Phil McKnight (0:02)

The Know youw Gear Podcast. The Know youw Gear Podcast is brought to you by Patreon members, channel members and viewers who like and subscribe. Thank you for making this possible. Hey everyone. Welcome to the Know youw gear podcast, episode 412. Hope everybody had a fantastic week. I missed you guys last week. I. I got sick. So it, it was a long weekend, but a good week and I think that's all that matters, right? So feeling better and ready. Had a very productive week. On top of that, it was kind of worked out really well, which is funny because there was a lot of paperwork and back end stuff to get done. And so when I wasn't filling up the speed, I got a lot of that kind of stuff done, which is cool. Which is why all the audio podcasts and everything are updated on the, on the itunes and Spotify and all that stuff. So hopefully you guys are. You guys that listen are gonna appreciate that everything's up to date. So we got some good questions, good subjects, lots of stuff. Maybe guitar of the Week. Maybe. We'll see how it goes. And then what else? That's it. Just want to say thank you to the moderators. They have the blue names and the blue wrenches to say thank you for moderating the, the, the chats and stuff. And then also I want to thank the patrons and the channel members. And also if you guys didn't see the announcement on the patrons and the channel members, that tomorrow is the hang. If you're in the top tier patron, tomorrow is the coffee hang that we do. And then Sunday is the clinic for the mid tier and up and then for the podcast tier. Your bonus podcast is next week and that's for you. I think if you're a channel member on YouTube, you haven't had the announcement, but don't worry, you'll get that announcement in 24 hours with the link. Okay, that's all. That's all the announcements. Let's get into questions. Questions, subjects, things. The first question I grabbed from an early riser was from. What else was it from? It says, I know I grabbed it. It came from Darrell Darrel said, hey, which comes first? The chicken. No, which comes first? Polishing frets are. Cleaning, conditioning. The fretboard. Well, here's the thing. The way I polish frets, which is with a Dremel. And I have a very detailed video about that, but that's on the patron side. In that video, I caution everyone to not use the technique that I use and well, to use it, but not to condition the Fretboard or put any oils on the fretboard until after you polish the frets. Because sometimes the dremel can create heat. And that heat can. When it heats up the fret, it could causes the oils to get even more liquidy, I guess. Right. You know, and they get thinner and then they kind of boil up to the top. So it's not a good. Not a good idea. So I usually just recommend to go ahead and do the fretboard conditioning last. First of all, I just kind of think of it as a last thing to do anyways when. Especially when polishing frets, it's just kind of like you're already done and just go ahead and do that is the way I would do it. If you're not polishing your frets. I actually condition fretboards usually before I even put new strings on. So. So sometimes I'll just loosen the old strings, leave them on, and just kind of condition the fretboard and just get it all cleaned up. And it really has to do. And this is why it's important to always kind of understand that not everything is a broad stroke. Easy question. There's case by case basis. Sometimes your fretboard is clean. You're the only player. Your fretboard looks great and you just want to clean it up. Sometimes it's a disaster. You know, I've done fretboard cleaning where it's unfortunately the very first thing I had to do. The worst fretboard. I'll never forget it as long as I live. And I think it was probably 400 episodes. I'm not exaggerating. When I told this story, if I told it, I once took a American Strat on trade and it had. The fretboard was caked. And what I didn't know at the time, but now I understand, is the nicotine from someone smoking. I. I know some of the smokers are going to be offended by this. I don't mean to offend anyone. I'm just. It was so bad. It was so bad. I remember this guy brought in this Strat and it was yellow. The Strat was yellow, okay. Like, it was yellow. Okay. And he came in with this American Strat and he's like, what do you give me on trade for the Strat? And I remember I looked at the Strat and it was just so bad. So bad. It was gross. The fretboard was the grossest thing every. It was. The whole thing was just filthy. Now. Now I probably have the hindsight to think what a great thing to do to a guitar and play the hell out of it. But at the time, it was like, whoa, what are you doing to this guitar? You playing it? It's like I was making it look ugly. But anyways, it was really. It was really gross. And so I remember I told him, like, I just can't give him much. I think I gave him, like, 350 bucks for it. And at the time, just. You guys have reference. I think American Strat at the time was going for about 550. This is about 2004. So used, right? Because they're new. They were about. About $1,000 new, and you were getting about $700 used, so, you know, half of that. So, anyways, I gave them the 350. And I remember it sat in the back room for days, maybe weeks, but definitely days. And then one day I decided because the store was slow, I was like, I'm going to clean this Strat. And I remember I had. I went next door to the grocery store and I bought gloves, and. And I remember I got out the razor blade to start scrapping, scraping the. Just the tar. It was just tar, literally