where the strings really dead. It's really hard to pull them off especially as well. And I'm not talking about harmonics, open string harmonics, I'm talking about actually pinch harmonics. We're squealing and stuff. Those become really problematic. The thing about this is there is this thing that's been said for years, which is if your strings get too old, too dead, they, they, they're stretched out. There's no good. I don't know that. I mean I literally had guitar players bring me a guitar and they had the same strings for 20 years. And I'm not exaggerating. I wish I was like original strings. Like this guitar is 20 years ago. The original strings, they don't want to change them. They're like, don't change them. In fact, right on my sheet, do not change strings, right? You're like, all right, I gotta do a setup, not change the strings. So I mean, you know, different strokes for different folks. Me personally, I've said this before. I used to like strings when they were bright. Always, you know, guitar strings right when they were new, which was the worst thing to like because you're always buying new strings. And then somehow over time, I just kind of found that I like them a little bit more. A little more dead, a little more muted. So I like them after the second week of playing, first week of playing, and then from that then on. And then to me, then it's not about their sound anymore. It's like when they get crusty, you know, they just get old and crusty. And one thing you can do to stop that is clean your strings. The best way to clean your strings, the best way is with a clean, dry cloth. After every play, you do one wipe on top of the strings. And if you can put it underneath the strings in the fretboard and slide it on there and get it under there, it's fine. You could use a paper towel if you. So, like, just. I only caution you because paper towels and stuff, although sound very, you know, like no big deal, they can scratch the paint on your guitar if that's, you know, if you don't want little pick squirrels and stuff. So I mean, some of you guys, I don't want you to, you know, take your $4,000 PRS and scratch the finish with a paper towel. But your strings and stuff, you know, just wipe them down, don't you. You know, there's string cleaner, there's all kinds of stuff you can use. I don't prefer to use any of that stuff. I find it's all. It's all prolonging the inevitable. So if you use a string cleaner, first of all, and again, this isn't my personal experience, like me playing. This is just watching guitar players over years and selling this stuff to them and watching what happens. I feel like almost everyone who cleans their strings, eventually those strings just break anyways. I mean, not, not like, like in a year. I mean, like in a week, they just break. So I find the best way to prolong the life of your strings is just to wipe them down constantly after every time you play. Just every time. If you touch the strings, wipe them down, get all the oils and dirt out of there and. And Then Model Burrow 6174 says microfiber cloth for the win. Yes, absolutely. That's what I use. I use the the sweet. No, Costco. Sweetwater, Costco. The Costco shop tales that you buy. You know, the yellow pack. That's fine. Or you just get whatever ones you want. Just. Yeah, cheap microfiber cloth is absolutely what I actually use. You see me use it all the time in videos I have. If you watch my. If you pay attention to the videos, I don't know why you would be paying this close attention. You always see a white towel and a yellow towel sometimes in the background of a video. And specifically, I use cotton towels that are white, and then I use microfibers that are yellow. And then I use it for different things. And if you're ever curious, for instance, let me give an example. I use microfiber cloths with guitar polish to do the guitar bodies. I use microfiber cloths with no polish whatsoever to wipe down strings. I use cotton cloths, white cotton towels to put fretboard conditioner on fretboards. I don't use microfiber on fretboard. Fretboards. And then for those of you going, why, it's because those little stupid little microfiber little yellow hairs get in your fretboard and the little marks, and then you're picking them out of there. Because again, I'm waiting for the customer to come pick up a guitar, and I'm like, ah, I don't want them to see this crap in their fretboard. So you clean it all out. So it's just I find that the cotton towels don't leave as many fibers behind. So that's what I use. Again, trying, you know, and a lot of these techniques I've used over the years is really more about. I was. Again, I was just trying to make a living making people happy with your guitar. So a lot of times when you ask me these questions, they are literally, yeah, here's a good idea. But also here's. In fact, here's something I would suggest. Most suggestions I give to you. I don't know if they're good for you or not. You'll have to decide that for yourself. But if you're a guitar tech, they're absolutely good for you. And I believe that because I may not be smart, but I did make a good living as a guitar tech. So I know. And how you gauge success as working on guitars is repeat business. And my repeat business was very, very good. It's because they like my haircut. Anyways. Okay, let me jump over and grab one of these. Drink some water for a second. Okay. Also, antique rocker sent me a Question earlier. I think email. Let me go over an answer I have. Let me see if it's antique rocker. I thought it was. If it's not you, I'm answering a question somebody asked. All right, I forgot who asked me this question. I apologize. It's probably antique rocker. Let's see if I'm right. Yes, antique rocker. I have the answer to your question. So antique rocker sent me a question saying, hey, there's a question from 5 7, 2025 and he says, hey, did you find out the story behind Stack's logo? What is your opinion of acoustic bases? Okay, that's two questions. I feel like that's like two for the price of one. No, I'm just kidding. So acoustic. Let me start with easy one. Acoustic basses. Used to love them, used to play them. I used to have a Tacoma Thunderchie which was like that's the holy grail acoustic base in my opinion. It's one of the reasons why I hate the fact that Tacoma went away. It was just a fantastic base. But I eventually sold it just because, you know, the problem with acoustic bass for me is anytime I was going to jam with somebody and they were into acoustic, say they would acoustic set, they would like bring your acoustic bass and then I would bring my acoustic bass with a small amp. And after a while I'm like, screw it, I'm just going to bring my regular bass. And then now what I do is I just turn the tone control back down or I put a foam pad underneath the bass and mute the strings a little bit to get a little bit more not acoustic sound, just a little softer tone or I like that. I've actually decided I like the tape wounds on a bass. So if, if you guys ever see my Stu ham bass, you see it from time to time behind me. It has black strings on it. Those are tape wound strings. I have a video about that if you want to watch it explaining why I use that. I prefer a tape wound string on a bass for an acoustic set. By far. I think it sounds really good. And the only thing you're missing is the aesthetics. I know that's part of having acoustic bass. So you look like you're part of the group, you know, but you know, no one cares. No one's looking. Look, the kind of gigs I play, if you're lucky, if you're lucky, there's you know, 10 people and if somebody looks up in their meal once, that's probably be luck. Good luck. Anyway, so. So back to your other question. So his other Question was about the Stu Mac logo. I actually reached out to Stu Mac. I talked to Brock. Brock is the VP of sales for Stumac. So what did Brock say? So let me just tell you what I sent him. I. If you guys remember, a couple weeks ago, we were talking about the Stu Mac logo. Let's share that with you guys. Because somebody said, hey, the dots are in the wrong spot. And I hate that I can't find a bigger picture of this. You know what? What if I just type in Stu Mac logo? Sure. Okay, here it is. I found something maybe. Yeah, it's funny. Okay, let me just share this. All right, so here's the logo right here. And the question was these two dots. If this is the 12th fret, this doesn't make any sense either direction. This logo does not make sense. So some people were saying they thought it was a ukulele. Some people thought it was a banjo. I saw some people said it was Martin because Martin's app like that. I mentioned that I did a review of a guitar that had fret dots in this position. But what did Stu Mack say? What did the 30 minute discussion on Friday about the Stumac logo yield? This is what it yield. The official response from Stumac is, and I'm sorry if I'm doing this. I'm just trying to get back to the screen I was in. I said, hi, Brock, I have a question. It came up on the podcast. What is the Stu Mac logo guitar fretboard based on? He said, hi, Phil. Stop sending me stupid questions. No, I just. Okay. He says, hey, Phil. It is part of the legacy of the evolution of our logo. It originally dates back to the 80s when it first appeared on the Stuart McDonald Guitar Maker Supply logo. For those that probably don't remember because a lot of you guys are newer and some of you guys even that are playing guitar for 20 years probably weren't guitar techs or into the guitar repair stuff. Like I was Guitar Sumac before it was a website. It was just like Carvin and like Musician's Friend. You would get your Stumac catalog sent to you and I would. You would dream about like oh, calipers. So yeah, so he's talking about originally like in the 80s and when they used to send out the books is what he's talking about that had the logo. So anyways, so back to his thing. So it first appeared on the Stuart McDaniel guitar maker supply logo, which would be on their books at that time. It had more frets and more position markers. As decades ticked By. We simplified it into the version we have now. That's the answer. So it's a piece of a bigger fretboard picture they originally had. So I'm gonna go stick with my original thought, which is it's based on some kind of Martin or something that had the double dots like we talked about. So. So that's the answer. It was. It's an. An adaptation. It's in a redefined, smaller version. Logo, more succinct. I actually made a memory. I think I did a pretty good educated guess. Remember, one of my guesses was somebody in marketing, probably. They hired a marketing company who basically redid it. And that's basically what he's saying it was. It's been adapted. And it's. That's why it looks like that. It's just, you know, somebody did it. Somebody says, what's a catalog? I know. Catalogs. Oh, yeah. Brian says, dear Phil, you have a problem. Signed Stu Mac. You know what's funny is this what I told you was what I sent him and what he said back. What I. What you didn't. If you were keen and paying attention, it's what he didn't say that says too much. His response was, hi, Phil. And then he answered the question. He didn't say, wow, that's a weird ass thing for a bunch of adults to be talking about on a Friday night. Like, notice he didn't even. He didn't even find it strange. He thought, yeah, that's what a bunch of nerds would talk about on Friday. By the way, I'm proud to be called that. I think so. So. Okay. Oh, my. Okay, Amanda, that's. That's. That's