Phil (0:00)

You 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, everyone. Welcome to the Know youw gear podcast, episode 400. We're in the 400s now. We're so old, such an old podcast. So I hope everybody had a fantastic week, is ready to have a fantastic weekend, but let's just have a great afternoon. All right, so a couple things, quick things to announce. As always, I want to thank the patrons and the channel members and everybody who hangs out. And also, if you're watching live, there's no commercials during the live part of the podcast. They start about 15 minutes after the show starts replaying. So you can enjoy commercial free so we can keep the flow going and have some fun. The other announcement is just, you know, hey, if you're new to the channel and you're hanging out live, people in green means they're sponsoring the channel through the YouTube app or whatever you call it, the YouTube system. And if they have a blue, blue name and a wrench, that means our moderator and they can facilitate questions to me and help with all kinds of stuff. So that all being said, the only other announcement I have is that tomorrow my buddy Larry Mitchell, that I can't point to correctly because I'm looking reverse screens, Larry Mitchell will be at Zims Guitars in Mesa, Arizona for a free guitar clinic. Now, this is a guitar clinic. Don't ask them to like check your prostate or anything or it's not that kind of clinic. It's a guitar clinic and it's free though. And I don't even think you have to call ahead. I think you just show up. I think you just show up first come, first served kind of deal. Tomorrow, Saturday, February 8th, at 2pm you'd probably know if you're in Arizona, but 2pm Is right now is technically, I think it's Pacific Standard Time. Arizona is half the year is Pacific and half the year is mountain because we don't time zone change anyways. So just letting you know, get there early, get a seat, have some fun, let him play amazing music for you, ask him questions so you can ask him anything and have a good time. So there you go. We'll probably announce that again throughout the show. Let's go back to the show. We have so many subjects, so many topics to talk about. What do we want to get into first? I want to get this one out of the way because this one sucks. All right, this one came from Corey. Now Corey, you don't suck. But yeah, you know, you brought up the thing that sucks. So let's go into Corey's question. Corey says, hey, I just got my 1099. So you know, it's always great for those that don't live in the United States. 1099 is a tax document you get that says somebody gave you money. And I think now it's anything over $600 last year I think it was over anything over $5,000 or something like that. Anyways, they're required to give you this thing that says they paid you money. It's like they're telling the irs like I gave this person money. All right, so just want to keep everybody on the same page. All right, so Corey Got a 1099 from Reverb. I did as well. If you sold, I think if you sold over $5,000 in the year of 2024 or I think more than 200 transactions, I just, I'm doing off memory. I think even if you didn't sell $5,000, but you did 200 transactions, I think you get a 1099. Anyways, so they sent him the 1099. He says the income states. The state that their income that they're stating is greater than what I received. Yes, that is accurate so far. Okay. The state sales price, uh huh. Including shipping and fees, less the tax is my income. Is this how it works? Is shipping a. The. Oh, the shipping went to ups. It's basically not his income. Okay, so I'm not a tax person, but I've done so many 1099 and reverb is not hard to figure out. So what Reverb does is they just tell the irs on the 1099 every penny that was paid to you, whether you received it or not. And what I mean by that is sometimes it's like, it's like this. So if they, if it was, if they gave it to you. So like here's a good example. Let's say I sell $1,000 worth of stuff on Reverb and Reverb goes, oh, we get 10% of that, they're still going to tell the IRS that they paid you like $10,000. I could be totally, slightly, totally off on this. Again, I'm not a tax person, but I'm just giving you an idea to work with. Okay. They're going to tell the IRS everything that they, that they, that they, they basically, I guess is a better way to put it. They're Going to tell the IRS everything they collected for you? Does it make sense even if you didn't get it? Because you're supposed to tell the irs. Because essentially what happens now, this is what sucks about this with the 1099s is every single person has become a mini business, whether you like it or not. You know, again, I hate this, you know, but what are you going to do? And I hate it. Not because of this whole tax thing, paying taxes. I hate it because as, like I said, I've been doing a business, small business for 20 years. So this is just like every year for me. I think I already got like 19, 10, 99 or something like that, some crazy number. But this year for last year, whatever you call it. But my point is, is that if you're not used to it, what happens is, is that you have to do all your own accounting. So now you have to tell them, like, what you got. Does it make sense? So that's a perfect example of it. Of course, I'm gonna preface that with please go talk to an accountant. Please do all these things correctly. I'm just giving you a sense of. Right now, all I care about is not so much giving you tax advice, because I'm not doing that. I'm just telling you not to freak out. They didn't send you anything that they didn't send anyone else. That's exactly. Whatever you're describing is how mine was sent and how I've seen all the ones I've seen sent out. So just be prepared for it. There is something to share with you all going forward. Okay. And let me go into this, and I'm going to go ahead and I want to make up something. So let me just put in a Fender. Okay? Just. It's just. It's nice little tidbit and it will help you if you're selling on reverb in the future. Okay, so what I'm doing is I'm pretending to sell a guitar on Reverb. Okay? So let me share this with you. Let me do this. Okay, so what I'm doing is I'm trying to see if it gives me the information here. It doesn't let me go back when. What. I just want to get to the screen that. Okay, so I got to type in a bunch of stuff. Just typing in a bunch of useless stuff. Is that not enough stuff? Select one condition mint. Okay, continue. I just want to get to the screen to show you guys. We're going to go ahead and say free shipping because again, I just want to get to the next screen to show you guys and okay, so here is what I recommend you all start doing if you want to sell on Reverb. So I did a mock listing right now for an American professional two for $1,171. Right here, I put my price. I'm gonna put that I want 900,000. Because that sounds about what? I'm just kidding. Did I put too many zeros? Okay, so anyways, okay, I'm just gonna put 9,000. Okay? So I want to sell this for $9,000. Okay? So right here, it's going to tell me what the fees are. The processing fee. Right here, what you paid for item drop down. You want to put in what you paid. Okay, so I paid. Now here's why this is important. Let's actually make this not crazy. Okay? So I can be actually helpful, you guys. Let's say they're saying competitive price is 1171-1272. I'm going to sell this for our 1200 bucks. But I paid 1500 for it. New or used. You want to put that in the box later. They don't do anything for you. But later will help you for your accounting. It'll help you get all that information quickly that says that. So you can tell the irs. Because right now the IRS is thinking you made all this money and technically you might not have because if you bought everything for way more than you sold it for, you didn't really make the money again. Please see an accountant. Don't. I'm just giving you references of things that you can do. Those features. Look, Reverb didn't create this problem, right? They are in the same boat as us. Trust me. No corporation wants to send hundreds of thousands of letters every year saying and tracking all what they paid out to you guys. So it's not something that they're excited about doing either. But they are at least giving you resources. That's a nice tab to put in there if you didn't know it exists. It's really innocuous is what I would call it. It. Right? So like. So a lot of you may not going there. All the other stuff, you know, like I said, for your tax purposes, go get real tax advice. But for this, I'm saying if you got a 1099 and it's showing, basically they're kind of like hammering you with what they paid you. Just trust me, you can contact them, but they're going to tell you it's right because that's just kind of how it Works. I don't know if that's helpful, but I hope so a little bit. But more importantly, like I said, I just know what it's like. Let me close out of this so I don't accidentally launch a guitar I'm not selling. I just want Corey to not spend the weekend stressed out thinking that they have his tax docs wrong. You just have to go and account for everything. Trust me, it's not as scary as is it sounds. It just sucks. Corey, welcome to the sucky world. 1099. All right, I'm gonna go. Okay, ready? Let's see. This was sent by Amanda. This is Dale. Dale says, what's the deal with Reverb Outlet? I see a lot of used guitars and reverb sales. They're 30% off using the price of a brand new guitar. Are they really any deals there? I have not really paid attention to that specifically, but there is definitely lots of deals out there. I just don't know specifically those deals. What I'm seeing is, you know, obviously, like I said, there's an abundance of product and not an abundance of people ready to buy a lot of products. So they're going to be making deals. So I'm seeing Reverb doing. I'm constantly getting bombarded. I actually am getting to the point now where I used to. I slowly stopped. You know how you hit your favorites button on Reverb? You know, stuff you're looking at and you're like, oh, maybe I'll get that, right? I'm always looking for like three beers, right? That's. I wish that wasn't a, you know, a joke, but it's true. It's like three beer. If I can make it in my third beer in a situation, like an afternoon on a weekend, if I can make three beers in, I could probably get out my phone and be like, maybe I do need that. I can, right? It's like, you know, you get that. It's like asking a girl at the bar, you're like, that's reapers in. Like, yeah, I ask her out. I'm instead, I'm like, oh, maybe I'll. Maybe I'll buy that petal. But anyways, so I put stuff in my favorites. And then what happened was I get harassed all the time from all these people that Reverb is tracking, you know, for them. And they're like, hey, here's a deal. And I get excited. I don't know if you guys have experienced this. So, like, I'll like, let's say I don't have anything to grab. Oh, here, let's say I want this, you know, this little spark amp. And I'll go, oh, cool. I'm thinking about getting this, you know, deal. And I'm like, oh, I get excited because I'm like, oh, cool. You know, that's what I need, right? That's better than beer is a discount that'll motivate me to push forward on this decision. And I open up and it's some random new seller going, hey, I'll give you 10% off new. I'm like, well, I don't want it 10% off new. I'm looking at a used one's already 30, 40 off. I'm trying to get 50% off. Like, what is. So I stopped kind of following a lot of stuff on Reverb. I still use Reverb like crazy, but. But I. I find, uh. So you guys know, if you haven't experienced this, I find that when you're buying gear, like we all, some of us are addicted to. Not me, of course. There's a right time and wrong time tendencies. Like sometimes you're. You know, as much as I don't like ebay, sometimes ebay is the right time to kind of, kind of peruse there. Sometimes I'm more on Craigslist. Sometimes I'm more in the, you know, reverb. Looking at small shops. Sometimes I'm on the dealers, like musicians friend and stuff. I've been buying some pedals, just a few here and there. And just I found a couple deals on a couple pedals that I'm willing to try out. And I couldn't find any other more. And so I just. I hadn't been. It's been a while, right? If you haven't seen this week, I did a video where I bought a vintage Ibanez 2355, which is an ES175 copy. And if you haven't checked out the video, please check out the video. And. And what was cool about that is that got me thinking like, oh, I should check out guitar center used online. And the pedal. What's funny is this is an absolute true story. There was two sellers on reverb. One selling it for 230, one selling it for 200. I went to the. The 230 said, you know, had a deal, you know, or make an offer. I said, I think I said 1. 75. 175. And they immediately declined my deal. And I was like, ah, our offer. I was like, all right, okay. So now I'm. I'M not, you know, I'm not going to pay the 220. So I'm looking at bad audio, huh? All right. It's probably got to be the Internet, guys. If the audio is cutting out, it's the Internet. There's nothing I can do. We've been having shaky Internet all day. So anyways, because yeah, we're not. We're not pinging the meters. So anyways, the. Let's see. Hold on. Okay, let's see. Okay, now it sounds fine. Cool. Like I said, it's going to be the Internet. We know the Internet's having issues today, so we've been. We've been testing it and we're. This is the best we think we got. But anyways, back to the offers. I was looking at the 199. I was like, well, that's going to be probably the best deal then because the other guy just want to go cheaper. And then I go, I'm going to look on Guitar center, see what happened. 129. There was one right on Guitar Center. 