tar on the frets and clean. And I remember we took off the pick guard. I'll never forget this. We took off the pick guard, and the guitar was white, bright white. Like. Like, just like an outline of that pickard underneath there was just bright white. But the guitar was this yellowed, you know, cream yellow. And we. I cleaned it up, and it was the best playing Strat I've ever heard. And some of you guys are probably going to cry right now that, you know, remember the story, because it's that old. Let's see how die hard you are. You guys remember what happened to the Strats? It was infamous in our store. For years, I played the Strat. That was the best, to this day, probably the best Strat I've ever heard. I don't know if it was the nicotine infused into the wood or just the hours this guy spent of his life playing it or just whatever, but it was magical. And I kept it. I ended up keeping it. I was like, oh, you know, great deal on it. It plays great. Plus, I put in the time. And I remember, remember at some point, I think I. I think I said. Or I can't remember if I said, hey, this is for Shauna. It's like, this is. You know, we'll keep it for you. But I ended up playing all the time. I think that's what happened. Or maybe she claimed it because she's like, it's such a good guitar. You should keep it. And we had it forever and. And then one day a guy came in store and he saw it and he's like, what's that? And I remember it was like Strat. And again, this is years, you know, obviously, it's like almost 20 years ago, so. 20 years ago. It's a hard story to remember, but I remember the guy played it, and he was like, I want this guitar. He's like, I played amazing. And Sean was like, no, we're not selling it. It's not for sale. It's just, you know. And he was like, I'll buy it. And he kept throwing numbers. I forget what number it was. It was probably something silly, like 7, 800 bucks, but. But he threw the number. And like all business owners, you know, you're like, ah. Well, you know, the guitar is amazing, but so is paying rent. So we sold him the guitar and immediately regretted it. He left the store. But he was a nice enough guy. He was a regular in the store. Cool guy, great guitar. Gross. Gross guitar. But, you know, amazing now. And he came back months later and he's like, hey, remember me? We're like, yeah. And he goes, I gotta show you what I did to the guitar. We're like, what? He had the guitar sanded down and repainted and refinished, and he changed out the pickups. And I remember it was one of the few times I've lost my cool. A few times. You can't help it, you know, right? You know, I'm supposed to have the customer service smile like, oh, that's amazing. And I remember he brought it and handed it to me, and he kind of hit me all at once. So, you know, it was like, kind of like, look what I did. And he handed it to me, and I was like, ah. And I remember I strum the chord, I played it, and I remember just saying, you ruined it. And I remember, like, then you have that moment, like, whoa. I'm not supposed to say that to the customer, right? You're supposed to say like, good job, smart. But instead I was like, you. You ruined it. And I go, he's like, no, it's better now. And I'm like, yeah, it's better. And I think I washed it off, you know, the idea, you know, like, oh, you know, it's. Everything's fine. And he left. And I remember as soon as he left, everyone in the shop was like, that guy ruined it. And me, you know, we. To us. To Him, I'm sure it was better for him and he was happy. Although I think I recall he didn't trade it back to us and sold it to us and got something else. But anyways, sorry, I'm just having a mental flashback to the dirtiest fretboard that was by far the dirtiest fretboard I remember. And then just to kind of understand, there was so much tar on the fretboard I had put. I was using at the time, lighter fluid. Lighter fluid and a razor blade and just like scraping it off and scraping off, cleaning it all up and then switching to oil, lemon oils, and then I had rubber gloves on. And I remember just black ooze, just, just all of it. Like, seriously, it was just so much running off the fretboard. It was so gross. And so anyways, in, in that case, you would clean the fretboard first and then dress the frets is what I would do. But what I would suggest, either way, in this very long answer I apologize for, is that you definitely do not polish the frets, no matter what process you're using, until at least 24 to 48 hours after you've conditioned the fretboard. You want that wood to absorb all of that oil or whatever it's going to absorb. And you don't want to create any problems where, you know, it could get messy when you're polishing. And that's especially if you're going to use like a Dremel or anything like that, a polishing. If you're going to use, you know, some, some light polishing techniques like those 3M pads and stuff that I've done videos on. You could, you could do that as well. But that's just my suggestion. It works for me, so maybe it'll work for you. David Kornblatt says, what do you think of titanium saddles? You know, I, I've never really, never really sought out any kind of titanium saddles. But I did replace my copper Strat, which, you know, my Strat I've had since the start of the channel. I replaced it to try to, like, I was trying to alleviate the weight a little bit. And I got a titanium block and I put it on there. And, and I think I've said this before. I've never really seen the tone difference of putting a, you know, heavy block. Everybody goes, put a heavy brass block on your guitar. And