amazing. So Amanda's says catalogs are magazines for poor people. I had a lot of them. Amanda, you're really messing with my head. Because I had so many catalogs, like, I would stare at. To me, it was the Carven catalog and Musician's Friend catalog. I would reread them, and some people are going, what do you read? Anything they would print, I would just reread them over and over and over again and over again and over again. I would read a musician's friend catalog 50 times. I'm not exaggerating. Just every day, each page. What else? What else is like what? I read guitar magazines. I never had the money for guitar subscription. Never? Well, not never. I mean, by the time I did, they got. Magazines died by the time I could actually justify a subscription. But I would. I would. I would like. I would. My favorite thing about Traveling was. Anytime I traveled, I could justify buying a magazine. So I go buy the magazine. But so, you know, my favorite thing in the world is when the used bookstores took off where I live. Like book bins and stuff. And that's where I would get all my guitar magazines. Go down there and get them for a buck fifty, two bucks. And I remember, I remember to this day. I remember like you'd go in there and then there would be one with like, you know, slash on the COVID and it was like 350. And I was like $3.50. And then. And then they'd have one with somebody I didn't care about. But it was like a dollar. And I was like, oh, I gotta get the $1. So you'd get the $1. But yeah, I just remember. Yeah. Catalogs were. Is poor people's magazines is definitely. I never thought of it that way. It's kind of makes me sad. But also, you know. Yeah, it was great. Yeah. Matt. The Matt Lewis Experience of Sam Ash and the Musician's Friend catalogs were the best. Sam Ash. I would. I would sign up to get a free catalog from Sam Ash and I get one and then I would never get another one for a long time. Like musicians friend, for those who remember this. Do you guys remember the thing about Musician Friend that was crazy was there was two things that could find you anywhere. Like, I would go, like, I'd like. I like join the army, I'm gone. And the Musician's Friend would find its way to the. To the barracks. Like, no change of address form, no nothing. Like film ignite. This is like. And the. To me it was Record of the Month club and Musician's Friend would find you wherever you go. You can. You could move 10 times and never do a forwarding address. And you would get your Record of the Month club and you would get your mags or your Musician's Friend. That's what you get. Sasha says the Sears was a wish book. So the Sears was the book that I. So I think it was a J.C. penney's book and a Sears book. Those are my. That's what I look. When I was a kid, I would like, look at the Sears book because that's where I would dream about like the toys I wanted. Oh man. Like GI Joe's and stuff. Right. Luckily for me, like a lot of kids that, you know, like for most of my life, my mom was a single mom, so. So like a lot of kids, the great thing about GI Joes and stuff was effectively Toys like Hot Wheels are a perfect thing. Buying a Hot Wheel or buying a GI Joe or a Star wars figure was not a huge thing for my mom. She would buy me that. But, like, playsets and stuff like that. Like, you'd just like, what? You never get that. You have to make your playsets out of styrofoam cups and cardboard. But, you know, like, you know, so it's. So the catalogs were great for, like, not only just dreaming of stuff, but blueprints, Cobra Headquarters. And you're like, I'm gonna cut that out of cardboard. I'm gonna make that. And then. And then steal all your mom's straws. My mom would be very upset. I would steal her straws all the time. And so. So by the way, straws are cannons. Stick a straw in a upside down styrofoam cup that looks like just like the cannons in Star wars and they could shoot each other. Okay, all right, I'm done with that. Let's go to talk about guitar stuff. Actually, let's do something even better than that. Now it's time for Guitar of the Week. Let's do Guitar of the Week. So Guitar of the Week is hilarious because someone brought it up earlier. So let me tell you what's going on. So if you guys recall, I did a video for Hills Guitars. So I got a Hills guitar. I did a video of it. Went over really, really well. It was one of those videos. It just got a lot of views and everybody seemed to engage with it really well. But if you recall, there's more to the story. There's two things in the story. One, if you call recall, I critiqued a few things. I reached out to Hills Guitars and said, hey, here's the issues I found. And they said, we're going to fix those issues. And a lot of you seemed really impressed with that attitude. So, you know, they've reached out. They talked to me. We talked about, like, could they send me the new guitar? I said, no, I wasn't interested in that. So what's going to happen with Hill's guitar in the future is I said, can you send me all of the. Because believe it or not, it wasn't just my suggestions. They were going through the comment sections of the video and reading your suggestions. A lot of you guys were like, what's up with no lefty guitars? Why no seven strings? Why no this? So I'll be doing a. I guess like an outline of all the things that they did to adjust and fix and improve our suggestions as A community so that I'll be doing. But they did send me this and I thought this is pretty funny. So they sent me a bass, sent me a Hills bass. It's gonna look familiar if you were here earlier in the show. This is a Hills bass and it looks very 80s to me, but it looks cool. Now I'm sharing this with you because it's pretty cool. But funny enough, when the comment came in earlier about the pickup and the sound, I find it's also very mid heavy which is why I adjusted for it in my EQ in my mixer. Now there's a couple things about this bass that are, that are important. This bass to me is the ultimate bass if you're a guitar player. So I'm going to share. I'm only going to play one, but I want to share you why this is important. So this bass is made in Indonesia. It's super light. I mean it's super light. I would say five and a half, six pounds. Like it's super light. I mean it's like air, okay. This satin white and they make it in satin black by the way. That's that back compartment where I can tell you for a fact because the controls are right here and then the output jack's there. There's definitely got to be room for a battery. But maybe I'll put a preamp in it and I'll share that with you guys and we'll, we'll see. I don't know. But anyways, volume tone, very basic. Individual saddles right here. And of course one thing that the Hills guys do that I like is that even though it's headless, it hangs on a hanger. I know a lot of you guys that are hate headless guitars are like this thing is ugly and it is, but they stay in tune, they play great. What's great about this One is the 30 inch scale. And the other thing that's great about it is, is it's just like my Keisel 30 inch scale base. I know it's hard to see, but just understand they're the same size. These are both 30 inch scale basses. If you're going to ask me to compare them, I'm going to tell you right now my Keisel is way better, but it's also a little over $2,000 more. Not exaggerating. So yeah, if it's not better, that would be stupid. So. So this is 30 inch scale. This is 599. So one thing I, I don't understand, they. They put these cool rubber Feet here and then there's a way to that way it can stand on the ground and lean it up against the wall. It's really cool. But if you leave a guitar jacket in there, then it doesn't work. Unless I guess you use it angled. But I didn't use it angled. I'm going to play it for you. So what do we have? We have a five piece neck. We have maple, walnut. Maple, walnut, maple. We have a rosewood fretboard. We have 24 stainless steel frets, one pickup. We have a truss rod adjustment at the base. It's dual action truss rod. Very cool. And then I like the individual saddles. These are pretty cool. Very easy to adjust right here. They're not very hard. I know some people ask, are they really hard? They're not. They're very easy. And then again, what's great is they stay in tune. So that's why I like headless instruments. I play headless instruments way more than I thought I'd ever play. I'm backing up so I can switch cameras. There we go. Look at that. Sound would be good maybe, huh? I have no sound. Why don't I have sound? Oh, I do. I have sound. I can hear it. You guys can't hear it. Let me adjust a couple things for you. Now, something to mention that's important is the. As you guys know, I've been writing songs and doing stuff and. And you've been hearing those songs whether you know it or not. And almost all my last, like, let's say two dozen videos. Almost. I'd say not 40, not 40. 80% of the songs I've been playing are from the tracks I've been writing for the album, which is just to have copyright material on YouTube. So anyways, my point is I've been recording almost everything solely on the keys base, which is 30 scale. So obviously I'm a fan of 30 scale, which is why I think. I don't think hills made a 13 scale bass because of me, but I think they decided to do the, the, the push this model first because of the fact that I've hyped it up a lot. Remember, the Hills guys are a big fan of the podcast, and so a lot of what they've done is in reaction to stuff you've said. Let me, let me play a little bit. I'll try not to mess it up. Okay, let's see what I can do. All right, ready? I'm gonna say this track. Let's see. Let's try it. Okay, now what I thought that'd be fun. By the way, I'd like to point out two things I need to improve this. But for some reason I procrastinate every week and I decide what the guitar or the base of the week or whatever I'm going to do is usually decided about an hour for the show and then I kind of lay up some tracks real fast and do this. I think next week will be the first week. I think I'm going to try to do it by. By Wednesday so I know what is actually going on. But let me go ahead. I want to show you. I made a track real quick earlier, like literally why I was three minutes late to the show with the guitar and a drum track. And I'm going to add the bass in and I want you to hear how this bass what I was talking about. The sweet spot, right? The sweet spot. Pickup right here. I wanted to show you guys why I think it kicks in a mix really well. So let me go ahead and show you this track. Here we go. Now another thing I want to show you is I was using a pick but obviously. But I. I want to point out that this is why I'm saying I like this for guitar players. I've been preaching this for years. As you guys know, I've talked about the Ibanez 32 inch scale basses. I've talked about so many 30 inch scales, the squier ones. I'm a big proponent of this. If you don't want to spend 600 for a fancy headless bass that sounds good and plays good, I understand that. Just I really recommend short scale basses. First of all, keep in mind that Sir Paul McCartney essentially played a shorter scale bass. A lot of players play shorter scale basses. I personally think shorter scale basses tend to have a very musical sound to them. More mids. They cut and mix really well. If you guys watch. When I play with Larry Mitchell I use my Warwick a lot. My Warwick is a 32 inch scale bass. It's not a full scale bass. Nothing wrong with full scale basses. I play them too. I love them. But what's great