129. And so I bought it and it actually wasn't even 129. It was like 119. It was one with shipping and tax. It was 131. So that's whatever it came to. So I was like, oh, that was really good. So, you know, sometimes you have to poke around and see what deals are out there and see what's out there. I found the deal. Sometimes I go on Guitar center used, and it's like their prices are obnoxious and sometimes the prices are super cheap. Keep in mind, keep in mind, the important part is with Guitar center specifically is because there's 300 different stores they could take in gear different ways. So when you go on their website, there's not like. It's not like they're using a hardcore database that says all these new products. I was looking at an amp a few months ago on guitarcenter.com and I made me laugh. One was like $500 cheaper than the other ones. I couldn't figure out why. It was just. Was so something helped. So let's see, let's see the. Let's go ahead and go to another subject. This one is for Rad Fury. This came from man as well. Any suggestions on an interface to record guitar onto a phone? I can't tell if they all do it, but I know you talked about it a bit with your on the go recording rig. So I don't use an interface for the phone. So instead of kind of guessing, let me tell you what rig I use if I'm mobile. So the rig I really like, I have all. I have everything. I have all the things, okay? I bought all this crap so many times because of the fact that it's, you know, I. This is my living. But what I'll tell you what I really like is dji, okay? So the letter D, the letter J and the letter I. I believe I'm going to double check that for you. Okay, dji. And I'm going to show you dji. I'm going to say. Laughs they make drones, by the way, and all kinds of stuff. Just try lavs. There it is. So here's. I'm gonna show it to you real quick. This is what I absolutely love. For all those that are gonna say, try the roads and the other stuff, that's fine. I have that stuff. Let me tell you. This is, this is pretty kick ass. This unit is 250 bucks. Now here's how I use it. And I've made videos that have got hundreds of thousands of views. If not, I'm not exaggerating, I have videos that have millions of. Well, not millions plural, but over a million views with this unit, many times over. So here's how it works. It's awesome. It has two transmitters and one receiver. The receiver can hear both transmitters. And in the little box here, if they don't give you the angle to see, you can see kind of there. If you look in the picture there, you can see they give you two adapters. One is USB C and one is the FireWire or whatever for, for an iPhone. So you can plug this. Let's go back to this, this receiver into your. The main thing, you can plug that into your phone, whether it's iPhone or Droid, whatever. Then what you do is in the receiver there's two meters and you can adjust the sensitivity of the, the gain controls on that receiver. And what I do, let me go back here is I will I use a lapel, like I'll use a lapel mic, but you clipped it on the person you want talking, if you want that. Okay. And this, this input right here where you put in a microphone, you can then plug in an eighth inch cable, okay, Stereo cable from something like a zoom unit or any kind of. You can take the output of your, of your. What do you call it? HX stomp, right? So you can send a little guitar, literally a guitar signal and a vocal center. So if you want to talk and play guitar, you can do both. And there's mutes on each one of those transmitters. And you don't have to use both transmitters. So if you just want the guitar, you can do that wirelessly. That works pretty good as well. And I've tried a ton of different devices, but. And this is why I ask people, please caution you, because every time I talk about stuff like this, people give me advice. I literally like, if I lose the audio, if anything happens wrong, I lose my income when I'm out on the field, so to speak. When I filmed the Keisel video, the one shot, no edit, continuous video with Jeff Kiesel, he had one of those lapels on him or labs on him from the dji. The other was on me, and the other one was receiver onto an iPhone. And if any of that gets lost, you know what I mean? So I can't. So that's why I've learned. I've just tried everything, and this is the one that just never seems to fail me. It works really good. So that's one thing. I know you're probably talking about something that's more just like plugging in your guitar straight into your phone kind of thing, but, you know, I'm. I'm. I've tried stuff like that in the past. I couldn't tell you what's relevant now. But that system, if you're trying to do something like what I'm doing, that works, or if you're just trying to record just the guitar, it will work as well. It's pretty good system. And so the Maddie says, what's the Maddie says, what's the transparent Strandberg on the wall? The transparent Strandberg is Last Podcast. So if you go to Last Podcast, I'll put that. I'll isolate that video section of the podcast and put on the second channel for Guitar the Week. If you guys don't know, it's a good way to segue. I have a second channel and we put clips of the podcast on the second channel. I have not been diligent, so we have someone who takes the clips for me, which is nice. But right now I'm the one that's uploading them. And I've failed you guys because I think I have like a 20. I don't know. There's dozens of clips that I'm supposed to upload. I haven't been uploading them, I'd like to say, because I'm busy. I have been busy. But I don't upload them because I hate just. I hate myself. I hate staring at myself. I hate listening to this stuff. So, so I go to upload a clip and I watch myself for a few seconds and I go, I don't, I don't want to do that. I know you're thinking, I make content all day, but most of the content, the content is me staring at the guitar. I'm just like, Sometimes you're just like, I don't want to hear myself talk. So I'm trying to get that removed from me so we can just get those podclips out. Because I know a lot of you guys have enjoyed those. That channel is rocking in the numbers. I'm blown away with it. But I think it makes sense because instead of sitting through two hours of this stuff, you can just go right to sections without having to go through the chapters like we do. So I'll. I'll put the guitar of the week. I'll make sure that's a priority this weekend. That'll get done. Since I actually. I bet you I already have the clip. Who knows? And then unfrequent believable says, it's not clear acrylic. It's actually hollow. And it's. Yeah, it's, it's. That's what I said. You could watch the whole video. Everybody saw it last week. So it go. Just go right to Guitar of the Week from last week's podcast. Dan says, what are your thoughts on AI? Well, I don't know if that's really guitar centric question, but again, you know, part of this channel, part of it is kind of the gig, right? I use AI on a daily basis. But what I use it for is a little bit different, I'm sure, than some. So what I use AI for mostly is I get so many long emails, they're massively long. Um, I love that everybody's so passionate, but I don't know, like, I didn't. I'm not exaggerating. Some of these are five, six, seven paragraphs. And I'm like. And there's a little bit of fear in me when somebody sends me really long emails and I see it. I'm like, oh man, I don't have time to read that. But I'm also like, man, if they wrote that long, maybe it's something serious. I need to get on this. And there's just so much as you guys know, I, you know, you. Everybody watching here knows I'm probably not responding to like, you know, 80% of the stuff that's coming in. I'm only getting just the top of whatever comes through but anyways, what I use AI for is I'll take long emails like that. I post it into AI and I ask AI I'll say, hey, give me a short summary, like four sentences or three sentences of what this person's saying, like Reader's Digest version. And they give me. AI gives me a short version. And then that helps me go, okay, cool. And I use AI a lot for that. I've had that. I find that's a very effective thing. Um, I like that because I feel like that's a. That's a. I feel that's a good use of the technology. You know, I'd love to be in a world where I could have some assistant read me my emails all day. It's like, have to pay the assistant more than I make a year. Wouldn't make any sense. But, you know, it's like when you're trying to manage my day of, you know, do I want to spend the first three hours of just reading emails every day? It's. It's cuts into your day. So it's. AI has been very helpful for that. So I found use for that. That's. Yeah, that's it. That's. That's. That's the use for AI. I messed around with a couple other things AI and I just didn't find it. So far. If it helps everything I've tried that. Some stupid random, you know, TikTok. TikTok type influencer. I'm just being sarcastic, but you understand all these quick little videos, like this is how you can make your, you know, your videos great with AI. All that stuff I used has all been crap so far. Every AI title it generated. You guys hated every AI image it made. You hated everything we tried to do with AI and we tried a different ways. It's. And I don't want to dog it or bag on it. I just want to say that we, We've been better at figuring it out ourselves so far. That's. That's the basic. But trust me, there was a small, small part of me, I was like, man, it'd be really nice to have to think of thumbnails and titles. Okay, we're off. We'll go back to guitar now. Hawkhead says, what if AI is lying to you? You know, Hawkhead, I. I totally. Not only do I think that's possible, I think it's possible that it just gets it totally wrong altogether. But I'm. When I'm dealing in a, In a. A game of I'm not going to read it at all. It's like, that's what my choices are. I'm not going to read this. Or I can at least do this and get something to this person's response that makes sense. Like, okay. And to be honest with you, usually what I'm trying to do is buy myself some time by sending a short response saying, hey, okay, this is what I think. What I mean by that is, keep in mind, one of the things I get is companies reach out to me and they just have a lot of questions. You know, there's a lot of things. We were currently. We just finished a long negotiation for a video for you guys. Not like a. And by the way, when I say this, I don't mean like a paid sponsor video. I mean like something cool. Like, I'm going to be doing a cool video for you guys. And there's a lot of things that have to be, you know, communicated back and forth. It's very important. Let's see. Neck through Nelly. Want to know if I ever checked this for the signature on the Zen drive pedal? If I checked to see if it did, I did not. I just didn't get to it. I've been. So, you guys know the redo of the new studio has been a hellish nightmare. And. And so, you know, it was technically done and then at the last minute where everything was working and I actually got a video done. So you guys haven't seen a full video yet or it's been done. One of the. One of the units, one of the things that does what it's supposed to do. This needed an update. I did the update and it crashed. So it took me two hours to fix that. It's fine now, but I mean, that drains out your, you know, again, it's just a time suck. Just, you know, shoots out the day. But for those that are curious, if you're curious about the new videos, the new videos start this week. You've been seeing hodgepodge collected of what I formula I'm doing now. But the actual new videos will be this week where they're so. All right, what else? Let's go back to guitar stuff. I've like, we get off subject a little bit. Let's Clown Clan. God, I don't know why clown. I had Clan Clan of House Cats. Why I always say clown? I don't know what it is. Some kind of Hooked on Phonics thing. He says Dream Theater album dropped today. If Low E is cut to 0.056, can it have a. Okay, I understand where we're going with this. I just want to keep reading it. So what he's asking is if the low E on the nut is cut to a. Basically a 56 gauge string, can you put a 46 gauge string in it? If not, a 52 or 54 don't want the nut to rattle. So what you can do, you have three options. When you have a slot cut to a 56 gauge string, my guess is the 46 is going to do two things. One, it's not so much going to rattle that it might do. It's going to sit a little too low. Okay. So that's one issue. So you might already just have that. As you hit the open E string on the 46 gauge and it's just going to rattle. It's going to buzz. Because when you cut a slot, you got to understand it's cut. It's not. It's not cut straight. Like this is cut at a. You know, it's scooped, so it's rounded. But just think of it like a V. Okay. So the slot is cut in the nut like a V and the string sits in there. And at some point, you know, it was sitting up higher when it. Because it was bigger. When it's smaller, it's going to come down a little bit lower. So that's my first concern for you, is you put the 46 in and it's just going to rattle and buzz. Yes. You could put a 48 or 40, 52, and each one. 50, 54, each one will be an improvement of that. Obviously, if it's. I would say 54, 52, you're fine. 48 is where it's going to get a little problematic. And 46 is going to be the first problem string gauge that you go to. Again, I'm just guessing, but it's a, you know, it's an educated guess. Here's what I would suggest to you to do. Definitely do this. The baking soda and super glue trick. I just talked about that for this guitar. It's an old track trick used by Lou the Ears forever. It's not my trick. I did a video that did really well with it because it's just something I shared that I learned from somebody. And there's probably 50 of those videos on the Internet as well because it's like everybody uses it. When you mix baking soda with superglue, it's. It's like hard like a diamond. It's. It's rock hard. So you'll just put a little bit of that in the nut slot and Then you'll just file it out. Now, if you don't have a file, I understand that there is. And this is where it gets a little tricky. You can do the other trick where you could do that and then wrap a piece of sandpaper around a guitar string like I showed you in videos, and use that as a makeshift nut file. That material is kind of hard, so it's going to take a little bit more work, but that's all you would really need to do. That's what I would recommend. And then the other thing you can do that's really nice is you can use an actual. Just a common piece of paper and fold it up and kind of put it in the nut slot and just find the spot where the string works. And it will work. It's just every time you use the tremolo arm, or your vibrato, whatever you want to call it, you know, the paper is going to be an issue. You'll. You'll have some tuning issues, but it'll physically work. At least you can get it to work. And that's the first step. And then I'll get you through until then. Until you're ready to either fix that nut slot or cut a new nut or put a new nut on it. So that's what I would. Wreck. Wreck. Eric says the super glue and baking soda can get super messy and kind of hard to work with. For me, anyway. Yeah, it is. Yeah. No, no delusions there. It's. It hardens super fast, you know. Right. Because they react to each other. It is a little messy. You have to move quickly. It's. It's not something that. Again, you know, but in difficulty range. Right? In difficulty range, I would say it's, you know, out of 1 to 10, 