the sustain is forever. And I've done testing with blocks. So you guys know I've, you know, I've done it for customers for years. But because you guys mentioning all the time, I'm like, oh, I should probably do this. And I took a guitar one day and I put like four different kinds of blocks. Three brass and one stone. I think it's made of stone. The brand is stone. It looks like granite or something. And what I noticed from that was the way the bridge feels is different. And therefore that could make the tone different. Just because, you know, the way anything that changes the way you react to the guitar is going to change the sound more so than anything else. Even whether it's placebo or real, just whatever reaction you have is going to affect the way you. You approach the instrument. The reason I tell you that, David, is so. I never really noticed a huge difference in going to heavy mass bridges. But, boy, when I stuck that titanium bridge on that guitar on my copper Strat, I remember just the tone was just not very good. It was kind of thin. So I don't know if it would have the same effect with saddles. I just don't know. I mean, we're talking about stuff. I mean, it's really weird to me. It's like. It's like if you. It's really confusing as a musician to this day when, hey, brass is where the tone's at. Stick a brass nut on a guitar, stick a brass bridge on it, and that's the tone. And then on the flip side of that, you have somebody go, no, aluminum is the tone, you know, and put aluminum bridge on it, put aluminum parts on it, you know, now you have PRs going, oh, aluminum bridges. That's the key. And I'm like, I don't know. To me, it's. Most of. It's just the weight changes the weight. Some of it's probably the tone. It's really hard to. To. To quantify, you know, like I said, any single part as having a huge, dramatic change of the sound of a guitar. But I haven't tried the titanium saddles. That's something I'd probably willing to try. I know with the Floyd Rose guys, they really like titanium parts on their bridges and stuff. I would say from a repair aspect, I like anything that you don't have to fix because there's a lot of things like, like I said, stainless steel frets and titanium parts where you could essentially not have to pay to have anyone replace it or fix it. You have a guitar that plays forever. There's something about that that's pretty cool, considering guitars just when they're not built to those kind of standards can last lifetimes. It just seems like, wow, does this make something last even more forever? You know, I think about all the time going, you know, if you have a Strat with stainless steel frets and like tanium titanium part bridges maybe, and know, really high quality components like in the electronics, I mean, could take 100 years before guitar needs any kind of service of any kind, especially if it has a spoke wheel, truss rod and, and adjustments can be done without, you know, any kind of major tools or, or any kind of technician. So hockhead418 says a lot of Ibanez prestige stuff from Ibanez has titanium saddles. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure I've played titanium saddles. It's one of those things. I'm going to stick with this forever. You know, I know we talk about, especially we talk about like, you know, because I repair guitars for a couple of decades and you know, and I've been in this business, whatever, but I've learned so much more than I've ever learned before. YouTube. On YouTube. And I. What I mean by that is just taking apart a thousand guitars. Just think about that. I think about all the time going, got a thousand guitars. I've just gone through so many guitars and intimately. And the reality is there's a negative and a positive to that. The positive is it gives you a lot of experience. The negative is things become homogenized. You start seeing things as not mattering. That could matter. You could see things that doesn't matter as matters. I mean, it informs me as also makes me as delusional. Right. Because again, you could become numb to things. But that all being said, I love the argument, and I'll always love the argument about stainless steel versus nickel frets. When the hardest problem I have is I've tried for years now to come up with a standard way to tell, you know, is this fret stainless steel or is this fret nickel? And especially since there's different grades of stainless steel and there's different grades of nickel silver frets. And I've come up with a few ways to test, you know, kind of figure out if it's really a stainless steel fret or not. And yet I'll have somebody say to me, oh, I can hear a stainless steel fret. And he's like, see, if you, if I, if I pick up a guitar, I can tell in a second stainless steel fret. I'm like, you're hired. See, what I'll do is I'll have you just play the guitar. Tell me for sure. It's stainless steel frets. Now, keep in mind, I'm also going to get you 100,000 views and you're going to be accountable for the information you give. And I noticed nobody wants to be a taker on that. It's because, like, well, everybody thinks they can tell until they're held accountable for that. See, and that's what I'm saying. I'd like to really know. Sometimes the only way that I believe that I can tell that a fret is stainless steel is if I cut it. I literally, if I take my snips and snip it. I have reef read enough guitars in my life to know just how much physical force it takes me to snip fret wire. And stainless steel fret wire takes a lot. Like, a lot. Like when I'm squeezing, it's a lot more like, right? And so, and that's why I