about for guitar players is I've said this many times for many years, which is every guitar player is a bass player just by, by just by how it works. So. So it's a lot easier. This scale length is very easy for most guitar players. You're not going to have a lot of problems on a 30 inch scale. I mean it's just, it's just not. For those of you like, yeah, but it's still, let's say, four and a half inches longer than a Strat. Yeah. But you're also not playing chords now, so you understand you're not going to be, you know, you're not doing any kind of weird, you know, patterns like this, you know, with your fingers sprawled out, you know, like a spider. You're going to be mostly sticking to single notes at a time. And so obviously this works really good. And to get the muscle memory on a 30 inch scale is really nice. So that was really cool. I thought I'd share with you guys. Let me unplug this again. The thing that's crazy is how light it is. The thing I don't know is, is I want to see. I thought. And we'll see if we can confirm this. I want to go to their spec sheet and see if you guys don't mind. So what do we have? A C shape? I agree. It's a C shaped neck for sure. 30 inch scale. Yep. It's a truss rod. It's the standard type. It's a four bolt on neck fretboard. Indian laurel is the fretboard. So I was wrong. It wasn't rosewood. It's Indian laurel. Light matte finish, 24 stainless steel frets. I was right about that 12 inch radius. The nut is bone. Oh, I didn't remember that. It's really cool. Little look. Look at that. That's pretty cool. And then I didn't even notice that. All right, let's go back to. This inlay is Perla Pearloid. Okay. Hardware D'Addario strings and. Okay, cool. So I was a little concerned. They shipped this to me and said, hey, would you check this out? So. So you understand this was very important. It was like, hey, give us some feedback on this bass. And I even made a joke. I said, I can't give you feedback until Ralph plays it. I had Ralph play it. I said, I'll kind of know if it's weird. My biggest concern so you know, is that it's. It's, you know. Come on, man. This is a. This is a look, right? I don't actually, I don't detest it. It's. It's. I think it's cool. To me it looks retro, not futuristic. To me. It reminds me of the 80s almost. But what's cool is it came with a deluxe gig bag and I just didn't know if they sent it to me that way. But no, it comes with a deluxe gig bag. So 599 deluxe gig bag. I Put a link down below if you want to use that link to check them out, I'd appreciate that. But can you bite the headstock? Probably. The one thing that's nice about it is that because the way they design it, it's like the strandbergs. See how it sits up higher? It doesn't sit low because the way they carve this out. And this is also probably important to show for those that are fans of Dr. Andre Flood's channel. You'll see why he'll like this here. So it sits here, this position, so you can play it. Or look at that. And then now you're in this position, which is a very, very comfortable, especially if you slap like me. So very cool that it does the two different positions. So it's actually thought out. It's not just a goofy shape. It's. It's there. You know what it reminds me of? Does anyone remember. Let's see how. How good some of you guys are. Does anyone remember this? There was a TV show in the 80s or maybe the 70s, and it was from space. And for some reason the spaceships reminded me of this. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? It wasn't Battlestar Galactica, but it looked like a cheap version of Battlestar Galactica. It wasn't Buck Rogers, but anyone knows the answer. Put it in the. But that's what that reminds me of because I remember my neighbors, the neighbor's kid had that toy and it was white. It was off white like that, and it was a spaceship. So it kind of remind me of this. Kevin says it's tough. It's thought out. And it's a goofy shape. It is a goofy shape. Look, the whole. I always think these guitars look like puzzle pieces to me. Like they're missing puzzle piece. The great thing about basses like this or guitars like this, as you know, I'm a. A fan of the. Of the eart guitars. And of course, hills and stuff is. Look. And of course Ibanez makes these two, so, you know, But Ibanez is their thousand dollars, you know, made in Indonesia. Nothing wrong with that. But to me it's. Oh, Star Academy. I'm pretty sure you're right. You know what? Before I go on a tirade about that, can we look up Star Academy to make sure that I'm not crazy images. No, that's not what it was. Space show. It might have been. Come on. So the spaceship. Let's put spaceship. Let's see. Ready? Oh, it's close. This is close. But it's not it. Hmm. All right. Okay. So anyways, somebody says Morgan Mindy, probably Mary Morgan Mindy, Mindy, Jefferson Spaceship. Suzanne says where are Hills made? All Hills are made in Indonesia. Well, okay, take that back. Because my understanding is. So Hills is the same company as Hex. They don't hide that by the way. So Hex is a Korean based company and then for distribution in Europe pretty much everywhere other than the Asian markets I believe so us Everywhere else it's Hills because of the fact that they told me the. I don't remember who but somebody owns the trademark on the name Hex so they couldn't use the word Hex. So if you look up Hex guitars, it's going to look like an identical company because it is, it's just Hills is the branding H I L S But these are made in Indonesia. So 5.99 for this base made Indonesia with a deluxe gigabyte. And the gig bag is great. It's the same quality that I did the review of the, of the guitar. I plan to do a deep dive on this. There's a reason why I didn't do the deep dive. They didn't ask me to do a review and I was like I was going to do it. And so you know, I looked and it looked like to me some of these are out of stock. And they get another shipment, a large shipment. Just I'm telling you, when I talked to the owner, he was saying they get a large shipment in the first week of April. So, so you know, so he, he. So I thought okay, I don't want, I want to do a deep dive. And then you guys go and you know, not you guys specifically, this is a much smaller audience than, than a main video can pull. So I didn't want, you know, somebody to be like hey, they're out. So that, so anyone interested? You'll get a heads up. So if you guys look and there's something out of stock, it's April is when they get their shipment. He. It's, it's in route right now as they, as we speak. So which is when I'll drop the video of. I haven't got them yet but they're going to send me their left handed guitar. I'll have fun playing that. Their new seven string and their new improved six string versus my feedback of that last video and I'll put that all in one video and we'll go through that stuff. So lost in bass, Lost in space, Lost in base. It's not, it's going to drive me crazy. You know what? Let's try this space show in the 70s with a white ship. Let's see what the Internet does. Spaceships in the seventies. I'm pretty sure. Oh, we found it. What is it? I'm looking at it. I'm gonna share it with you guys. Okay. The Eagle transporter. Okay, ready? Maybe I'm crazy. I think this is what. This reminds me. My neighbor's kid had this ship as seen in Space 1999. A signature passenger ship model in Space 1999. So the show was called Space 1999. It said, okay, there you go. That's what it remind me of. Because it was like, see the black, it had the white and the black. And it just kind of remind me of that era. Like this bass should. Like that's. If there was a band on that ship playing music, they would have this bass. Space 1999. I just remember, like said it's one of those shows like you forget. I just remember, like you. Because, you know, we didn't have it like we have now, where you just watch whatever you want. Like it would come on and you'd see a couple episodes and then, you know, they come on when you, you know, your parents. I'm dating myself right now. They come on when your parents didn't let you in the house. I know I'm not alone. I know. I know some of you guys understand what I'm saying when I say that, like, you were like. Like you were. Had to be at home by a certain time and you weren't allowed in the house until a certain time. Like, you know. Okay, so anyways, but. But the neighbor's kid had that toy and we would play with it all the time. Okay. All right, we got to get back on track here. I'm going to grab something amend to sent. She'll always have us back on track. Let's see. Step van Joe says what actually kills the strings quicker? Dirt or finger oil? Oils. You know what? I don't know the answer. You know, I'm just. I could pull, you know, from my ass some. All kinds of theories, but that's all they are. My guess is anything that, you know, causes the string to oxidize and, you know, it corrodes essentially is what's happening, right? The metals corroding. So I don't know. Oils, dirt, all the above. Water, moisture, all that stuff. It's metal. Everything that makes metal, Everything that you want to keep away from metal, you just keep away from your strings. But. But I will tell you. That your hands are the delivery system for most everything that's going to ruin the strings, which is why I say you should wipe them down. By the way, the. The better thing is wash your hands before you play. And if you can do that every time you play. But sometimes you have to understand, and I've talked about this before. This is absolute fact. There's just no way around this. Some players just the makeup of their skin, and they're like. I have very dry hands. I've said this before. My hands are so dry, I can't open those plates. Plastic bags at the. At the, you know, in the grocery store. I just can't do it. In fact, my wife is so accustomed to it now, she'll. She'll go grab tomatoes, and then she'll grab the bag and like, open it and hand me the bag because she knows I'll be sitting there like a. Like this forever unless I touch. I usually touch. Like, they usually water the plants. So if I touch them water, I can get some grip. So that's my hands. Some of you have really oily hands. Some of you guys have. You guys sweat a lot. You have really sweaty hands. I mean, and so all those things affect it. Some of you guys, you know, have more acid in your. In your sweat than others. Right? It's usually what you eat, and that's usually a big part of it. So that. All that, all that all changes the lifespan of a string. So. And I can tell you if you have. If you have any of those issues. Just like I said, wash your hands and wipe your strings. So. All right. It says Bob says, hey, Phil, can you recommend a guitar setup kit? Would like to learn to set up guitars. Set guitars up? Yes. So I have been using the Music Nomad setup kit for a while now. This is. And I've had my ups and downs with it. I'm going to share it with you guys. Do I have a thing, by the way, if you guys choose to buy this from Sweetwater or Guitar Center, I don't think Guitar center sells this stuff. If you can use one of my links, that'd be great. So I can get that 1% or whatever I get. Just kidding. I always say that. But then the truth is I don't even know if they pay me. I'll pay me correctly. Anyways. I always feel weird sending you guys stuff. And then I go, I don't even know if they're actually paying us half the time. You know what? Just thanks for being here. How about that? You can choose to buy it however you want. Okay, so Music Nomad kit. Let me. Let me show you