10 being super difficult, you know, and we'll consider. So you guys have reference. We'll call it difficult refritting a guitar. Right. A ten is reframing a guitar as a challenge. It's a four. Yeah. So it's not hugely a big deal. So. And it works with anything. And so, you know, you can use that even if it. You're using a. Have a graphite nut. It works on everything. So let's see. B. I'm. I'm gonna. I don't want to mess up your name. I'm gonna do my best. Okay. I'm gonna say BL. It's B I L, Al B L or Biel Bi. I'm just, you know, I'm doing my best. You have a really cool name. It's Just unique. I haven't seen it. So it says, do you still play your Valiant Jupiter? How does it compare to the highest end guitars you can buy? I don't have it anymore. It is a fantastic guitar. You gotta understand guitars like that. What ends up happening is, you know, you do content and then you have to pay the bills. You hear YouTubers talk about this all the time, especially the gear channels. Like, you know, guitars sticking around is. It has to be one super paramount. Like, it has to be this guitar that you just can't live without. Because ultimately, I've said this before and I. I'll say it over and over again. Guitar youtubers, whatever you want to call them, guitar gear channels, whatever, they do not get free gear. They trade services for gear. So whenever you see a YouTuber saying, hey, they sent me this pedal, and you're like, must be nice. Get free gear. Well, it's. Look, it is nice. I mean, who doesn't want to get sent stuff? But it's not free. It's in exchange for the work. And that's fine. If, you know, as a side hustle, that's great, right? Could you imagine. A lot of you would probably love, like, a perfect example if you asked me could. If I had a real job, right? Okay, I had a real job. And at the end of the day, I come home and, you know, I hang out with my wife and we do a couple things and I go, hey, I think I'm gonna go make a video. And a company sent me this cool guitar and, you know, I'm gonna make a video with it. That's a great, like, hobby. That's a great side hustle. Like, who wouldn't want to do that? The problem is, is no company's gonna send you a guitar because they, they don't care about you. They care about your viewers. And you have to have a lot of them, right? That's what they care about. I've said this before. They. No company cares about me. That's why they care about you guys. And so what they do is they trade with channels like us in hopes to get gear in front of you. And that works for us sometimes. Because what I do sometimes is, like, I told you, is I'll take that gear that they send and we just churn it. We sell it to get other things on the channel, right? The, the. You know, I just did those two Fender standard guitars. I had to buy them because. And, and I didn't look technically what I bought them with, but I can tell you it was Some gear that some company sent me that I sold, took that money and bought it on. In fact, that's out of you. I have the new. I have the new Ibanez Az. It's. That video is out this week. Including. And also there's a cool Yamaha guitar behind me that is a sponsored video. So that was cool, the Yamaha. I got Sweetwater to send that out. But you know, think about this. The irony of life, right? I. They sent out the 200 guitar, but I paid for the 600, but you get the idea. So yeah, it's a great guitar. It just, I just moved it along because again, we wanted to pay ourselves for that stuff. So that's how it works. Sometimes though, sometimes companies will actually do both. They'll send the gear and they'll co sponsor the video and then you, you don't have a reason to sell the guitar. So then that's what happens sometimes. So that helps a lot. But most of the guitars, unfortunately they go. The only exception to that is. And again, I just, it's just being honest with you guys, the only exception is sometimes I like the thing they sent me so much that I sell something I already own in exchange for that. And that happens. That happens not quite often, but kind of often. So. All right, back to. Let's see. Searching for Tone says I buy it, I review it, and then I have hard time with the last part selling it. I have a hard time selling it because you guys, my heart, my thing that sucks is when, when I buy it and I sell it, nobody wants to give me anything for it because they didn't like the review. If I, if I do, if I buy something and I review it and it's like, it's phenomenal. And I put it up for sale, you guys will buy it like in an. Within an hour. And I'm like, oh cool. And I'll get like a big chunk of that money back. Sometimes even all like what I paid. Not very common, but close. So you guys know I, I'm selling the. Obviously I bought the Offender Standard Telly and Strat, but I put a teaser out there to people that I was going to sell them and nobody was interested. So I already know we're going to have to take a bath on those. And so I'm not in a hurry to sell them is what I'm trying to say. They'll sit around because I'm like, you know, like I said, I'm never in a hurry to lose money. I can lose money whenever I have free time. I'll figure it out then. All right, again, we got to get back onto guitar stuff and less YouTuber guitar stuff. Let's do this one. This is. Thank you, Steve, for the super chat. This one was from Dr. I'm gonna call you Dr. Mab again. Dr. Mab says, Hey, I got my first boutique guitar. Okay. A new Novo. Okay. Solis, from an authorized dealer. Love it, but it has a strong odor, like Raid roach spray. Is that the lacquer? You're the second person to tell me that their Novo had a strange smell. You're literally the second person. So that's really strange. I wonder what they're doing. Usually lacquer smells sweet. Like, it's got a sweet smell to it. It's possible if it comes in a gig bag or the case. It could be the gig bag or the case. What I would. So here's. Here's. I literally, a friend of mine, a close friend, bought a Novo and texted me and said, dude, I got it. I love it. It smells. What do I do? So I'm going to give you the same advice to him. He never asked me again, so I'm assuming it worked. Okay. So if it doesn't work, I don't, you know, don't kill the messenger. I'm going to say it needs to gas off. Okay. So I kind of told him the same thing from his situation. It sounded like they sometimes. Guitar man, you know, look, Novo is not like, you know, they're not like Fender. They're not building guitars. And then they put them in a warehouse, and they're waiting for somebody to order. You know, go to a dealer, they probably build it, and as soon as it's done, it gets boxed up, and, like, it's right. You know, it gets inspected and it goes. So sometimes they need stuff to gas off for a little while, and so there might be something in the guitar or the case. It's just weird that when he sent that to me, I thought it was a strange thing to say. Now I'm like, literally, he didn't say it said Raid. I don't remember what he said. It's not like he just said it wasn't a pleasing smell and should he be concerned? And his was brand new as well. And I said no. I mean, I would imagine, you know, it'd be fine. So basically, what I would tell you is, like, I said, let it gas off. So in other words, let air get to it. You can put a fan on it. You know, put a fan by it, maybe not directly on it. But let it breeze off the case or gig bag. I. I have this problem a lot of times with case or gig bags. I'll let them literally sit in my garage for a couple days just to make sure. Again, to let the. Whatever odor that they have coming, you know, kind of dissipate and stuff. But that's what I can do. You can do all kinds of stuff, like with baking soda and all this stuff too. But I would just say let it for. First of all, I would say, realistically, 72 hours of letting it gas off and seeing what happens. And now I'm curious enough. I might try to reach out to someone I know with them and see if there's something we should know. But I wouldn't. I wouldn't worry. Your next part is. Is there a way to deodorize it? There probably is, but he's. Oh, he said, by the way, the gig bag smells fine. So, yeah, just let the guitar gas off. Don't. Don't. You don't have to do anything to deodorize it. Literally let it gas off. This is. You know, it's. Here's why I'm saying this. I. I've experienced so much when it comes to guitars. You know, just the volume of guitars either repairing or selling or whatever. You know, a lot of really, really inexpensive guitars have an issue with this. What I mean by that is, you know, when they slap guitars together for like, 99 bucks and they ship them to stores, I remember, like, they come straight, you know, to the. You know, like, literally get straight to us, you know, from like, China or Vietnam. And we'd open them up and they would have this intense, you know, like polyurethane or some, like you said, like, not bug spray, but intense synthetic smell. And it was literally just. They needed to gas off, and we let in a couple days. They were fine. So I would say that's. That's my recommendation to you. Let it sit for the weekend. He. By the way, he has more. He says, also, GF says, oh, girlfriend. Ah, I got you. Girlfriend says, it barely smells. You could be sensitive to smell. I'm super sensitive to smells. I don't know what it is. I don't know why it is. It's. I'm. It's super problematic for me. I'm. I'm sensitive to all of it. So, yeah, I don't like. I. I get. I get weirded out by stuff. So when I was. When I got my first 412 cabinet, the selection speakers, they smelled like cat pee. To me. And it was driving me crazy. And I literally, I was losing my mind because I was like, there's no way, you know, Right. I got it brand new from a store and I was like, whoa. And I remember I. I drove back to the music store and I went in and I went into the store and I went and smelled a bunch of the 412. They were crate 412 made in USA, 412 cabinets. And I went and smelled the cat. The speakers cabinets, like, the holes. Like I had to do it like inconspicuously, like, you know, like. And they smell like. They all smell like happy. And for some reason that calmed me down. That was like, okay, whatever it is, is what it is. It's just as long as it's not wrong or weird. But yeah, it was just weird how it's so. I always remember that. So. Okay, okay. Anyways, Roger, Roger, what do you have? He says, hey, Phil, have you ever seen the neck through Fender Teles made in Indonesia? I have and they originally were made. So they're not neck through though. They're set necks or what they would call set throughs. So let me get through your question and then we'll talk and show you one. He says much better value than the standard series. I love the audio podcast too. Thank you so much. I finally got the update to get all the audio podcasts out. So by the way, for those that hate commercials, the audio versions have almost no commercials and they very rarely put commercials in them. It's like YouTube. They put commercials in like YouTube does. But it's very rare that they have the commercials and I can tell you if they do, if you wait a day, they won't because they only do run little campaigns from. But just give me an option if you don't like the commercials. So let's look at the. I'm just going to put this in the search and I bet you it comes up. So what he's referring to is this guitar right here. I'm pretty sure this is it. Let's go to it. This is the Fender special edition Custom Telecaster fmt. By the way, they used to have a Strat. In fact, we can look up the Strat too. They don't make the Strat anymore, which sucks. The Strat was great. We can just type in Fender fmt. You know what? And the Strat will probably come up. Let's look at the, at the, at the. Here you go. Here's. They had a USA one. This is. This, this one's not usa. This one's a thousand. That's new. You might see they did have a set neck. FMT USA 1. This is probably it. Fender American Deluxe. It. Nope, that's bolt on. But let's look at an actual. This one. This one will be main Korea, because I'm pretty sure the Strats died off. Look at that Main Korea right there on the headstock. So these are cool. And again, like, you. Like you're saying. It looks like if you see it, you're thinking, yes, it's a neck through. It's not. It's a set neck. Exactly like Schecter. See, you can see right here, besides that big dent on that neck. Ooh, you can see where I'm pointing. For those listening, I'm pointing out a scarf joint. This is literally where they. They've glued together the base of the. The neck and the neck itself to the body. So this was. They used to offer this as a Strat and a telly. My guess is because the Strats didn't do that well, they switched to the tellies. There's also a signature model like this. Let's go back to the telly. And so, like. Like PRs and everybody else, they were making them. Korea got too expensive. They moved to Indonesia. So now they're made in Indonesia right here. We can't zoom in any closer, it looks like, but trust me on this. So this is what you're. I can. Oh, I can see right there. Indonesia. So they're made in Indonesia. Yes, they're great guitars. So, you know, my issue with the standard Fender standards has nothing to do with being in Indonesia. It's like I said, it has to do with the specifications. And interestingly enough, the. The thing that made me laugh was I was going through a Squire affinity the other day. I don't know why. And I was looking at the standard Strat and the affinity, and I mean, they were really close in specs. And again, some people say it doesn't matter. I don't know if that. That doesn't matter. But, you know, my whole point was for 600 bucks, I just was hoping for a little bit more. But yeah, yeah. So seeing the set next, they make a lot of. So they make other Fenders. They make Fenders in Indonesia. They make Fenders. The Fender. The acoustic guitars that say Fender are made in China and they are labeled Fender. So Fender labeling, things made. You know, the Fender logo, made in China, made in Indonesia. That's been done before and currently done as well. Think of this Currently guitars with the Fender logo are made in the usa, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia. I think Korea is pretty much all gone, but there might be some Korean ones as well. And so what I say, China, Indonesia, usa, Mexico, Japan and. And Korea kinda. So that's six countries that I know of that they make Fenders in currently right now. And like I said, Korea is the only one they probably stopped from. But you never know, they might make one or two. So they do make Fenders in other countries. That's why like I said, I was I honest to goodness, I bought the standards thinking this was going to be a great video as wow. I