said, sometimes I think I'm like, maybe I'll just pull a fret and snip it and then replace the fret. Go on. Maybe that's what I gotta do. But I feel like. But then I also came to the conclusion one day, well, if I have to go to that extremes, does it really matter? Like, if you can't tell until you do that, does it even matter? Because no one else can tell. So I guess to. My point is sometimes I don't know. Like I said, I could have played titanium parts. I never known it. I could have played stainless steel and I'd never known it. Some things are more obvious than others. Everyone, everyone is cavalier with their opinions. I've seen it over the years. It's going to happen today. On today's show. Somebody's gonna be like, oh, Phil, it's easy. Let me tell you how to do it. And I'll go, great. Now keep in mind, you're going to be accountable for this information. Right? And then everybody kind of, you know, whimpers a little bit back on that because it's very difficult. And the fact that it's fox and the hound says, won't a magnet work? Well, first of all, no, because a magnet wouldn't pick up the nickel silver frets or the stainless steel frets. But on top of that, I can tell you what happens if you take any kind of real magnet. Because I have a lot of magnets, obviously, because I wire pickups, wind pickups, you know, I'm talking about the magnets I use to magnetize to gauss. The actual magnets for the pickups use really high powered Magnets. Here's what's going to happen. As soon as you use any kind of magnet that can even detect something like that, it actually pulls against the truss rod. So in other words, it sticks to the neck because of the truss rod. So I've tried all kinds of magnets. It's just not going to. It's not effective for that because, like I said, it's just not something that's reliable that way. I've tested. Look, I've talked to everybody I know, and everybody I found in there is one definitive way to tell if a fret is stainless steel or not. It costs $32,000 for the machine. So I can. I found one used for about 15,000. I think it needed a little work. Not a lot of work, but a little bit of work to adjust it. But. And they use it for. Companies will use these machines for safety purposes because they gotta, you know, test the. How strong steel is steel. And steel is for making things that matter, right? And that machine, I track one down and I'm like, it's 30 grand. And I'm like, okay, I could do that. But then again, I kind of laugh going, okay, well, if I have to do that, then I think it doesn't matter. So in other words, it's not that important because like I said, it should. To me, it should be obvious. So I guess the reason I say that is I'm not a big. You know, and I don't really feel the need for getting stainless steel or, sorry, titanium saddles and stuff. But like I said, I can imagine it. It's really great. So somebody said, robert Baker says a taste test. You could try. You know, this. They actually. I asked a couple people that work in guitar manufacturing who do stainless steel work, you know, stainless steel frets. And I asked somebody who does both stainless steel and nickel frets every day, like for a living. And. And they tell the way I'm telling, which is they polish them. And I actually, I should back up. I'm telling, like, I can tell or test. So when I tell you guys a guitar, like when I take a guitar and it's like 199, it says Hestilian sil. Frets. And I go, yeah, hestilian steel frets. How I'm doing that right now is I'm doing it the same way they told me to do it, which is I polish the frets. And obviously the stainless steel frets will come to a much higher shine and you can really see how much more shiny they are with polishing. So that's what I've been doing to detect that. The only easy thing I've ever done is I once got a guitar that they claim they're stainless steel frets. And the guitar came from China. And when it got here, the frets were all crusty. And I took a picture it sent it to the manufacturer. I said, okay, these frets are really crusty. I cannot believe these are stainless steel frets are this crusty. And then they said, oh no, that's a miss. That was a misprint in our website. They're actually nickel silver. And then I remember thinking like, oh man, it would have been a really clickbaity fun video if I would have done the. I caught them. But they admitted to it and you know, they said it was. I think they were being deceitful, but, you know, I couldn't. Couldn't prove it. You know, they said it was an error in the website, but I think they were actually trying to con people. But again, you know, do I want to make 100,000 view video and be accountable for that with no proof? No. I want to be able to be able to say they did something wrong. Yeah, Cigar. Dad says you can get the hardness tester on Amazon. I have it. Yep. I have. Have all the things. Bought a couple things and trying. Tried a couple things again. You know, it's so there. Like I said, everybody keep throwing your. Hey, by the way, I'm not upset if you guys all say you have ideas. Throw them at me. I've tried a ton of the ideas and one might stick as the definitive test that we can do that's not going to cause us to actually have to destroy an instrument. Okay, let's see. Oh, Nella says, hey, I never hear about Cry, Cry. Cry. Cryogenically genic. What is it? Cryogenic. Genetically, I don't think that's right. Cryogenically, that's it hardened frets anymore. Yeah, that was a thing just like strings, right. You know, and then now pickups. Right. Isn't it the music man's things that they basically have the pickups that way