the kit. Let me show you where I'm at with it. I will be doing a video on it. I have decided to do the video. Two things I will share with you guys right now. I. I will be doing two videos that will be out within 30 days. Both. Hold on. As you guys seen, the frequency of the videos have increased a lot. It's because I'm moving videos along faster. Hold on. Where is it at? Music Nomad setup kit. Come on, guys. You know, one day I want to have one of those cool podcasts where, like you ever noticed, like, the really fancy podcast, people always have this. Like, they always have somebody and they're always like, named Steve or Mike or Dave or something. And like Dave that look that up for me. And then they look it up. I'm always looking at my own stuff. I'm like us. Sorry, I got jokes. Okay, the Keep it simple kit. Okay, so we'll do Keep it simple, Keep it simple kit. Let me show you what I don't like about it. So you have a heads up. I will be doing a video. They have a great video on it. I will tell you what my problem was. I've resolved the issue and I don't know why. It's a starter kit bundle. I don't want the starter kit bundle. They don't have just the Keep it simple kit. Why is this such a problem? Keep it simple. Yeah. Every time I do brings me this $160 thing. Probably because part of the problem is there, you know, why I'm doing this. I should drink some water. I just want the kit. Precision gauge set. No, I want. Do they not sell it individual? They have to sell it individually. Now. This is taking forever to get to. I might just give up and quit. There is no way that is buried this deep into the searches. Okay, I. I literally give up. I'm on Sweetwater and it's not coming up as a kit. It comes up as a. Is a $160 thing mixed with some other stuff, but I can't find it by itself. Guitar tech kit. Precision kits. Ultimate home guitar work. Bass station kit. I don't know why it's not coming up as. So can I. I'm gonna share this. This stupid thing. But understand, don't. Don't buy this, whatever this is, this whole thing, unless you want to, I guess. So the kit specifically I'm talking about that I'm showing you right here is The Keep it simple kit, I believe that kit is 70 bucks, right? I can tell you right now, you can choose. You can buy this kit, which is very. It's very overpriced. It just is, right? They set up the convenience for you. You can choose to buy the kit. If you just want to keep it in a nice case and keep it all together, it's great. Or you can look at the kit specifically, and then, you know, which, like I said, I'm circling right now. So it's going to have the string action gauge. It's going to have the radius blocks. It's going to have some gap gauges. And then here's what I don't like about it. It comes with a guitar pick. And if you've seen how they do it, which is really. This is really pissing me off. Why Guitar kit. It's got. Somebody's got to have it just by the kit. I want to know what it is by itself. Every single search is drink. Bringing me to this $160 bundle. I wonder if they stopped making it. I'm having the worst, weirdest luck with music Nomad today. Yeah, I'm gonna go back to you guys. Is anyone else finding anything different? Somebody says, will it work on bass? Yes. Yes, it will work on bass because the string action gauges would be correct for bass, and the radius gauges will work, and then the gap gauges will work. Anyways, my problem with this, they give you this guitar pick essentially, to work like a capo. Just use a capo. That's the part I don't like. I don't like the guitar pick. I kind of feel like, look, criticism is what it is. Here's my criticism to the music Nomad guys. The Keep it simple guitar setup kit is great. It's effective. It works especially if you watch any of the deep dive. Now, you essentially could use that to disable. To figure out. Just let me keep it easy to figure out exactly how I'm doing it from that. The problem I have is, is that for the price, see, somebody says somebody has. Amazon has it for 59 bucks, right? For 59 bucks. It's great. Except for I think it should have came with a capo, not a guitar pick. I think that's kind of silly. I. I don't like using the guitar pick. Just use a capo. They want you to guitar use the guitar pick like a capo. On the first fret. Just use a capo. But it's a good kit. It. I used it over and over and over again and over and over again. And I told you I have my issues with it. There's a bunch of stuff, but essentially what I wanted to figure out, it was like, how effective was it? So I would go over and it's. It's effective enough for 60 bucks. I think that it's about the easiest thing I can figure out to send you guys. Like, in other words, if you're, you know, sending you guys for information, that's about as easy it comes to. So a lot of you guys are saying 60 bucks on Amazon. So, yeah, see, 59 on Sweetwater. I. I don't know why every time I'm searching on Sweetwater, it's taking me to this bundle. But 60 bucks is what I remember. Actually, I remember it being more than that. So I wonder if the price has come down. But 60 bucks it is. And if you look at it, and I'm just. The reason I'm telling you this is because I just don't want to see in the comments like, Phil, this is like $3 worth of stuff, kinda. But they put it together for you and it's. I mean, here's the real thing. To me, that string action guide is still the best one I have. I've had been in meetings with the people at Stumac. I flat out told them to make. To change their string action guide to a black one. And I wouldn't praise and market the music nomad one again. I told him I have no allegiance to either side. I don't really care. Right. Neither one of them is paying me anything. So I just go. I just, you know, I just won't recommend your string action guide, the Stumac one, because I don't like it. The black on silver, it's too hard for me to see. I like the black with the light. And I said, actually, you should make it luminate. You should make it to where it bright, it glows in the dark. Even so that if they're shadowing, you know, it kind of pop out a little bit more. But they don't seem to be interested in it. I almost want to make mine one myself, but I would definitely want it luminous, so it would. So like I said, when you have shadowing and stuff, it pops. So that's what I would recommend. Okay. And if I find the right link, I will. Well, here, you know what? Let's do this. Look. Okay. Something is seriously, seriously wrong. I'm not, I'm not making this up, guys, because I just put it in Amazon and it comes up as that $160 K. Yeah. I don't know how you guys find. I don't know what it is that's happening on my. My search in my computer, but every time it pulls me to this 159 and it's all three kits in one. Hmm. I don't know. All right, well, I'll put a link later then if I find it. But that's what. It's the KISS system, so. All right, let's go to another topic. The next topic is. Hello, bro. I'm. I'm gonna try to do the name because it's funny. It's Gruto. Baca. Grudo. Baca is my. Is my best guess. Hello, bro. I am a guitar beginner. I can play normal song, but it feels like I'm stuck in progress. That happens a lot. Happens to all of us. And the best, best advice you could ever get is this. There's. There's nothing wrong with being stuck. When I say nothing wrong, meaning it's going to happen no matter where you're at. Beginner advanced. I don't know if you've been playing for 50 years or if you plan for five years or five months or five weeks. Everybody gets uninspired or they get stuck or they get in a rut. It happens all the time. There is a ton of great advice, and every time I give some advice, you'll always get tons of great advice in the comment sections as well. One thing I will say is there's nothing wrong with stepping away from the instrument. Sometimes the best inspiration is just to get away from something. Right? You know, it's funny is there's a couple of things. First, I always say this. You can always try listening to some new music and look at looking for inspiration. But sometimes the problem is looking for inspiration is like looking for love. If you try really hard for it, it's hard to find it. So sometimes the best thing you can do is just get away from your guitar and do other things. And I find that sometimes when I'm doing something else, all of a sudden I'm like, oh, if I had my guitar right now, I play this or I'd figure this out. So it's okay to take a little break. The fear I think people have is that when you take the break, you're like, what if I never come back? You will come back. It doesn't take much. It happens all the time. I have to do this. So, you know, not only have I had this problem for guitar, but for years now, I've had this problem on YouTube, like, I don't have an idea for a video for next week. You. You know, should I do a review or should I do an instructional? Or what should it. What should it. You know, what's the. What's the reason for doing this? And I find anytime I'm in that block, I'm very frustrated. I'm not gonna sit there and go, ah, it's no problem. I just tell myself, no, I'm very upset. I'm very stressed. And what I do is I get away. I go for a walk, I go for a drive, I go on a vacation. I do something. I, you know, whatever. I focus on other things. And, you know, I work on tasks that are. That are more. Less artistic and more dysfunctional. Because obviously, sometimes I'm like, well, I still gotta make money, so what can I work on while I'm not focused or don't have any inspiration? And I find the further I get away from it, the more I'm like, oh, man, why didn't I think of that? I can't wait to get back to it. So, same thing with music. It's okay to be in all kinds of ruts. When you're artistic, you're artistic. Nobody can be artistic all the time. The thing. The best advice I got, the best advice I ever got as a YouTube creator was that if you keep going, you know, if you keep playing guitar all the time, if you keep making videos all the time, you will burn out. There's just no way around it. You cannot be creative 24 7. It's just too much. It's too taxing. So stay away. Just take a break. Have, you know, that's my best advice. But again, you know, there. That's my advice. Okay, hold on a second. I'm sorry. I'm just reading questions real quick. Okay, here's one. Irregular Star says, hey, Phil, I love your show. Sweetwater has a deal where they're selling Guild Starfire for $999. What is your opinion about this guitar and this price point also? Turns out they're discontinued now. You know, I don't know. You know, Guild is one of those brands. You know, the one thing I've been focused on is trying to get more brands that are not normally in the YouTube routine. In other words, you know, it's not hard to figure out what brands are in the YouTube routine. What I mean by that is all the YouTubers just. This is what we talk about. The question that comes up a lot. It's Very valid. It's a great question. It's like, you know, like when you guys said how come no one does videos of Rickenbacker? And I said it's because, no, Rickenbacker doesn't send the guitars out. You know, it's like, you know, it's hard to buy a guitar and then make a video. So actually, let me put it this way. When I say that, I don't want you to think I'm complaining. I'm not complaining. I'm. I want you to understand it's literally impossible for most 75% of channels out there. It's impossible. It's not, not even something they can consider to do. You cannot buy a thousand dollar guitar, sell it for 700 