thought it was going to be one of those wow videos. But I didn't really poo poo the guitars. But obviously when I went through them, I mean it was hard for me to get like wow, this is really awesome. I can't wait for everybody to 600 out of their pocket and buy one. So I mean it just, you know, they were fine. They're fine. That's what it is. They're fine. I will tell you this. The next two guitars, the next two videos you see of guitars I thought were as good or better than them and the one that was as good was less than half the price and one was better was less the price. So that wasn't great. Great soil. One soil sample says, hey, do you prefer decked or floating trim inexperience with a trim stabilizer. So I used to use a trim stabilizer like 20 years ago. I stopped. Over the years what I've done for me is just for my sanity and just the way I like to be is dector. Floating trims have to do with the guitar. Some guitars just do well floating and they just take abuse and I just, I don't deck the bridge, I float it. So I use the tremolo however I want and it works great. And I can drop D in the guitar and everything just works great. And then some guitars don't. So I just deck the bridge and so that's how I fix it. The perfect example is my charvel DK24 that I really like. It's made in Mexico, that one, for some reason, man, that thing just has trouble staying in tune. So that that bridge got decked and it works great. I just go forward on the trim. It stays in tune as long as I do that. But floating, man, I was always just fighting it. And like I said before, if a guitar goes out of tune, if I. If I'm playing guitar and anything happens and it goes out of tune. I'm just like, ah, I'll grab a guitar that I know stays in tune and just keep playing. It's like, why fiddle with something? I got too many nice guitars to fiddle with something. So. So that's how it works on my current Strats, my personal Strats. My green Strat is, I think decked, and then my copper Strat is floating. And it might be reversed, but I know one's one, one's the other, so. Okay. Oh, what time is it? Oh, look at that. It's a little early. Guess what it's time for now. It's time for Guitar of the Week. We're gonna do Guitar of the Week. So this one is gonna be fun. It's a, it's a, it's a guitar I wanted to share with you guys because, I don't know, something cool. So what do we have today? We have a Paul Reed Smith CE24 Semi Hollow. So this is a made in USA. One is a maple neck. So what you have is a two piece maple neck. This has a scarf joint. I know you have a mahogany body. It's a bolt on. You can see the bolt on right there. And then you have a maple cap. This one's in yellow. I don't know why I picked this. I. I just love the color. I bought this from Wildwood Guitars. This was towards the end, towards the end of my, what I would call my pandemic purchases, where I was like, I think this was one of the last ones. If not, not the last one, but one of the last ones where I was like, oh, maybe another guitar will make me happy. And I got this, this one is light. I want to say seven pounds. It's not seven and a half. It's probably seven pounds. High sixes, low sevens. It's got the tremolo arm. I believe it came with the original clear lampshade nozz, but I switch it to the amber ones. I just like the color of the amber on the yellow. This kind of reminds me of Santana. The red back with the yellow front, semi hollow. I only did it because the weight relief. I was just like, hey, it'll be lighter. I. I've had a couple of these over the years. If you guys watch the channel. I had a green one and then I had a. I had one of those limited edition, you know, the reclaimed wood ones and I sold that one. I. I'd love to say I regret selling it. I don't, guys, because I, I bought it and I liked it. And then what happened was they like doubled in price. It was one of those things like everybody went crazy with them because. So I. I sold it and I took the profit and I bought a solid body. That's where I got the green one. I had a solid, but because I got a green one for a smoking deal. So I was like. So it was one of those things like, oh, now I have one. And then over time, I got rid of the green one because I wanted to get a semi hollow or something light again. So that kind of worked out. So it all worked out in my favor. So this has the 8515 pickups, something. I wasn't too sure if I like them as a lot in this guitar. I kind of wanted to maybe put some 57 or something in there, but I kind of like them. I've kind of grown to like them. And again, I like that pickup. I just didn't know if I liked it. In this guitar. It's a rosewood fretboard. It's got the. The white birds. So it's the white ivory. It doesn't look like mother of pearl or anything, which I actually like. Some people don't like that as much. And then I'm gonna play it. So I'm gonna run it through my Amplified Nation Wonderland overdrive. So I'm running an amp and it's running through a 212 cabinet. It's mic'd up with a Sennheiser, and that's what you're gonna hear. So let me go ahead, I will switch camera views, play it, and then if there's any questions, we'll talk about it. Here we go. Let's go to the neck pickup and roll the volume back. Let's roll the volume back. Back to the bridge, back to neck. Roll that volume back off again a little bit. Let's coil, split it, go to single coil mode. All right, so hopefully you guys can hear me again. So what's interesting is I have an affection for the Cell Bolton guitars. As you guys know, Guitar of the week is about just sharing a story or a funny thing. And I. I have this weird compulsion to own a C.E. bolt on guitar. You know, when I was, when I first got into PRS guitars, I was not. I was definitely elate to the game on PRS guitars. I. I didn't really ever see any interest in them. To me, they were just. Well, so keep in mind, for, for. For reference, it wasn't just PRs. It was Gibson, Les Paul's and PRSS's. They were just like, you know, old guitars. And so I was like, oh, I like newer looking guitars. And I wasn't really into this look, this fancy, pretty look. And I still, even when I opened my store, still wasn't into prss. It wasn't a thing I was into. And then. But I was like, oh, I have a store. I want to own some. You know, I own. I want to have some nice guitars in store. So we started picking up nicer brands and nicer brands. And one of the brands we went to was a prs. And when I approached PRS to be a dealer, I said, hey, I want to, I want to get some PRSs. And they said, well, to be a dealer, you have to buy nine. And I was like, oh, okay, well, we'll buy nine. Because I'm thinking, okay, that's actually, you know, that's a lot, but it's not a lot, right? We can do that. And they go, well, the problem is, is if you ordered nine, we'd only be able to ship you two. So we couldn't even supply you. So they just said no. And I might have told this story before, but it was kind of funny. So fast forward a couple years later. Remember, the store was kind of new at that time and the rep, who's a good friend of mine to this day, was in town and he was visiting the more well known, more well established guitar store in the Phoenix area. And the owner there, who is actually a friend, but at the time we didn't know each other. He spent the entire conversation complaining about us. He's like, I guess he was like, yeah, they're selling a lot of guitars over there and they're selling so many guitars and all these people are talking about them. And what happened was he. Because he spent their sales meeting the owner bitching about us. When the rep left, he got in his car and drove straight to our store, walked in our store and said, so how do we make you a PRS dealer? And I said, oh, I've talked to you guys before, I want to be a dealer. And he goes, yeah. He says, basically, he's like, you know, when the other store hates you, you got it. You're doing something right. We got to get the, we got to get your PRS guitars. So I started carrying PRS guitars and. And I just didn't get them still. I would sell them because, you know, people, you know, should get whatever they want. And they were nice guitars. And then what happened was, as you guys know, in 2009, I went to PRS's factory and met with them. And in that interaction I just fell in love with the employees and just the vibe and the career. And I kept buying PRSs and I just couldn't find a PRS. I got one of those fancy ones and I was like, just, this isn't my thing. And so this isn't the name drop just to tell you why. This is personal to me. So Chester Bennington, who's the singer of Linkin park, his son used to work at a store, take lessons and stuff. And so he would come and he was always super nice. And one day he came in the store and he bought some guitars. He bought a Mexican made blacktop telly from us. I've told this story maybe before. And. And he bought a PRS Miura from us. And. And I made a joke because he gave me his black card. And I was like, this is actually funny because if I don't tell this, Ralph will get mad at me. We used to never take American Express. And we had to take American Express because he handed us American Express black card. And we're like, oh, we're taking American Express now. So anyways, he bought the guitars and I remember making the joke to him. This is just to give you an idea how nice he was. I said, why are you buying guitars, man? They'll give you these guitars, like these companies. And he's like, nah, no one cares about the singer, man. I'm like, I don't think that's true, right? And no, it was just. Cause he just wanted to support the store. He was just nice. He was as nice that way. But what happened is, and why that ties into this is we were talking one day and he told me he really likes Strats and he likes PRS ces. And I said, oh yeah, I don't like the ces. I go, they look cheap to me, right? I was like, I don't get the fancy thing. I just. It can't get there. But then this looks like a cheaper version of that. So I don't like that either. And he goes, yeah, but the C's, they got the mojo. They sound great. That's the best sounding guitars PRs ever made. And I just have to have one now. I've always had. That's why. So you know, that's why I'm telling the story. Like I had the, the, the reclaimed one I sold. I got the solid body and I'm like, okay, I gotta get this one. I have to have a C. And there's just something I like about them. To me, they sound like really fat Strats. Like, this guitar is more of a fat Strat vibe. So I just tell you that some people have different opinions about them for that reason. And it's funny to me because I like stories like this because I think it's, it's nice to share that. We talk on the Internet, you know, Tone woods and fights and, you know, you know, we fight about, argue about silly things, you know, and, you know, and the brass block versus the thing. And the reality is, is I always feel I love this because as a guitar tec tech and as someone who illustrates and shares guitar tech information with you guys, you know, specs matter for value. You know, when you want to like, hey, what should this cost you? This is your hard earned money. But I keep saying this and that's why I like to have the podcast and this conversation comes up. The stuff I own never is because of the specs. It's always because of an emotional attachment or a thought. Like, like I said, gold top, Les Paul slash is cool, so I think Slash is cool, so I think this guitar is cool. That's just how that works. I'm a John Mayer fan, so I have to have like a Dumble John Mary sounding amp and it's like, okay, that's my thought. Chester was really super nice and I was like, oh, well. He said, this guitar is cool. I gotta have that. I think it's funny how silly it could be. And it has been for me my whole life. The things I like really have no real, real attached, real tangible values. It's just how I feel about something. So. And all these years and all these videos and everything I've learned about guitars and shared with you guys, I still come down to, yeah, if I like it, if I feel good about it, I like it. If I don't feel good about it. And I don't know, I just like that because that conversation seems to get lost in the weeds a lot on the Internet. You know, that's not the argument. The reality is, is. And the reality is there's nothing to argue about. And I think that's why the Internet doesn't like it. What do you argue with? I like it because I like it. It's all. That's all. So Brian says He was a CE guy until he got the DGT. That's a great guitar. The DG2T ME. The CE is. It's again, it's just about, like I said, the story. I told you, it's like Just something cool. It ranks. Always makes me think of Lincoln Park. I'm a huge Linkin park fan. So we went and saw them. What tour was that? The last tour we saw him, it was. I'm trying to. I can't remember the name of the band that opened for them. I just know the singers was the Joker and the new Batman. Why am I having trouble? Is it something to Mars? 30 seconds to Mars, my. I just remember. This is what I remember about that show. I'll never forget it. The singer of 30 Seconds to Mars, who's the actor, he must have had. Something was wrong with his throat or he's having a hard night. Or is the end of the tour because he spent the whole show doing the. You sing was good. It was cool at first. You're singing along and he's holding the microphone out. But then after a while, Shauna looked at me and she goes, I think he's trying to get us to do his job because we were literally in charge of singing. The crowd was in charge of singing the entire show. Yes. Jared Leto. Yes. So I think he had an off night that night is what I'm trying to say. But it was still a great show and Linkin park was amazing. All right, so that's our guitar of the week. Let's. Does anyone have any questions about the guitar? I think at this point we covered a lot of cool things about it. So if you're curious, this one. This is another thing to talk about with ces. This one I got on a deal because they, you know, they made me a deal at Wildwood Guitars. But so, you know, on the CES specifically, I find them all the time, great prices. So if you're looking for a USA made prs, I think these ones are the ones. I constantly can find the best deals on you. These guitars sell for like 2400-2800 new. I find them $1500 all the time and. And sometimes cheaper. There was a Semi Hollow. I almost felt bad I didn't buy it. It was a Semi Hollow just like this in Arizae Verde Green in my local Craigslist. And they wanted 1400 bucks. And it took three weeks before that listing came down. So that tells you I was like, 1400 bucks for a USA made semi hollow PRs. I was like. But so, you know, on a side note, I also think it's because these guitars are a little. A little priced high. They're aggressively twice overpriced is what you would say, right? Overpriced. I Don't know why. I just not going to say it sometimes I'm trying to be nice, but, you know, it's over. They're overpriced. All right, all right. Let's go to another subject. A question we have. Working. Working night 84 says congratulations on 400 shows. Phil looking for. Looking forward to 400 more. This is the last one, man. Just kidding. 400 more. It's crazy. The. I don't know. It's kind of funny. 400 is nuts. That's 800 hours of talking. It's nuts. Nuts. I don't know. Sometimes I'm not. I don't know if I'm proud of it or ashamed of it or a little both. I think mostly I'm proud of it. I'll be honest. I'm just mostly shocked that the community stuck around and you guys have hung out for these all these years. And it's crazy to me that. By the way, not crazy. My wife. My wife's like. She. If any of your wives have trouble or girlfriends have trouble, understand this. My wife explains it to women all the time. She's like. They're like, yeah, I don't understand that. She's like, I do. They're like all like this funny. All right, okay, so next. Next subject was Brad Guitar Miller. Hey, Brad. He says, ordered and received my kyg work shirt. Now I'm cool, too. Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm super excited about the new merch. I have the new mug. Look at that. What? The geeky stuff. There's two kinds. Look, this is. Thank you. Just you kind of segue me into the merch stuff that I'm bad at. I don't know why I can't hold. I'm just horrible at holding these things in the. Right. For those that listen. Dis. Understand. Just picture. I have no idea what I'm doing. Anyways. They have geeky stuff. Stuff. I'm not probably supposed to share the stuff, but like we have like mouse pads coming. Not supposed to share that, I think, because it's not approved yet. But we have a lot of cool new stuff. So the mugs and stuff are out. There's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. And the new work shirts. Awesome. I love them. It's fantastic. And I'm glad you bought one. Thank you so much for supporting the show and stuff and. And getting a work shirt and get it just. Anyways, getting the merch. I just appreciate it, guys. Like I said, it's really cool. I've said this before. I'll say it forever. I know the merch. I always look at the merch as like a. It's a vehicle for a donation. That's what I feel like you're doing when you're getting the merch. You're basically just supporting the channel and saying thank you with your money and you get a little, you know, present for doing that. And because I know it's like, it's not like, you know, you could buy this stuff anywhere with whatever brand on it, but I appreciate it is what I'm trying to say. So this is T sizes. Hey, happy 400th, Phil. Thank you. I appreciate that. T size he says. Have you ever dabbled in classical nylon string guitars? I have a Godin class classical guitar currently. I've had a bunch over the years. I had an Amy which is by Arts and Arts and Luthery which was really cool. And I've probably had a few others here and there. I think I had an Ibanez classical for a few years. Says I wanted one for the, for the last couple years but the selection and price points throw me off the woods and these are actually matter. Unlike electro electrics. Yes. So classicals. So first of all, like I said, let's, let's just change hats for a second literally to like owning a store and selling guitars. If you're not, if you're new to classical. Let me explain how classical works. Real classicals are like 4, 5, 10 grand. That's like, that's where they start. So if you, when people tell me like, oh, I'm thinking about getting a classical, but I know I gotta get like a really nice one, like a thousand dollars, I'm like, that's not, that's not even a thing. That's. The real classicals are extremely expensive. For high end ones, usually hand built by one person, it's usually, it's a big deal if you're seriously into classical. So here's, here's what I would tell you. Classicals matter a lot because of course, you know, you want the quality of instrument because they resonate so loudly. But I would say for classicals, if you're not gonna, you know, you gotta start somewhere. So don't overthink it, right? Just get a nice one like a Yamaha branded one or you know, I'm trying to think of another one that's pretty cool. Cordoba makes a couple like affordable ones that are nice stick with affordable ones. I have a go down one because it's electric. Classical plays great. The neck feels like a classical. It's Thick and wide and, and, and because classical is one of those things, like when I'm in the mood, ah man, I love playing one. It's like the greatest thing ever. And I think to myself, I'm like, this is what I really should be playing like my whole life. And then like three days later I'm like, nah, go back to, go back to electric guitar. But I would say go. I, I personally think for classical guitars, for affordable and quality, you cannot beat the Yamaha stuff. I mean it's just legit and you got it. Like I said, you got to start someone. Don't, don't overthink it and don't try and basically, you know, the buy one cry ones don't do that with the classical because like I said, if you really are going to take classical to the, to the level where you want to take it, it's going to get crazy expensive and it's going to get there crazy fast. And, and most the classical, legitimate classical players I know, which I don't know a lot, but I know a few they don't like. I mean, here's, this is my take on it. They don't play anything. Any of you would know every guitar they play. Why? Okay, so I say I don't have that many friends that are classical players, like legit ones, but maybe four or five. And out of the four or five, not a single one of them. Their guitars, you would know their brand. Not a single one. And all of them are crazy expensive classicals that are made by, like I said, they're always like, I would check out. I don't even know where you go. Like in Arizona, Acoustic vibes is close to somewhere to go for that. Usually you go to these specialty, specialty shops. Like you're not going to, you know, guitar center and stuff and buying a nice classical if you're going like the high end. So like I said, I would take it slow, start something normal. Have fun with that. Aaron Shorts music from the Aaron Short Music Channel. Hey, what's up, Aaron? He says, hey, Phil, thanks for the live streams. Thank you. Thank you for your channel as well. Is there a way to tell if the frets are stainless or nickel or do you just have to wait and see? Okay, so on the tests because as you know, we keep trying to increase the tests. That's what we do. And we've added a couple new things. But one of the problems we have is the whole confirming something stainless. The reality is is that first of all, stainless steel fret guitars, the best ones, the Highest quality ones. Somebody using like the Jaskar. Jessica. Jessica. The Jascar fret material, that's not the hardest stainless, right? So they can't even use the hardest stainless steel. And again, this is, this is where it gets tricky. So like nickel silver. Okay, so there's degrees, right? So, so essentially, like nickel silver frets, there are. They don't think about thickness and, and, and like, you know, medium and jumbo and, and vintage. Don't even think about that. Just think about this. In density of strength. There are different materials within that same naming structure. So somebody saying nickel silver doesn't really tell you the whole story, right? It's, it's. There could be more nickel content or more of a material content in it and less of a material content. And they can be made. Paul Reed Smith himself, Powersmith Guitars, claims they claim that their nickel silver frets are some of the hardest nickel silver frets you can buy in the industry. And that's what they're using, right? So, and so they're saying, he's said, Paul has said that his nickel silver frets, the materials they're using that they're buying from their vendors, are less than stainless steel. They're certainly not as strong as stainless steel, but they're almost as strong as the weakest, I guess, stainless steel. That's basically right. So think about like a chart 1 to 10, right? 10 being this ultimate hard stainless steel. But they're not using that in frets. I tell you that, because that's kind of where I'm like, wow, I'd really like to give that information to you guys. The sad part is this is what we did. We looked into it and so a couple of you guys reached out and you guys had some information. And we learned that there's a machine. And I looked in the machine and I really did. I even found a used one that will help me tell if something is stainless steel. The problem is the machine was 20 grand. I found a used one for nine grand. So I was like, man, this is going to take a long time. Plus, I have no idea, right? I remember I'm taking a shot in the dark. This will even work for what I want to use it for. So how I can tell? There's only two ways that I can be able to tell when I'm testing the frets. So you guys know. And I do this sometimes off camera, but I'm still doing the test. Test one is I polish the frets. So polishing stainless steel is really simple. Think about this way you cannot nickel silver. In my, in my experience with nickel silver frets, when I polish them just with steel wool, like, right, like, like four ought steel wool. When I polish a fret as hard as I polish it, as much as I polish it, I cannot get it as shiny as a stainless steel fret. So stainless steel fret is more mirror like image or finish, more mirror finish than a nickel silver. However, when I use my magnifying glass, that big magnifying glass, when I go there and I look at the frets, no matter how, no matter how shiny I get it, it's almost impossible, almost to not see any micro scratches in stainless steel ferrets. All stainless steel frets all seem to be. You can get them really super shiny so that visibly to your eye they are super shiny. Like I said, like a mirror. But if you get out the magnifying glass and you look up close, you're going to see these little teeny hairline marks in them that you don't really see in nickel silver. That's one of the ways I've been able to tell. And by the way, then this is a best educated guess at that point. I'm giving you guys some kind of confirmation that way. The, the real easy way for me to tell is to cut them. I have cut so many frets in my life, right, that when I take the nips and I like cut them, I don't care what the fret is. When I do that. I know exactly what that is. Nickel silver. Like cheap, cheap, cheap. Like you know, frets on guitars. Like we're talking inexpensive, student grade. You know, at the Costco guitars, you know, you put one of those frets and you cut through it. It's like cutting through like butter. It's butter. Stand still. You always have to kind of. I always have to kind of push. I can always feel it in my wrist. Like just all of a sudden I'm. Oh, that last little piece tells me like, oh, this is a little harder than normal. And that tells me. So here's the problem with that. The problem is if I yank a fret and I do that, I can repair the fret and there's not that fret, but I can put a new fret and I can repair the guitar and sell the guitar. But I really devalued the guitar. So it's been really tough for me to kind of justify doing that. So we have been in talks for another idea, one of the ideas that we're reaching out to companies to actually provide us a piece of their fret wire. The problem though is how do we know they actually are providing us the correct fret wire? And how geeky and nerdy do we want to get with this on this channel? Right? Really, at the end of the day, here's how I feel about it. I have no doubt that Kiesel guitars is giving you stainless steel frets. Okay. And I have no doubt that Paul Racing guitars are giving you nickel silver frets. Like, I have no doubt there. So really, when we're testing things, really just testing these off brand companies, so, you know, it's really, that's what it's about. It's like an off brand company. Are they really giving you what they say? And the. Luckily for us, Fender and Gibson, who are big brands but notoriously known for being off specifically, they don't claim to use stainless steel for the most part. So those, I would tell you the fastest way is definitely polish them. Polish the frets. You can really tell that's that comes. That's been the fastest. And by the way, the other thing I did, besides looking into the, the tools, what I really did is I reached out to a bunch of my friends in the industry who work in the factories, physically work in the factories polishing frets all day. I actually have three of them, three close friends who polish frets all day. That's all they do in three different companies in the US and when I talk to them, they literally said, and so why that's important is to me, they're better than luthiers, they're better than repair guys because they're somebody doing something all day. If you, you know as well as I do, anybody knows, if you do one thing all day, right, you know that thing better than probably anyone else. And so when they're polishing frets all day, what they said is exactly what I just told you. They said, look, we can tell because so, so you know, they have stories too where they have stories where like, yeah, guitar comes through. And I'm like, this is supposed to be stainless for the customer. And it doesn't look stainless. And they got it, they got a test too. And I saw, I go, how do you know that you grabbed the right footwear and somebody didn't mess up down the road, you know, up, up the, the production line? And they said the same as me, polish the frets. You won't get any nickel silvers to get highly, highly polished like the stainless steels. So it's really cool. So that's my, that's my Insight on that. Max. Max says big brand should offer stainless steel Rats. I'm, you know, there's again, we can talk all day. Everybody's going to talk about Tone woods and opinions and all this stuff. I know I'm not tongue of Tone woods, but I really think at this point, every guitar, they can have stainless steel, fresh stainless steel frets. The players, though, still freak out of that. That's the holdback. The holdback is some players like, no, I hate the way they sound. I'm convinced that most of you guys can't figure it out. Because I can't figure it out. And I'm not saying, like, oh, I have a magic ear and if I can't hear it, you can't hear it. I'm telling you guys, like, just trying to confirm something like that. If it was so easy that all of you can