bucks and make $40 on a video. It's just not, it's not, it's not going to happen. So small channels have it the, the hardest to do this as the channel's gotten bigger over the years. If you notice, one thing is for sure is the more I've pulled outside of the typical sponsored norms, that's because I have the luxury and the privilege thanks to you guys, the patrons, the people who watch the content. Because like I said, you know, my majority of my money comes from video views then patrons. Second. So, and I say this all the time, it's not to, it's not to brag. I just want you to understand it's not a brag, it's just how the channel set up. I make my money mostly off YouTube videos, then Patreon, then merch and sales like affiliate sales, then sponsored content. Sponsored content is last for me, which is, which is great. I'm very, very happy that it works that way. However, it also makes it tough for a lot of channels to pull stuff like Guild and companies who are not interacting as much. So to answer your question, I'm not familiar with them at all. They're not a company that doesn't interact with social media and they just weren't on my radar. This is why the Friday show has been so valuable to me is a lot of times when you guys. Like you right now, Irregular Star, when you bring this up, this gets on my radar because you think, you think because I talk guitar all the time, I'm aware of every brand all the time. Some things, you know, to be honest with you, I knew Guild got bought and got kind of brought back in the last like five years or so, but I forget sometimes I'm like, oh, did they go out of business? I don't even know, because I don't see them like you guys. It's, you know, all you see is the same. I feel like we all see the same 12 brands on YouTube all the time. It's just, it's a little much. So I'm really trying to pull outside of that. And also keep in mind that one of the downfalls of channels that do make a living on the views like I do, one of my downfalls is picking strange things, kills your view counts, and then it's hard to finance that too. But I do. We do have the. The. I just want to let you guys know because the patrons know this. One of the patrons asked me to review a new a loser tool and we bought it and I have it and I've been using it. And you'll see a video of that probably within the next week. I can't imagine it's going to be longer than a week now because I've already done all the. I've done everything with it. So suggest things is what I'm trying to say. You know, email me. I know sometimes you don't get responses and maybe you're like, okay, you didn't respond. But a lot of. A lot here. A lot of you will tell. Will publicly say this. A lot of you sent suggestions to us, never got a response to us. But that video was definitely put out and because you suggested it. So suggest guitars. If guild is what you're interested in, let me know. So. So to give you an idea, a couple weeks ago, was it a couple weeks ago? Time is weird, right? A month ago, a year ago? Weeks ago. It was definitely a couple weeks ago. A couple weeks ago. I still have it. I have these funds and I'm like, oh, I could buy some guitars and put them on the channel. And I went to the traditional, like, you know, companies, you know, I went Sweetwater and looked, you know, what they have. And then I look at guitars and what they have and then I look hit some mom and pop stores, what do they have? And I couldn't think of anything. I was like, I don't know, what do you guys want to see? You know, because again, I don't want to buy a guitar that I don't really care to buy and make a video that no one wants to watch. What's the point of doing that? I want to make content you guys want to watch. You're interested in subjects that's interesting to you, things that are interesting to you. So I do have a. So like Fred Flintstone says, what about Bootlegger guitar. That sounds like a great suggestion. Let me put it down there. And like I said, and what I do, because what's great is some companies. I'm sorry, I'm just putting this in my pasting it. Some companies suggest I could buy the guitars and we can do the videos, and then you guys could, you know, you get the content you want. And some companies, believe it or not, we reach out to them. We say, hey, look, somebody asked us. Somebody asked us about your brand. Would you like to send a guitar out? I'm very upfront about, you know, like some YouTubers, like, this is what I charge, and this is what I don't charge. I don't have any upfront costs. I don't talk. I don't. I'm not upfront with what I charge, because what I charge is. Is decided by the situation. What I mean by that is if I want the video, then I don't charge. I want the video. That's what matters to me. So, for instance, if you want the video, then I want the video because you'll watch it. And if you'll watch it, I'll. That's how I'll make my money. And I get to have fun doing a video. If I don't know you want it and a company asks me to do it, well, then the company's got to compensate us because it's my time. And I don't know if the video is gonna perform, and I don't know it's gonna perform because I don't know if you care. So that's all. So that's my thing on it. The reason I say that is because sometimes company companies seem confused by this. They reach out and like, hey, you said you'll do a video for free. I'm like, well, not because you asked me if the viewers want a video, I would gladly do the video. But if a company wants a video and I don't think the viewers are gonna click on it, then, yeah, you have to co sponsor with me. I have to have the cost covered with. So that the time is covered and. And then hopefully it'll work out for both of us. You'll sell some guitars and I'll get some views. But the downfall of. So you guys know the downfall of the deep dives is it's hit or miss. Some deep dives sell so much good gear, the company can't believe it, and they're amazed and they're happy. In some videos, I just said the right thing. When I say right thing, I Mean the wrong thing. The thing I critiqued was just the thing that really broke the video from selling tons of gear. You never know what critique is not going to matter to some of you and what one's going to kill the sales. So, so tough. All right, there's enough of that. Somebody says, jennings guitars, huh? It's interesting. Kyle. I've never heard of them. Okay. All right, hold on a second. Just reading a bunch of stuff. See, I think I get sidetracked reading your comments. Okay, let's go back. We have a comment from Matthew. This was sent by Amanda. Thank you. Amanda says, why is lighter fluid okay to use on nitro finish, but everything else in the world seems to wreck it? You know, I don't know. I'm not a Finnish guy. That's something, though. I can find out for you. I can ask my Finnish friends. Although using lighter fluid on fretboards is very common to clean fretboards. But it's not a finish. Of course, that's unfinished wood, but I don't know. I don't know. Finish work is not my thing, but I'll find out. As you guys saw, some of you guys watched the video with John from Throwback Pickups. That was amazing to do that podcast with him. That was a bonus podcast this week. If you missed it, you should watch it. Look, he's a. His amazing amount of knowledge. If you weren't paying attention to some of the things that he said in there, it was things that could have broke the Internet. You know, he has a lot of great information, and some of this stuff was so enlightening. It changed my perspective of everything. And then some things were just fun. But, yeah, I tend to like to pull experts in areas, and so maybe I'll get a finish expert and we'll do a bonus podcast on finish work. So. All right, let's go here. Whoops. This one came from Fred. He says, hey, Phil, is the PRSSC Hollow Body 2 Piezo Piezo Pazo still a good. I just messed with you guys. So you guys know I'm never gonna stop doing this. Because if I told you guys, I did a video, just on a side note, I did a video called how Companies say Their Names. That's what broke me. I thought it'd be fun to ask companies how they say their names. If you watch that video, half of the comments are like, they're wrong. I'm like, they're wrong. You're saying the company that's saying their own name is wrong. So I've learned Now I'm just gonna keep messing with people. I think it's funny. It's one of the things I can do to make myself laugh. Okay, so anyways, he wants to know if it's still a good buy for today. I'd like to install the pickup in a guitar. Basically a transducer pickup. But I'm not sure whether it's better to modify a Gibson Les Paul or buy another guitar. You know, I'm not a big fan of modifying guitars with transducer pickups. The reason being is that I have guitars with transducer pickups. And in my personal opinion, based on the fact that I have. Let's say I have a guitar that I have a pickup that I like. Okay, so let's start there. Something easy. Let's say, let's take a. Just a basic Seymour Duncan JB in a jazz set of pickups. I like that set. It's a good basic set of pickups. I like it. I throw it in a guitar. Let's say I throw in a Les Paul. I like it. If I had add the transducer system, right? Which is an active system, which the. Now the magnetic pickups have to go into the. The half. Everything has to go through that preamp, okay. So that the levels are lined up. Otherwise the passive pickups and the active transducers pickup is going to be a different line. They're going to be different levels. So everything goes there. In my opinion, it always ruins the magnetic pickups. It's always worse. It's never better. It's one of the things I don't like about transducer pickup systems in guitars that have both systems. So me personally, to tell you personally, adding it, it's not something I prefer. If you are right now and you're like, I do it on my guitars. I love it. I'm happy for you. And it doesn't make you wrong. I'm just telling you why I don't like it. So I'm not a big fan of adding it to something because the fact that it will change the way it sounds. And usually in my opinion, not for the better. However, I do have many guitars that have that blending system because it's very good. It's like you, very, very versatile and it's fun. So I like. I prefer having guitars that already have it in there. And then that way I don't have a reference of whether or not the guitar sounds better or worse. I just play the guitar and like it. To answer your question, I have to look let's see. I'm going to go on reverb now and look up what a PRS Hollow Body 2 is going for. Se. So when they were $1500, they were not a good deal. But they were what they were. But. But for a while you could get them for a song, you can get them for a deal. This is a soft market. You should be able to scoop them up for a deal. I'm curious to see what they're going for. And Hollow Body 2. So 1299 used. Okay, 1299 is high for you. Oh, this is not used. This is a dealer. This definitely wants to offload a guitar. That's huh. It's a store demo. Okay, so here's the deal. So let's go here, here's the store. It's got a used Mint 1299. Calculating shipping. And then it says here, the PRS it's a guitar. It was a demo in our retail store. It is mint condition. It shows no dings, dense scratches. Okay, so what I would do me personally is I would look out there, there's dealers with these guitars that would love to get rid of them. Right now $1500 is a hard price point to sell. It's a guitar that essentially is an import guitar. It's made in China, which is not. Not. That's not the negative part. The negative part is just fifteen hundred dollars made in China's expensive. And when the market softens, people get really weird about their money and they're like, okay, I, you know, I'll. They. They not only do they buy less expensive guitars, but then they get really picky about what they buy. That is expensive. So. And what I've seen is this guitar in particular is very soft in the market. In other words, there's a lot more of them than there are as customers. So if you're interested in it, I would say get it and go find a deal. By the way, Rodney is saying he bought one new for $1100 a year ago. I think you could find one for $100 no problem. New or ish. You know what I mean? You gotta look, okay, go out there and find one, get one used, get one new. But either way you'll find a deal for sure. Because the fact that it's like I said, it's a little soft on the market for guitars like that. That's just my two cents for whatever it's worth. But I like the guitar. That's the important part. I really do. I really think it's one of the best PRS's I've ever played, period. I'd put it in my top five PR's I've ever played in my life. And it's an SE. Think about how crazy that is. Clan of house cats says, is it good to shield tape a Fender custom body? Sure, you could shield tape it. It doesn't hurt anything. It's. I don't know. I don't know of a scenario where if you were to ever sell your custom shop, Fender used that. You know, if somebody's like, oh, it's got shielding tape inside the cavity. I take off $100. I don't know why anyone would want to decrease the quality of that for our value for that. Also, it's removable because it's just tape. You're just going to stick it in there and use it in there and. But I would say that even if you. If I did, let me put it this way, I wouldn't caution you if you came to have me do it. Like, if you said, hey, Phil, can you put shielding tape in this cavity? I wouldn't go, okay, but just so you know, you're devaluing your guitar. That's not a disclaimer. I would say to you, I'd say, sure, yeah, do it. And then I'd almost say, if you ever sell the guitar, I wouldn't mention it. You know, I wouldn't even care or, you know, mention it. It's like, hey, you can have it, or I'll take it out if you want. But no. And it's. It's so. I don't think it's a bad idea at all there. This one came from unplayed video games says, hey, Phil, is it true that you should not adjust the tremolo mounting posts for overall action without completely detuning the strings first? Will it really strip the knife edges to do so? Okay, so this is where it gets a little tricky. The answer, the official. The right answer is yes. You should not only detune your strings, but you should relieve the bridge of the spring tension as well. You don't, because the springs and the strings are both pushing the bridge. They can be both pushing it towards the post, the knife edge. Typically, it's the strings doing it. And then when you leave the strings, you know, the springs pull back on the bridge and the bridge is being pulled away. But either way, there's some tension going there. So you want to decrease that. So sometimes, you know, you want to. You want to do it from both sides. But at the very Least, which is most cases gonna be enough. Do just the strings. Yes. Relieve the string tension before you make the adjustments. The problem now is all the metals are really soft. They're not very good anymore. They're not really hard like they used to be. And even back then, I wouldn't even really recommend it. But I mean, you could. I will tell you though, because I want to give you two answers that are contradictory to each other. But I think it's just a real life answer to a customer's guitar. If it wasn't mine, I'd always do the strings. We're going to do it the right way. That's the right way. Me, personally, my guitar, it depends how much I'm turning the posts. Yeah. If I have to just go like a quarter turn on one post or two, I may not go through the whole process of detuning it because it's. I'm not saying it won't do any damage. I just. I feel like I've, you know, I'll be fine. But I would say to you, always take caution because once you mess up the knife edges on the bridge, you are going to mess with the tuning stability, which is problematic. And it's very hard in today's world to fix. It used to be super easy. Now it's more of a pain in the ass. Because like, like I said, it's not about. I mean, the metals are so soft. They're so bad. It's just all junk. Everything's IKEA furniture now. Everything. I feel like everything is IKEA furniture. Just so bad. Okay. Jeremy says, hey, Phil, I bought a new Wolfgang. And the string height on the high E will not go lower than 2 millimeters. At the 12th fret, the bridge is down all the way and the neck is straight. Is this a design issue? No. If the bridge is all the way down. Right. It doesn't. This is what you want. You want to shim the neck. So that's the proper. That would be the next step. Now again, I'm not looking at your guitar. You're giving me a scenario I'm picturing in my head and I'm giving you my picture in my head version of this. I always say this is my disclaimer. But just from what you described, my instinct would be to shim the neck. I would use a one thin piece of sandpaper. You know, some people use a business card. I just use sandpaper because that's what Fender used forever. I always say that over and over again because it's true, you know, fold 100 pieces of sandpaper out of Fender necks. So anyways, use just a little piece of sandpaper towards the back of the neck. That's probably what I would do first. You might be prepared to put two pieces maybe. And believe it or not, that little thing you're going like, that's not enough. Like, because in your mind you're like. But it's this far away and that piece of paper is this thin. It doesn't matter, Trust me. You just do that. Bolt the neck back down, you know, tighten it back up. And then that way you can raise the bridge a little bit. Or sometimes you're just lucky and that's just where it lands. And you don't have to move the bridge. But most cases you'll be moving the bridge up a little bit to get the action where you want. And that'll get you where you want to be. So that's. It's a pretty straightforward fix. The thing I'm going to tell you that is important is this is a very common fix. It's why Leo Fender wanted a bolt on neck. Okay, Our screw on neck. If you read any of the books about Leo Fender, he talked about it in detail. This is literally what he thought was like great. Because instead of a guitar like with a sat neck, a set neck, or a neck through design, when it had issues like what you're talking about, you know, you'd have to pull the neck off. You have to delaminate, pull the neck off, you know, right. Make some changes, glue the neck on. It's a very big process, very problematic where again, a bolt on neck can literally just be unscrewed off. Stick some paper in there and fix it. You can buy the, the wood shims and stuff. It's up to you. It's up to you what you want to do. By the way, this. But me personally, I just use sandpaper. I don't buy the, the wood shims. The only time I buy the wood shims is if it's a really, really big problem. But my guess is if you're at 2 millimeters, even if you want to get to like 1 millimeter or 0.75, which is about as low as you're going to get. You know, no one's ever asked me this all these years on the show, like, what's the lowest action ever seen? The lowest action I've ever seen with no buzz that played great, was half a millimeter high, and was on a Jackson soloist made in the 80s. Neck through it, played flawlessly with no issues, no buzz. And literally when we measured it, it was half a millimeter. It was crazy. I have seen tons of guitars from Tom Anderson, from Ibanez, you know, main Japan era, Jackson usa, Charvel usa. Tons of guitars, especially older ones, where again, you know, 0.75 action was very typical and there was little to no buzzing on the neck. It's. So my answer to you is, you know, if you're at 2 millimeters, you're probably not wanting much more than 1 millimeter action. Even on the Wolfgang, you'll be able to get that by shimming it. So I wouldn't worry and you wouldn't even be able to notice the. You know, you're not going to see a gap, so don't worry about it. But it's totally. I think it's totally fine. It's. To me, to me, the way I look at repairs is in two different buckets, okay? There's cost to consumer buckets. So notice if I complain about something, I might say something like, this is unacceptable for guitar. The reason I'm saying that is, look, if a customer pays $300 for guitar and it's $300 worth of work, it's just not a reasonable thing to ask the customer to do. It's like buying a $30,000 car and saying it needs $30,000 worth of work. It's like, like it's not gonna be. It's just not. It's not gonna work. So I'm a little bit more critical of that. But guitars that typically just have a quick things like that, like a, you know, a shim and stuff. I. I'm not really concerned about that. To me, bigger items are things you can't do. You don't need to take it to a tech to put a shim in it. You can do that yourself. Okay, we have Jeff. Jeff says, hey, I have a Fender Players 2 Strat, and what size truss rod tool is needed to set it up as. I did not get the wrench when I bought it. Well, Jeff, what I want to share with you because I could tell you the answer, but instead I'm going to show you where to get the answer because of the whole feed of fish. You know how the saying, right, you get, you. You give a guy a fish and he's going to eat fish. And if you teach a guy to fish, he's not never going to be home on Sundays. So I'm pretty sure that's the saying. Anyways, let me share this with you. Let's See how this goes. Okay, so what you do, Jeff, is you go to musicnomad.com's website and you say, you know, I don't want to join the blue team, whatever that is. You want to go here to how to advice. Okay. And you want to go to Truss Rod Wrench Finder. And you're going to select a brand and you're going to say Fender. Okay? And then you can see here all models. You said Players two. So we're going to say all models made in Mexico and Fender. All models Mexico, 3, 16. Allen key. Look at that. And not just plugs Musicnomad, but they sell this kit here, right here, which is pretty much every truss rod tool you'll need for $59. Do you need this? Well, hell no. You can buy all those Allen wrenches and tools for like literally dollars and stick them in a little Ziploc bag if you want. But, you know, hey, they did it. But my whole point about this stuff is I always show you guys, like, look, you notice. If you notice. And this kind of goes back to the podcast I did with John at Throwback Pickups. Something I've noticed that's interesting is that people who are really smart, who create really interesting and really quality products, like the Music Nomad guys or the Throwback Pickup guys, and there's tons of them that I could suggest like this. Yeah, they always tend to charge more than everyone else, but always tend to give the information away free. And I always think to myself, stumac, they charge a lot, but they give all the information away for free. And I always think it's funny when people get upset about their prices. I'm like, but you understand, they give the information away for free. You know, most people are trying to charge you for this information. They will