hear, it would be. That would be easy. It's just not that easy in all those cases. So. I don't know. I don't know. But I'm sure everybody, again, everybody keeps telling me they can hear it. I. I don't know. I can tell you this. I told you guys, I refrated my PRS Miro with stainless steel frets. I've handed the guitar to dozen, two dozen guitar players and not one guitar player says, man, this guitar is really bright. They all say the same thing. They all go, it's really dark. Is that because it's all mahogany? They all say that because it's. And it's really dark because the pickups are really dark. It has. The mirror has a really dark, mellow sound because those pickups are really underwound. And every time they're like really dark. Is that the mahogany? No, it's sustainable frets. Yeah. I don't know, but I like. Now, see, watch. Art. Art says use a magnet. Art. That's a great idea. Believe it or not, we actually not only tried that, we bought a ton of magnets. Here's the problem. There's a problem. First of all, nickel, silver, frats aren't magnetic either. So that doesn't help us. We can't get the magnets stick to them. We've tried all kinds of things, okay? In bare wire, you can kind of get some materials to stick to the magnet. But the biggest issue, believe it or not, this is from testing, like I said, hours. I mean, I've spent hours on this project. So, you know, the biggest problem is the truss rod in the center is that once you use a magnet that's strong enough and sense enough to detect something like the fret. It goes right for the truss rod. So you can't tell because you're, you're, you know, again, you have to pull the fret. And if you're pulling the fret, I don't really need to use a magnet. If I'm pulling the fret, I told you, I can. Once I pull the fret, I can tell it's just, you know, pulling the fret. And I also got to just say this again, kind of like my story earlier about, you know, loving a guitar just because I love it. I also came to the conclusion after putting dozens, not hundreds of hours, I don't want to be ridiculous here, but dozens of hours into this as a, hey, wouldn't this be a cool thing to do on the channel? To give someone as information is. If it's this hard to tell, then it's insanely stupid, right? If you have to go through this lengths to figure out if something is good or bad, then I guess you can't tell. That's the answer, right? The real answer is in 20 years of real playing, real playing, you'll figure out if you have nickel silver or stainless steel frets. The sad thing is if somebody says, oh well, if you get nickel silver, you'll tell only if you play the crap out of it for a lot, for over many, many years. Only because most guitar players aren't wearing Al frets. You know how I know that? I know that for a fact. Here's how I know that most you guys aren't wearing Al frets. Go on Reverb and look at used guitars and show me how many of those guitars have worn out frets. There are guitars that are 30, 40 years old now, by the way, for the record. So in case someone gets smart about this and says, oh, well, they crown and level them. Yeah, well, how. Show me how many guitars have three crown levels over a period of 30 years or whatever. It's not a lot, not comparatively. So a lot of players are not playing as players decided to get dozen guitars. They just can't put the wear on all their guitars. You know, I had somebody tell me it's a good argument. Somebody says, oh, they used to play them a lot in the 80s and 90s. Now they don't play them as much. It's possible. My theory is it was a lot easier to wear out your frets when you had one guitar or two. When you have 10, it gets really hard to put those guitars in rotation to a point where you Wear them out, you know, it's just. It's just the reality of it. So. So we'll see, like I said. But again, I'm going to stick with. If it's that hard to tell, then I guess it may not matter to us. So we put focus in other things and other things we're taking. Somebody mentioned the new sheets. The new sheets. The new sheets are really cool. The sheets you got those are new that you saw on the website. There's a new new sheet. We improved it even since then. It's just really getting long. So I don't know. Authority on regulations. That's nice. Sign on it says, hey, Phil. Pickup height. Does it affect intonation? Pickup height. The whole concept of pickup height, pulling your guitar out of tune is true, but it is a very specific situation that happens. It's not how close a pickup. I've talked about this before, but we'll just recap it. It's not how close a pickup is to the strings. It's the type of pickup that is close to the strings. So, first of all, in my experiences with pickups and guitars and setting up, it's very rare, to the point where it's not even worth mentioning to worry about it, that a humbucker pulls a guitar's intonation out or pulls a guitar. So not only can a pickup make the intonation wonky, it can make your guitar buzz. Like, I've had it where a guitar player hits a string and it's buzzing and they think they need it and they're like, I've made every adjustment and we just lower the pickup and the guitar stops buzzing. Because what was happening is the string was spinning and the pickup was pulling the string down so hard that it was just hitting the frets, even though it should have had enough clearance. That usually is specific to P90s, but not. Not very much sometimes, but mostly single coils. Single coils. It's funny, people think of like. Yeah, like a pickup, like an invader, where if you're not familiar with the invader, it's a. It's a humbucker with big magnetic slugs on the top. Something like that. The magnet, the big slugs. It's possible, but essentially anything where the reason the single coils are problematic is because the actual slug is the magnet. Where a humbucker uses steel posts or steel screws and then uses the magnet underneath. So the magnetic field is strongest at the magnet, even if they're touching the metal. So the problem is, is that's a little further Away from the strings where the single coils, the slugs are literally right there. So I find that it's usually the single coils that caused the problem. So Strats are more likely to have this problem than other guitars in my experience with it. And again, the pickups have to be a little aggressive or, you know, again, have a. You know, they've been gaussed really heavy. So there's again, really strong magnet, a lot of magnetic energy and relatively too close to the frets or to the strings. Sorry, to the strings. So, yeah, it can be done. However, I've seen it and I've fixed it a couple times, but I always think about that going, wow, out of the hundreds of thousands of things I've done over the last two decades, I've fixed it like two, three times. So it's not. It's not a wide spread thing. It's one of those things where it's like, it happens. It's not common. If you're chasing that, I'm assuming you've tried everything else because it's going to be the last thing to worry about in most cases. So that'd be. That's my thought on that. Okay, let's get through some of these topics. Amanda's got some. I need to refresh this screen. This one came from Amanda says, S guy 715 says, hey, Phil, I had. I had bought an Ibanez AZ Prestige a while back with a non floating bridge. Every time I use the trim arm, even just barely, all the strings would return nice noticeably sharp. Any idea why? Could be the nut on that guitar. It's possible. Usually Ibanez Prestige guitars are, you know, set up really well. Really well. But usually if everything's sharp, what's happening is. And again, this is where it gets tricky because I told you, when you say all strings are noticeably sharp, what you really have to do every time, there's two things. This is what you have to do every time you notice a guitar and you move your vibrato arm and you notice strings are out of tune. I don't care if they're flat or sharp. Okay? It really doesn't matter at first. It's very important to know exactly what strings, because what a lot of us will do is you'll strum a chord and the chord is out of tune, but maybe only two or three of the strings are out of tune. So first of all, you need to make sure. I know you're saying all strings, but you need to be dead sure of that. Like it's all, every single, all six strings are out of tune. Because that's, that's, it's really not common. Believe it or not, it's really hard to get all six strings knocked out of tune at the same time. It's just tricky. So, but if it's three or four, you know that's still enough, right? Only need two or really actually one. And you can have a sour chord. So, so you first, you verify that with your tuner to make sure, yes, it's every single string. Or what if it's not? It's what strings are sharp and that tells you what's happening. Which is, what's happening is the strings, you're, you're, you're dive bombing or you're taking your tremolo. I'm using this for illustration purposes. You go down with your tremolo arm, right? Or your vibrato arm, whatever you want to call it. You go down and you come back up. And it doesn't matter if your bridge is floating. What's happening is the reason you're sharp is because as you loosen the strings, they moved across the nut slightly and then they got stuck where they move to, right? Does that make sense? So using my arm as an illustration of a string, here's where it is on my wrist, you loosen the strings, they went forward because you, you went down in pitch, right? And then when you, the bridge went back, they didn't go all the way back to my wrist, right? They, they were like here. And then it went and it stayed. And that's why it's sharp. So it's, they're stuck in the nut. So the fix for that is you get some, you can take a pencil, put some graphite in the nut slots. You can use some lubricant, you can use some Vaseline, you can use whatever you want. You just gotta lubricate those nut slots so that reduce that friction that's probably sticking those strings in there. If that helps it in any way whatsoever. Just means the nut slots need to be properly treated and cut, you know, right. Smoothed out. If it doesn't help, well, then that still doesn't mean anything. It just means that that wasn't enough to correct the problem. Your slots could be. Still need to be smoothed and then lubricated to make sure. Now if you fix that at the nut, they could, it could be happening at the saddles of the bridge. But again, we're going to go with most common problem first because like I said, diagnostics is the most important skill. When Dealing with repair. So that is the most likely culprit is that nutrition? Because there's a reason why Floyd Rose wanted to have a locking nut on everything. Because if you lock the strings at the nut, none of the things I just told you can happen. So that's how they can keep the guitar in tune. So yeah, you can use everybody's like nut sauce. Yes. Big Ben's nutsauce works great. So there. Yes. All right. Okay, next. Next subject question is Jay says, hey, phil, one of two things. My favorite guitars are the Purest Satin 24. Okay. And a Bell Sonic. I think that's what it is. OS1 with Lawler's Lawler P90s phenomenal recommendations. Thank you. Oh, cool. Oh, so yeah, the Bell Tone Sonic. Yeah, that's, that's a great guitar. And so is the PRS satin too. So yeah, I'm glad those worked out for you. Mr. S says, hey, decades ago, Yamaha hired a couple master ludios from Granada, Spain to come to Japan and teach them how to build high end quality guitar classical guitars. Yeah. Well, first of all, if you've read any of the stories about companies like Alvarez, who also has the brand Yeri, which is a Japanese brand, or Ibanez, Right. Look, Ibanez is a Spanish name. Most people know the story, right? So it's a very easy story if you don't know it. If you don't know it, it's fast and easy. There was a company called Hashino. They still exist, okay? They're, they're in Japan and they made a contract a long, long, long time ago, way, way before any of us are even on the planet or even thinking about being on this planet. They made a contract with a company called Ibanez, which is a Spanish company in Spain to make classical guitars. Because what would happen is Spanish guitar players wanted guitars with Spanish names. They wanted Spanish built guitars. They didn't want Japanese guitars. It's no, not a secret. For a while the Americans were like that too. We wanted American guitars, we didn't want Japanese guitars. So a lot of the Japanese manufacturers, what they would do is they would ghost build those classical guitars. So they would build them and brand them as Ibanez and sell them to them and then be sold as an Ibanez brand. So it's not like it was like, oh, I'm buying a, you know, a Japanese guitar that says, you know, it says, has a Spanish name on it. They think they're buying like a Spanish made instrument. Okay. What ends up happening is what Always ends up happening. It's a story as old as time. It keeps happening in this industry. The company that was selling the guitars, Ibanez in Spain, got into debt to Hashino and essentially Hoshino took the company as the payment. So they became they owned the brand. And so they continue to make Spanish guitars and then acoustic guitars and sell those in the United States. And then they started making Gibson and Fender copies. You see how this works and that's how it goes. So it's really common to do that to, to have, you know, a Spanish named instrument that was made in Japan from a lot because a lot of companies did this. So I, I would be not surprised at all that Japanese companies had Spanish luthiers come and teach them the trade because they already are fantastic woodworkers, masterful in fact. And they just needed, you know, the adjustments to go. You can read all about it in the Ibanez history book. This is from another one from Jay says, hey, for a 99American Standard Strat. Oh, I think it means 99. Like the year 1999 says look for a 99American Standard Strat new neck or refrat 350 bucks. Also looking for pickups. This seems. These, these seem weak and shrill. I love my Lawler P90s. If you like Lawlers, you might want to go with the Lawler single coils. He makes fantastic single coils. That'd be a great way to go with the guitar. And then on the refrat, new neck or refrat. I've said this before, there's two ways you can approach this problem, okay? When it comes to Fender guitars, if you have a USA minute Fender guitar, you can buy an aftermarket Fender neck that is already fretted, already has the nut. With the nut slots you'll have to polish. You know, you'll have to kind of cut the nut slots a little bit and make some adjustments. But you can slap on a brand new serial numbered USA Fender neck on