give the information for free. And if you then so choose to buy their price, you know, higher price product, great. But you don't have to. So the thing with the music Nomad, you can go to their website, use that tool, that tool, lookup tool, find the truss rod. For most guitars, it's not gonna be every guitar, but it's a large amount of them. And there's your information. So, you know, for future reference, too, one thing that we did, which is inspired kind of by the Music Nomad guys, is we are. That's why we started doing this, which is if you go to the Know youw Gear podcast website and you go to geeky PDFs, when you go here, all the guitars I review now, they're in order from when we started doing this. And it has the sheet on the guitar. So, like, for instance, if you had this Yamaha Pacifica right here, you can go here and go to the next page, and it's down here. And it will tell you that. What will it tell you? It will tell you I say that and then I messed it up. Does it have that? Oh, no, it's on the next page. Okay, cool. Sorry. Let's do. There it is. Okay, so it's the Ibanez. So we haven't updated the Yamaha page, which is good. I'll make sure I do that tonight. So if you go to the Ibanez standard, it just came out. If you look here, we put all the specifications, but one of the things we started adding is, look at that bridge saddle wrench size is a 1.5 millimeter. And the truss rod wrench size is 4.4millimeters. It's actually 14. Look at that. See, this is why. This is why you trust Music Nomad and not us. No, seriously. It's just our sheets haven't updated yet. We're probably in there. I was in there editing them, and we haven't updated. But my point is, we started adding this kind of information for that exact reason. So if I review a guitar, whatever came with the guitar, we're now documenting what came with the guitar on those sheets. So that if you buy that guitar and it didn't come with something, let's say you bought it used or just the retailer didn't include it, you can look up the sheet and go, okay, what was supposed to come with this? So, you know, I'm actually doing that. Not on just Allen wrench, stuff like that, like hang tags, you know, all that stuff. What was supposed to come with the guitar? So we're on the sheets. We're not only putting the specifications of all of the details I find on the guitar, including the details that are different to the manufacturer, which, by the way, three, it's already happened. Think how crazy this is. Since doing the sheets, three manufacturers have had to adjust their websites to our information because their information was incorrect. I sent it to them. I said, this is what I found. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And every time they sent back, oh, yeah, they always have the same answer. The person who does their website, which I kind of understand because I don't do my own website either. So person do our website didn't do it right. So. So my point is, that's where I'm trying to keep that information for you guys, so, you know, to look for it in the future as we. As we gain momentum. Somebody asked if I'm going to go back now and in the past and do all the videos. Probably, probably. But remember, I got to have the. I'm not saying the free time. Trust me. I have downtime like anybody else. I just gotta wait for that downtime to kick in. And I'll go back and start doing older ones. But from now, we'll do it forward. But in the meantime, for your Allen Wrench needs, you can look up the music Nomad. Well, let's go back. You get the idea. You can go to their trust Rod Wrench Finder, which I've mentioned many times, and look it up. Your specs hero of the day says, hey, yeah, you ever happily overpaid for a piece of gear you just loved? All the time. All, all the time. So let me read the rest of yours and then I'll. I'll give you my answer. I got a Rittenhouse Strat a year ago. Definitely overpaid for the brand I had never heard of, but I just love it and I had to have it. I overpay for gear. I would say, on average, more than I underpay for gear by far, which is why I hyper focus. What I've. What I've learned. Everybody's going to have a different philosophy on this. Here's what I've learned. Sometimes they have what you want and they won't budge. Sometimes people are nuts. They're just nuts, but they have what you want. So a good example is like, they have the guitar I want. They have the color I want and the weight I want. No one will pay for this because most people don't have weird hangups like I might have about. Like, I want the guitar to be a certain weight or I want it to be a certain color. And they're not budging on the price, and they're just not going to budge. And so I just. I go like I want it. So I pull the trigger. It's why I try to find a deal when I can, because what I kind of look at is an overall thing. So, you know, I kind of look at it as overall. So I will. I put all my purchases into an Excel spare spreadsheet. All the guitars ever bought, they go in this sheet. And I go, this is what I paid. And then if I got rid of it, I go, this is what I sold it for, and this is what I lost, or this is what I netted. And, you know, this is what I gained. And. And I'm. I'm talking about more personal than I am the business side, but definitely personal for sure. And I do that just because, again, I'm trying to figure this out. Um, so, yeah, it happens a lot that I overpay. I. All the time. All the time. And so the. The way I justify overpaying is because I underpaid somewhere else. I kind of look at it. I think maybe that's just what Sean says. The IRS wants to see the sheet. Trust me, the IRS sees everything. There's one thing I know. I'm paying enough taxes. When I say enough, I'm sure they could find a reason to pay more, but we pay a lot. I pay a lot. It's insane. So anyways, back to paying. Underpaying, overpaying. The reason I do that is because it helps justify. It's nice. When I buy a guitar, let's say it's, you know, Everywhere is asking $1,000, and I got into it for success, 600 bucks, and I'm like, oh, that's a good deal. And then it's a lot easier to justify the whole, you know, like, they're ask. Everybody's asking, you know, 12 for this guitar, and this guy wants 15 or 16, and he just doesn't budge. It happens all the time. So the problem is, is that when you overpay, what I tend to do is go, okay. And I have a bunch of guitars that I happen to me all the time about. I'll go, all right, I'm going to buy this. I'm going to overpay for it. But I know going into it how long I have to sit. Like, in other words, if I get this guitar, if you're so inclined to be in this situation, not everybody is okay. It took me a long time to get to a situation to tolerate this kind of craziness, which is I buy a guitar, I probably overpaid. I have a guitar where I overpaid $1,000 for it. A thousand over what it's worth. I cannot get anything close to what I paid for it right now. And I don't love it. And I'm not gonna sell it because no one's gonna pay me what I paid for it. So luckily for me, when I bought it, I knew two things. One, I might not like it, which it's not that I don't like it. I'm just not in love with it. And two, I might have to sit on it for five to 10 years. And I don't even know in five to 10 years if it's going to be worth what I paid. I just think it'll be closer. So it happens. It just happens. So, yeah, now most of the time when I overpaid, I was more than happy in the idea that I got it. And I was like, okay, this is exactly what I wanted. And it's really great. So it happens to all of us. Yeah, you guys. Funny. Windsurf Maui says, when he says irs, he means your wife. In other words, my wife's looking. My wife does not care what I spend on guitars at all. I wish. Look, she's done some podcasts with me. If you guys go to the second channel, you can watch them. They're audio only. She will only do audio only. She's very upfront about this. Like I said, look, she was in the public for 13 years at the store. Everybody who's a customer of the store knows my wife very well. She ran the lesson program. I've said this before. She ran the lesson program at the store, which is more important than the store because in the idea what I'm about to explain, because hundreds and hundreds of students came here every week, right? And so over the years, thousands of students have transacted through this lesson academy. And they know my wife. So if we go to the grocery store, my wife gets more recognized or as recognized, almost, as I say, almost as much as me from YouTube. Like, I. People go, oh, it's the guy from YouTube. But every time I get that, my wife will be like, hey, it's Mrs. McKnight. And they, they know her from the store. The sad thing is, is that half the time my wife's in shock because she doesn't know who's talking to her. Because it's usually somebody who came to our store and they're 13 and now they're in college. And she doesn't wreck it. She's like, oh my God, there's no way you're Billy, right? Whatever. Whatever. Or. But anyways, my point is from that experience, which she does not dislike, by the way. She just does not want more of that. And that's what she's learned. She's like, I don't need to be recognized anywhere I go, even if it is on a. Because of a lowly, you know, YouTube status thing. But my point is, so she'll do audio only podcasts. You can listen to them on the second channel. They're totally free. You don't have to be a patron. We do them from patrons and Then we give them to the, to the second channel. The reason I tell you that she'll explain to you in detail what she cares about and doesn't care about when I spend. Why you guys would care about that, I don't know. Maybe you'd want your wife to hear it. I don't know either, but my wife is the first one to say something when somebody says like, you don't need another guitar. My wife will explain why. Guitars, in my wife's opinion, and I know I'm speaking for her, but it's true. In my wife's opinion, buying guitars is a good thing because of what I said. Yeah, I've lost money on guitars. She'll, she'll tell you because I've showed her and she's seen it over the years. And she knows because like I said, she's dealing with all those crazy people because she, she worked in a store dealing with all of us. She, she, she can tell you that overall worst case scenario is almost net flat. Like you just, you just don't, you don't lose money on guitars for the most part. You just don't. Especially as you get good at, you know, not good at buying guitars, but as you get good at figuring out what really matters, you know, to you, you know, so notice how I'm speaking now, and this is very important. A lot of people don't understand. There's guitar flippers, there's people who make money buying and selling guitars, especially in the vintage market. I'm not talking about getting good at buying a guitar and selling it for money. What I mean by you, you refine your ability to not sell your guitars to keep them. See, she's learned it. Remember, she's known me Since I was 13 years old, you know, so, so what she's learned is as I've learned more about guitars over the years, the guitars I purchased slowly don't get flipped as much because I figured I refined exactly what it is I'm looking for. So the. Sean says she doesn't care because you're not broke. You know what's funny is that, Sean, you would really enjoy what she has to say about that. I almost don't want to tell you what she, she was specifically asked that question on the second show, on the show on the other channel. She was specifically asked, you know, when I bought guitars when we were broke, what she thought about that. She will, she'll tell you if I don't want to give you the guys the answer, but it was a great answer. I Didn't. I didn't expect her to say it, but. But anyways, back to. Back to refining. Like I said, you kind of learn what it is you want and then they stick. The one thing that's funny is this. And I always say this just to be clear because I love hanging out with you guys. I love being part of a guitar community and I love making content for everybody. The one thing that I always kind of want to reiterate, sorry about that with everyone, is that sometimes my youtuberness the making content for a living and me as a guitar fanatic, they blend together and it confuses people. So here's what I will tell you guys that's interesting. If you go and look at my first videos, take the first 20 videos that I made on YouTube, 99% of the gear that's in those videos still here today. You'll still see it on the channel. You still see in the background, it's here. The gear that's rotating all the time. It's the gear that I'm using to make content with. That's what really goes. So a lot of people are like, you sell a lot of guitars and that really almost all my personal guitars are. They're here, they're still here. My copper Strat's still here. My green Strat's still here. My original Parker still here. My original Les Paul is still here. My Mira is still here. You know, my. My 68 Princeton still here. My Mark 525 Minis still here. I mean it's most of stuff I actually, I stick with. I've been sticking with stuff for, you know, a decade, no problem. So again, it's just. But before that, before in the time besides, you know, financial issues, I mean, sometimes, like I've told you guys, sometimes I had to sell everything because of financials issues that happens. And then as hopefully as you get older, that's less of that. But not always the case. But that's a different scenario than what I'm talking about. Bridge of Fire says, do you list guitars that you're trying to sell? I do. I have a public reverb store. It is the KYG store. Usually in some of the videos there's a link. If not, I'll put a link to it and I post it. And because obviously this is where I said sometimes you have to, you know, I be up front the YouTuberness of it. I tend to flip all that stuff really fast. I put, I usually put. I have been putting for about the last month or two a guitar A week up on, on the, on the site. So there's a couple reasons we do that. So you know, and then I'll go to the next question. We'll button up the show. I just want you to understand what's being sold on the chat on that. On the Reverb store. Sometimes I have guitars that I just done with and I sell them. That happens. Like I said, I'm just like everybody else. That's what gets sold there. Sometimes a company sent a guitar and they left it with us and essentially, like, that's our compensation. Like we get to have the guitar. We made the video. And I can tell you right now, it's a mental thing for me. It's really tough. Somebody's like, oh, did you not like that guitar? If you look at a video, I can tell you exactly. Just do the math. If you look at a video and you know, I got compensated the guitar, in other words, they sent the guitar and they said you could just hold on to it for doing the video. If you look at that video and it did not do really well, I always sell the guitar. It's mental for me. It's like, ah, you know, it's like I shouldn't keep that guitar because the video didn't do well. Like, payment wise, like, I'm better off getting paid than I am having this guitar. If I get the guitar and I like it and the video did well, I keep it. But a lot of times, so, you know, what happens is we used to not do this, but now we, we came with this idea was really great. Somebody suggested it, it might have been a patron, but a lot of times the companies, they send us a label and they go, they want the guitar back. And what we started doing, which has been really effective is if the guitar, if the company wants the guitar back, we send them a message saying, what's your best blowout price on this guitar? So you don't have to send it back. We'll buy it. And then what I've been doing is we list it on Reverb and then you buy it immediately. And then I ship it to you and I send them their payment and I keep the difference. And it's been a way. We've been getting some extra funds on the channel. It's really nice. So there you go. Just let you know. All right, let's. Let's hit these last super chats. What do we have? We have Grumpy Mike guitar. What's up, buddy? He says, for the tone jar and why not? What Is your favorite overall 2 inch speaker? I'm considering switching out vintage 30s. I think it says 12 inch. It's 12 inch. It just was exclamation mark too. So I'm like, what? Okay, 12 inch speaker. I'm considering switching out the vintage 30s in my cab or two. So. I love creambacks. I keep coming back to them. So you guys know I just bought a red back speaker. I've been comparing the red back speaker speaker to the creamback. The red back speaker, if you're not familiar with slashing, is a higher wattage than the creamback. And to me it sounds like the creamback but with more high frequency. So if you got a cream back and you think it's kind of like darker or muddy or whatever you think of it, red back might be the way for you to go. That being said, as much as I like the red back creambacks all the way. In fact, I like having other speakers. I have. I have greenbacks. I have Jensen's, I have some. Some Emmer. No Emersons. I have some Evanescence. I'm trying to think. Not the band, not the. Not the cheap radio company. I can't remember what they are. Doesn't matter. Here's. Here's what really matters. What really matters. I like creambacks to the point where I'll stick them in everything. The Amplified nation has creambacks. All my Freedman amps have creambacks. My. If. If I have a cabinet and you see me in a video and I say, hey, this cabinet has something and it's not. I'm not saying creambacks understand that. I just haven't switched it to creamback yet because eminence is. Thank you, guys. Eminence. I do have an imminent speaker. I like it fine. It's good. I do have a green back. I like the green back with a G really, really well as well too. But I prefer cream backs. I just like the clarity of them. I. I don't know what it is. I have a V30 V30s in and a bunch of cabinets. Brian says you can mix the cream back in the V30. Yep. I've tried all the mix and match stuff. I just like cream backs. It's just something about them. They just appeal to me. And I even did a mix where I did a red back and a cream back and it was a little better, but I didn't care. It was like, oh yeah, I could see where this is better, but for some reason my default was right to cream backs. I don't know what it is about the speaker. It is specifically that I. It's like home to me. I just know it. So I like vintage 30s, but I prefer creambacks. In fact, I just bought a Marshall cabinet and it's got their Marshall V30s in it. It's like they say Marshall them, but they're made in England. And I'm gonna sell those off because I'm putting creambacks in it. So if anyone interested in those, I have boxes to ship those in and I'll sell them. So let me know. I'll probably put them up on for sale. The lamp says, hey, Phil, watching from Ireland. Hey, I just got some cool stuff from Emerald Guitars. They sent me a hat and a shirt and I was going to share it with you guys, but I'll probably do it next Friday. It says, hey, I'm watching for Ireland. Love the channel. Can I help? I'll try. Let's see what we can do. He says, I just got my first Gibson Les Paul. It's awesome. But can you recommend a stand or hanger that is suitable for nitro? Yes, absolutely. I like string swing. I like. Hold on, let me move this base. So the stands I recommend are what I use. That's all I use. So what's on the wall here is string swing. I'm not paid by String Swing. I've never received a single penny from String Swing ever in my life, ever. So. And just for more disclosure, String Swing once did send me some product, a few hangers, right? But I, I own all these hangers. I bought them all. So. So anyways, String swing, that's what I recommend. And then zither stands, which are these stands if I don't hit the ceiling. So there's stands which use a string swing cradle on here. And that's what I was hanging this base on is what I use. There are great stands out there. You can do your research. I'm not saying these are the only stands. I'm saying I love these stands. I use these stands. I trust these stands and that's what I go with because of headless guitars. I do own a couple other stands from Gatorade, which obviously because they're all poly, I don't have any nitro headless guitars you could use. You could use, you know, I could use those, but I, I prefer not to. I like literally. Literally just like the zither stands and the String swing. So string Swing for me, for everything, with very few exceptions. And there's a reason for that. It's because, like I said over the years, you Heard all the testimonials. I got so many great stories about them with my experience with them. In other words, how the quality of their, you know, how long they last, how well they take a beating. And. And so that's that funny. Funny thing to mention is I've said this before, which is true. String swing, at least I haven't checked. Recent years, okay, in the last year or so, used to not tell you on their website, and they probably still don't. They would not tell you that it's safe for nitros lacquer. I asked them about this. They said, look, they're a small business, okay? It's a few employees making string swing. And they just said they can't. They said, basically, you know, we can't swear that it won't hurt nitro, because obviously if someone damages somebody's guitar, it's like we'd be on the hook for that. So I was like, okay, I've never seen it damage nitro. I have my nitro guitars on string swings all the time for years. No issues. But funny. Why the story's funny. Gibson does a knockoff of their stand. So they make a knockoff of the zither stand and they use a string swing cradle. And they claim, even though it's not them making it string swing, they claim it's safer nitro. So Gibson claims string swing is safer nitro. I just want to be clear to you, because you're talking about a Gibson string swing doesn't swear it's safer nitro. I'm telling you, I've never had an issue with nitro and string swing. But Gibson claims that their stand is safe for nitro, and their stand uses a string swing cradle. That's. That's it. All right. I think we did it. Do we do it? If I missed something, I promise I come back to it next week. As the rest of you guys, I hope you had a fantastic weekend planned out and play some guitar. If you guys didn't see the bonus podcast with John from Throwback, I would check that out. If you didn't see the videos this week, you could check those out as well. I have lots of videos for you guys next week. And of course, we'll see you next Friday for the show. As always, I want to thank you guys, the moderators, the patrons, everybody, for hanging out and talking guitars. And as always, thank you for your time and Know youw Gear. The Know youw Gear Podcast. Today's episode of the Know youw Gear podcast is brought to you by Patreon members, channel members and viewers who like and subscribe. Thank you for making this possible.