the guitar. It's going to come in a nice little box and then you take your old neck and stick it in the box and stick it on the bed. You'll be fine. Okay. I would loosen the truss rod, just go to loose. But you don't even have to worry about that too much. That's option A. Or option B is you can refread the guitar. The problem is what you have to decide is the cost factor, right? If you're not doing your refrat yourself, it's gonna cost you two to three hundred dollars a refrain. I don't know your area. It could. You know, some people are getting crazy with the prices, but I think. I have no idea. Let's look at what a Fender neck is going for. I mean you can get offender made Mexico neck for a good price. Fender USA Neck Strat. I think there used to be 600 bucks. Ah, 700 bucks. Here you go. So here's one. 700 bucks. So $700. This is an aftermarket neck and this is without deal or looking around to see who, who will give you a deal. So I mean this is your options. Your options are you can get the new neck. You don't have to get a Fender neck. You can get a warm up neck or you can, like I said, you can get a made in Mexico neck or a mighty mite neck. But you know, if it's the American made Fender, you probably want an American made Fender neck. Like I said, the Fender aftermarket necks are serial numbered. So they look legit. They are, you know, they don't come like any different than the guitar. I'm sure the serial number tells Fender that it's an aftermarket neck, but I don't even know that to be true. But you have to decide, you know, if you want to, what you want to do that ways. But both are good decisions. So I don't know. I don't know. It's tough, it's tricky for me. It's hard for me to buy aftermarket next because I can just take an afternoon and refread a guitar. So. But I don't recommend your first refrat be an American Strat. I mean it could, I mean it's not the worst thing you can do. It's just a lot of people are freaked out if they. I guess, I don't know. I never want to say never. Like you can't really hurt the neck. But yeah, you can jack up a neck if you wanted to. This is from Kent. This came from Amanda says, hey Phil, how much difference tonally is my American Pro 2 Pine Telly from my American vintage tillies. Is it mainly the pickups and the Telecaster? It's going to really come down again. Everything matters to the sound to some degree. That's my philosophy. Everything matters. But then, you know, things have way more effect than others. Pickups are definitely first on the guitar for making the sound difference from your American Pro to your vintage. Then the bridge is probably next in that tonal. So the pickups in the bridge. So we're going to go in percentages. I don't want to say what percentage. But we're in the order of percentages most, like if we're talking about ingredients that matter. Right. First is most. The biggest ingredient. First things, pickup. Second is bridge. Then after that, probably neck thickness. Believe it or not, neck thickness and material has a big effect on how those strings move. And then that's how sometimes the. Because remember the pickups picking up the strings. So strings have a huge effect on the way the guitar sounds. Especially, you know, again, how. How thick the neck is, how much the neck moves. And then probably tuning keys. Think of this. That tells you where I am in the whole tone wood debate. It's. I think that wood matters, but I'm gonna say pickups, bridge, neck, tuners, nut body. So it's. It's not last. I'd say paint's last. Right. It's the last tonal. I don't know. So I don't. I think I. I personally, I think the wood matters more than the paint, the type of paint. But. But again, like I said at that point, I'm talking about things that I, you know, I don't think that matters a lot. They just matter a little. Okay. And I'm in the feed right now. I'm just looking to see if you guys are talking to me directly. Just put a question mark first. Hold on. As I scrolled. Scroll through. All right, let's do this one. Sean Brooks says, hey, I tried to trade in a PRS core model to casino guitars. They told me they aren't accepting any PRS core trades at this time. The market is very soft. Yeah. You know, this ties in. Sean, I'm going to answer somebody else's question, because somebody sent me a question, and I wanted to talk about that too. So, look, like I said, everyone is. Does something very well, like in the. In the guitar industry, right? So, you know, Guitar center does something. Well. Sweetwater, you know, small mom pop stores do something really well. So sometimes, you know, the whole saying sand at the beach, sometimes you're bringing the wrong guitar to the wrong shop. The casino guys, if they have a lot of PRSs, like, you know, new, they're not going to want a lot of used ones because the used ones will sell first. And you're like, well, that's good. But then think about this. If you're. If you have guitars on the wall that you haven't paid for yet, or you've just paid for, either way, it sucks. You are like, literally, that's your focus, right? You want to take care of that first. Not worry about a new guitar that's going to flip in the meantime and keep that guitar stuck to the wall. So they may not want the competition. So that's the main reason they could say that another dealer might tell you the opposite. They were looking for PRS's because they have customers that are looking for core purses. But I would say yes, the market is very soft right now. It takes a deal to move somebody or it takes something really exciting, one of the two. But it's not a dead market because you can see all the guitars still moving. They're still moving at epic amounts. They're just not. Again, it's not close to what it was. And I'm sure, you know, I'm sure it's. I'm sure it's just hard to get people to, you know, to dispatch a couple grand right now on a guitar they may not need one. What's funny, this person asked me a question and I want to talk about this. They were saying that they took their full tone pedal to Guitar center and Guitar center says they won't take full tone pedals on trade. And they asked me why and I pinned it to discuss it and then I didn't get a chance. And so, Sean, your question kind of prompted it. So to answer that question for that person, what happened is that during the COVID thing, when Covid was a thing, Mike Fullerton, the owner of Full Tone Pedals, he posted a bunch of stuff on the Internet and as you know, the society at that time, look, I'm not trying to avoid the politics of this. I'm just trying to give you an. What do you call it? A balanced response to this. So anyways, he posted a bunch of stuff and of course some people, I'm going to say half the people were offended by it, half the people weren't. Seems real common now. It seems the world is turning into half the people are pissed and half the people are not pissed about everything that happens. But anyways, in this particular case, half the people that are pissed the guitar center decided and reverb. So you know, Reverb, unless it's changed anyone Reverb sees this podcast, you can more than happy if you want to email me and tell me if the policy's change and I'll share that with everybody. Reverb's official policy is they won't sell new full tone pedals on Reverb's website. So Reverb will let you sell your used pedal on Reverb, but they won't let a Dealer or Full Tone themselves sell new product on their website. So that's. So you know, that's reverb. Guitar center also stopped carrying full tone pedals, although there's an argument there. I heard stories again, we're just now we're in the rumors of it, but I heard stories that Guitar center at the time was not in good financial standing to pay full tone for those pedals. And so that was already a problem. But again, I'm just giving both sides of a story. But Guitar Center's official policy is that they won't carry full tone and they won't take it on trade. They went they up the antity. They won't even take it. So to answer your question, when you took a full tone pedal, the Guitar center and they're like, and you think it's strange, they're like, we won't take this pedal on trade. It's because their corporate policy is they won't take them on trade. So I don't know, I don't know if anything's changed since then. So that's what's going on with Full Tone pedal pedals. You're more than free to sell them on Craigslist or used on Reverb. So that's how you would get rid of them now, if that, if that helps. I am apprehensive. I've. I've never met Mr. Full Tone, but I've talked to him twice on an email when I was a dealer trying to become a dealer. He's gruff, right? It was a gruff email. I mean, don't get me wrong, he didn't say anything mean or malice or anything. It's just, it's, you know, he doesn't talk like somebody who wants to, you know, sell you your pedals. And not that he has to. I'm just saying it was an interesting, it was an interesting email correspondence. I started with like, hey, I really like your pedals and I'd like to carry these pedals in my store. And, and in his response back, I'm kind of paraphrasing, I remember something to like, I've worked really hard to build this multi million dollar company and you know, and this is what you have to do to be a dealer. And he was like, you got to buy these, these, these, these, these. And he gave me a list of everything I had to do. And my favorite part that I always, I think I've told this part, but my favorite, my favorite part of the email was he's like, and you have to buy my Cables. Because all the cables in your store are mediocre and crap. I remember that because I was reading it on the plane, the email on the way back from the NAMM show, and I remember going, all my cables are mediocre crap. And I was like, laughing because I was, you know, I'm a gear nerd like you guys. So I knew what Fullertone, what company Fullertone used for cables, and it was the same company was making PRS cables and a bunch of other. It was like, bond. And I was like, yeah, I already have your cables with three other brands on my store. So I started laughing. I laughed because I think he assumed I just didn't carry nicer cables in the store. But I was laughing going, I carry nice cables. In fact, I carry the company that makes your cables. I didn't say this to him, by the way. I was like, I was just thinking, like, I just thought. I thought it was funny that that's the, like, you know, that's the hill he wanted to die on was like, I gotta buy his cables because I carry crappy cables. But he doesn't even make his cables. And I do carry his cables. I thought that was kind of weird. But ultimately, that's not why we didn't carry his pedals. We didn't carry his pedals because a good friend of mine said something smart and that's all it took. He said, man, if this is how this guy sounds before he's got your money, I don't know. I don't know if it's gonna be fun. Once he's got your money and you have problems, I'm like, yeah, that's probably. Probably a good way to think of it, right? Once I hand over the money for the pedals, if I have any problems. Plus, he was kind of known for. If you bought a pedal used, a lot of people would complain on the Reddit and stuff, as, you know, all the forums that if you bought a used pedal and you called him for any questions or problems, he would always say, did you buy it new or used? And as soon as you said used, he's like, I don't support. You know, you didn't buy my pedal new. You're not supporting me. So, so gruff. We'll call it gruff. But anyways, that's. That's the background of all that mess. It's weird to me now that all these years have gone by and it's still a thing. I was shocked by the way when this question came up. I was actually shocked to hear that Guitar centers. Love that policy. I thought everybody kind of had forgotten and stopped caring about all that stuff, but maybe I. Maybe not so much. And then a lot of you guys are talking about whether or not he sold the company or he. He did shut down the company. And then I believe he brought it back, right? He's still invol and he's brought it back or something to that thing. I don't know. You know what I'll say, and I mean this with no disrespect, because he does make a great pedal, is he makes a couple great pedals that I really like. And I think. And when I wanted to be a dealer, what I wanted to carry was essentially the ones that I knew I'd sell the good pedals and then a few others that I thought would be unique and fun to have in the store. And the reality is there's a couple pedals that are just. It's not that they're not good. It's just, you know, there's other choices out there that I think people would prefer, but I don't know. But, yeah, I know a lot of you guys are sticking on the mediocre and crap. I did too. I just remember reading in the email going, this is the weirdest email I ever got. But, you know, hey, you know, I think I've experienced when people build their own things they've had. You know, it's like they're babies and they have a lot of pride. He was the first guy that ever caught me off guard with something that he didn't make. Like, I get why he was passionate about his pedals, and he built his brand, and I got that. His whole letter was like, my, I built this brand. It's make millions of dollars. I'm not going to anybody ruin it. I'm like, makes sense. Totally behind. Like, I don't want to be told this, but I understand it. Right. You're not. You're not telling me anything that doesn't make sense. But then the whole cable thing, I was like, well, okay, that's a weird hill to go down. So, yeah, you guys are Keely. Yeah. See, Keely is like, they're literally the bipolar opposites of each other. Robert Keeley is like, the nicest person I've ever met in the industry. It's funny how it goes for the extremes, but I don't know. So this is off topic. Luke wants to know, Phil, have you ever taken a waymo around? So if you guys don't know, some of you guys haven't don't we have Waymo cars here, which are their robot driven taxis? It's a non driver taxis. I see them everywhere. I've not taken one. I don't go anywhere, man. I don't need a car to take me anywhere. I don't go anywhere. My, my biggest problem is just getting out of the house to get some vitamin D so I don't die. All right, okay, we need to go. We're almost. We're buttoning it up now. We're at the end of it. YouTuber says, hey, Phil, I'm a guitar guy. But I, but I suddenly getting the urge to play bass. Where do I start with a bass? I would get a bass. Come on, you set yourself up for that, right? I mean, I would get a bass, man. I get a bass and a bass amp. I mean, that's where you start. It's pretty simple. I like a lot of Fenders, Ibanezes, I mean, you know, schecter basses. It's tough. It's tough because it's. Again, it's your personal choice, but I mean, there's really a lot of great instruments out there. I think all guitar players should have a bass. Especially if you record any music. It makes no sense not to. The bass is easy to record. They're relatively inexpensive. And if you can play a guitar, you can half ass play a bass. I mean, it's. It's funny to me, it sounds like it's an obvious thing to say, but keep in mind, there are bass players who can't play guitar. There are no guitar players who can't play bass. I'm not talking about great bass playing, okay? I'm talking about like play a bass. I mean, I have met, I've said this before. I have a friend, he plays piano, drums and bass masterfully. Okay? He can't play guitar. And I even told him, I said, let me get this straight. You can play bass, which is a stringed instrument and piano, which is a chorded instrument, but you can't play guitar and he cannot. It's just, he's like. It's just not something he says. Not wired to do it. So I've met bass players who can't play guitar. I have never met a guitar player can't play bass. I mean, I met guitar players with horrible rhythms, so they probably shouldn't play bass, but they can play it. They're just gonna play a really horrible rhythm on bass. But yeah, YouTuber, I would just get a nice bass. That's really reasonable within your Comfort zone of price. And, and just go and play. That's all. That's it. Just play bass, right? Go online, grab a couple online lessons, go. What I wouldn't do right away is buy a bass amp. So that's where you start. Start with a nice bass, not a nice bass amp because base amps are getting kind of useless if you're not going to use them in gigs. So I have a couple base amps now I have a Phil Jones and stuff like that. But I like said I'm recording. When I record I don't usually run the bass to the bass amp. I told you I like the sound of my Marshall head for that one growlie tone. But otherwise I'm. I'm running into di boxes and all kinds of stuff. I'm just running in interfaces. So it's just how it works. Now we got Steven who says, Phil, have you, have you checked out the newish Fender Player 2 Jazz Master? I have not played the Player 2 stuff. I just picked it up. Have to say I'm impressed. I will definitely be getting one. So since this is the later part of the show, we can be more personal with the audience about stuff. The new studio is done. It was a hellish nightmare. I said last week, I cannot understate how horrible this whole experience was. Every day was high stress, insanity. Doing this because everything created a problem because I had to re gut everything and do everything. But now physically, I want to tell you, just so you know, we did the very first video in the new shop studio. I was able to do a complete deep dive in one day. It doesn't sound like a big deal. That's a huge, massive deal. The fastest I could do a deep dive in any one given day was in two days to two full days of working was the fastest I can knock out a video. And like I said, and if anything goes wrong, which tends to do. It was a two and a half days. Very rarely is it three days, but it'd be two and a half days. It doesn't sound like a big deal. But then how do you produce multiple of those a week when it takes five to six days to make two? Right. It's just impossible. Right. So now we can. I can make them physically in a day, but more importantly, no, no. And they're improved. Better. We have better quality cameras, better quality views, better quality everything. But it was such a logistical nightmare to first teach yourselves how to build this studio. Then we had to learn how to set it up. Then we had to work through all the problems, because we had a lot of constraints and problems. We even had modified tools. I'll be sharing that with you. We modified like six different tools to keep this process going. So why that's a big deal is that's been the big holdup for me over the years is I just can't produce content as fast as some of the other channels because again, you know, it's like a lot of. It's a lot, it's a lot easier. And I'm not saying anything bad, I'm just saying it's a lot easier. When you're holding a guitar on your lap and you're just talking about the guitar the entire. It's really problematic. What people don't understand is like when I, when I want to show a close up of the bridge, I don't want to just say I like the bridge. So that needs another edit, another cut shot. And unless you have that camera to switch to immediately do that at that time. So that's really a huge difference. The other thing that is problematic for me is taking guitars apart. Because you take apart, you got to put them back together and restring them and go through that process. And so, and, and so now we have it set up in a way and it's really cool. So, so to answer your question, Stephen, we'll be definitely getting a player, jazz offender player we have. I don't want to show you I don't get in trouble, but I have this dry erase board and it's so long it looks scary. With all the guitars we're doing, so many guitars are coming. So many guitars. So excited. So, and I'm excited about the two for this week. This week's guitars that are coming out. So very, very cool. And just to give you a reference, the amount of cameras we're using now because what, what. So just keep this in mind. Every time you see a video now and you see all of a sudden you're looking at it close and then you're looking at far. I want you to understand that's not cropping in or anything. That's two cameras switching back and forth. There's multiple cameras switching. So one zooming in one way, one that like, it's like literally we had to set up all these multicam systems and work it all out to make sense. And, and, and then of course the new sheets, which are pretty detailed. And then of course we wanted to increase some of the quality stuff. So it was really cool. I'm very excited about it. I am, I'm super Excited now? I am. I'm not gonna lie to you guys. Two days ago, literally as recent as two days ago, we were almost confident we were going to scrap the whole thing and go back the old way and just. It didn't work out, which was heartbreaking to think about the amount of money that was spent, much less the time. So. And the time was really important because, as you know, we had to decrease the amount of videos we've been putting out for the last. For the last couple months, even. There's less content. So we can focus on this. So I'm excited. All right. Road hash rash says sheets. Yeah, let me. Let me share, and then we'll go to another question, and then we'll start buttoning up the show. So let me show you the. I'll show you one. Here we go. Make this go there. I gotta want to share with you guys, but I also gotta frame it out so you guys can see it. Otherwise it's not gonna make sense. So is this the right one? Even? This is not the right one. See, I grabbed the wrong one. Okay, hold on a second. Give me a second, guys. Another file. Because again, we have so many versions now, and we need to probably kill the old versions. There it is. This is the correct one. Okay, let me share this with you guys. All right, so to your question, these are the sheets that we're talking about. So what happens now when we do a video is we now have these sheets that are on the Know youw Gear podcast website. This is all the information. So, for instance, I just did the 1977 vintage Ibanez. So it's how many strings as I know this stuff's silly, but it's there now where it's made, how much it costs, the day of making the video, what the measurements were. You know, how do those measurements compare to other guitars? What tests were performed? How did those perform in our. You know, in our tests? Literally going through all this stuff, you know, everything. And there's actually, I think, another category we just added. So this is done on every single guitar now. And you can go and look at them right now if you want. You just go to knowyourgearpodcast.com and then it says PDF sheets or whatever, geeky sheets. You just click on that tab and it takes you right there. And right now they're just archived in order, but they'll eventually be archived in a nice way where you can sync them and download them per video. There's a. We do them in black because it looks cooler on the videos, but when you download them, you download them in white. So obviously, because otherwise you'd be printing all this black on your paper stuff. And why is that important there? Because not only can you find out information about the guitars more than what the factory's telling you. For instance, sometimes the factories don't say certain things, and we've discovered it in the video. But also, just in case you want a reference that you trust, and more importantly, we can data put a database of this stuff together, and then that helps us, because what's nice is what we're doing. Well, what. What we're doing that's cool is instead of saying arbitrarily, I think this is good, or I think this is bad, we've decided, and that's what you've noticed in the last couple videos, that we grade everything on a curve of all the guitars we've graded before. So literally, we take everybody's guitars in the industry and go through them like I've done. And now when we say, oh, this is good or this is bad, it's relative to what the industry has sent us. So. So even if you guys say, well, I think this. That if I say whatever, you know, the action is 2 millimeters, and you go, that seems high. And I'm like, well, industry standard says nine out of 10 guitars shipped out of the factories is two. We're not saying it's great. What we're saying is it's standard. It's within what everybody's been doing. The decision to do that is so, you know, to date, including one I can't talk about, but I'm super excited when I say I can't talk about it. It's even months away, but it's super exciting. To date, we've had 11 companies contact us, interact with us, and literally tell us because of the Deep Dive videos, they've been assessing their own guitars and other companies guitars from our videos. And as you guys know, Kiesel made some changes. As you guys know, Hills made some changes. As you know, a ton of companies now have made changes. The guitars from the videos, and that happens to a lot of YouTubers. They. They give some feedback and the companies make changes. But I'm not talking about my feedback. I'm not talking about. Like I said, I think it's dumb if you make red. And they go, we decide we're not gonna make red guitars, because Phil thinks that's stupid. They literally have told us that they're. And not the intended purpose, by the way. And I don't know if it's good or bad. We'll see in a couple years. You might, you might hate this. I don't know. They're looking at their competitors guitars. They're looking at this as like, oh, yeah, he's. He's deep diving this guitar. We're curious about the guitar and they want to see now, you know, how did that guitar match up to theirs and what is somebody else doing? And it's funny how this industry was. A lot of these, A lot of these companies live in halos around themselves. They don't really interact with each other or go and spy on each other. And so they literally had no idea. And so a lot of them are learning. So we thought, okay, if that's what they're doing, then viewers must be doing it to some degree. So we need to up the game on this. And that's what the decision was. So a lot of money, a lot of time, and I'm proud of both. And you'll like said you'll see next week, Monday. Monday's the first video. Okay, let's do the last couple super chats because you guys were nice enough to super chat and I think. Or maybe not. Why don't I see them? Oh, there it is. Oh, Christopher says for the camera fund. Thank you, Christopher. I appreciate that. You know, part of this, I don't want to milk this too hard. Part of it is just because I'm a guitar freak like you guys. So I. When I buy a $3,500 camera and I have to buy a bunch of them. But by the way, so you guys know my camera freak friends, they're like, those are the cheap cameras. Like, oh, you bastards. I'm like, I. I had to approve two cameras. Two cameras. And I'm like, that's a prs. I could have bought a PRS for those, those two cameras. I was like, oh, man, this sucks. But anyways, just anyways. So anyways, Jed's, Jed, Sparky, Jesse Sparky. I'm gonna say that. Jetty Joe, Jedi, Sparky. Ah, I caught it. Got it. See, it's all about where you got to figure out where the. The words stop and start again. So Jedi Sparky says, building my first pedal board thanks to hanging out on the New Year's Eve. Thank you, man. That, that video is really another thing that catalyst sparked us. Building the rig out, resisting putting six distortion pedals on. Hard to just pick three. I got a Keely Halo coming. Can't wait. Thanks for the inspiration. So fun. Holy boards. And Chuck's power supplies are great. Yeah. You know, I like. So how I do it is I kind of like. I kind of like, whenever I build a pedal board, like that night, I'm always. When it comes to overdrives and distortions, I always think like, this is my main drive. This is the pedal I like. This is. I live on this. This is. I gotta have this. Okay. And then there's a secondary pedal. It doesn't matter what they are. It just means that's always the way I think about with drives. Overdrives. I always have like, this is my main overdrive. This is the overdrive that I'm going to use sometimes. And here's the wild card. And the wild card changes that all the time. It's just whatever the flavor of the week or the month is, I just throw that on there and it's always, always changing. And I've just kind of learned to do it that way and it's. It's really fine. So I don't know. All right, on that note, I'm gonna let you guys go. I hope you guys had a great time and look forward to this week's videos. I'll tell you. So you guys know what they are. The first one is the. The Yamaha Pacifica. You guys been asking me to do a Yamaha Pacifica. It's really great. You know what, let's. Let's actually hook you guys up for real. And if they might change order. So this might be Monday. I don't know, we'll see how the order goes. Okay, so. But they're both the next videos. So you got a Yamaha guitar and then you got the new Ibanez AZ's. Look at that. So little precursors. This thing is sick. Good. But. But anyhow, so those are the next two guitars and then again a ton of guitar videos after that. Like I said, the load up will start happening starting Monday. All right, on that note, I'm going to let you guys go and have a good weekend. Play some guitar. Until the next time. Know youw Gear. The Know youw Gear Podcast. 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