too? Yeah, yeah, it's. It's nice. Like I said, played them. Yeah, like I said, like I said. What I notice is this. I don't notice tone differences with frets so much. What I've heard and with my own ears with guitars is some guitars to sound brighter and some guitars just sound darker. And a lot of it has more to do with the strings and what type of strings than it does the fret in my experiences. But like I said, a harder fret lasts longer. And that's just something nice about that. For anyone who thinks it doesn't matter, it's kind of like, here's. Here's the thing. You know, somebody says, rotate your guitars and you don't have to do that. That's fine. But if you've ever had this experience that I've had, and maybe that's the. Where it changes for me, not once, not twice, but 20, 30 times in my life as I come across guitars in a music store or somewhere where I picked it up and it just. The guitar just had a lot of, like, magic in the guitar, right? Like, you strum a chord and it played and it was like, wow, it's really good. And you look at the frets and they're just chew marks in the frets. And you're like, okay, this is gonna need a refret. And in my experience, because I refread a guitar, sometimes when you refread a guitar man something, sometimes the magic just isn't there anymore. You know, anytime you start modifying a guitar, you understand you're changing it and just something really cool about, you know. Here's what's funny. I think guitars sound really good when they've been played for 10, 20 years and they've kind of worked in. And I think the idea of having that done but not having the frets worn out is a really cool idea. So, I don't know, let's see. Music Companion says, have you ever done a deep dive on Bill Lawrence like the pickups or Dan Armstrong and the DiMarzio fallout and how his company got started, as opposed to Seymour Duncan being actually in London in the 1960s? I don't know any of that. Is. I do know the story of Bill Lawrence and DiMargio and how that happened. And Musical Companion, what I will tell you is this. What am I going to tell you? I was told a story once and gives me the background and all that stuff, and I wasn't officially told this. It's funny, I've only had this happen to me twice. So one is a renowned guitar builder. That is not. Every time I say that, you guys always go, but it's Paul Ruth Smith. It's not Paul Smith. I don't have that kind of relationship with him. But around a renowned guitar builder once told me a cool story and then said, and when I die, you can tell it. So I was like, okay. And actually, I have the video. I filmed it. And then he says, anything when I die, you can release this. But he goes, I'm not, I'm not, not until then. I go, okay, so I have it. And then the other thing is when it comes to the story, I have a cool story with the Bill Lawrence, Dimaru and all those guys. And the same, same logic. The story is when the parties have all passed, I guess the story can be told, I guess kind of thing. It has to do with the fact that no one wants to create drama. You know, I've had this happen to me a couple times with a small guitar builder once. One of my favorite, and I'll probably saying too much this time, but one of my favorite videos that I ever made on my channel of a mid sized builder and there's a piece of the video that had to be edited out that's not there. And it was because they felt it would upset another competing guitar manufacturer and they didn't want the drama. And sometimes that's just, you gotta understand, sometimes the people in this industry don't want the drama. But what's funny is, and this is what's funny is I'll go on like the Reddit or all those pages and there's all these people with all these stories and how all these people are fighting and stuff. And the reality in my experience is the majority of them, they're trying not to fight with each other and try not to upset each other. So. Because they got to live in this very small industry. This is a small, small, small, tiny, little nothing industry. So. So that's all I'll say about all that. But I like the Lawrence, I like Dan Restroom, I like DiMargio, and I like Seymour Duncan pickups. And I have all four of those brands on guitars probably behind me. So good stuff. Yeah. Tofu delivery says meanwhile, other people live for drama. Yeah, there is drama in the industry. And sometimes, you know, it's juicy and fun, right? Because it's fun. But yeah, most of the time you can understand. It's like, you know, the lesson I think I've learned interviewing so many of these amazing characters or at least talking to them in depth because I make content over the years, is that a lot of things were done when they were young. They're not young anymore, they don't think like that anymore, but those things happened. Does it make sense? And I'm like, I can totally understand that. So. And it's kind of funny that way, you know, they, you know, when you get older, they just, I don't know, gets wiser. Okay, let's jump to another cool Subject Nella says, which Bill Lawrence Isn't one an imposter? Well, it's. It's not one's an imposter. That's another drama thing. And I don't know the answer to it. What I do know is that there is Bill Lawrence and Bill and Beth Lawrence. And I believe Bill has passed away. I believe, if I recall. And then. And then essentially now there's two Bill Lawrence pickups companies. This happens a lot. You have to understand there's a lot of this in our industry where two people come together and they make a business, and then the two people separate and then they become two versions of that business. The. The. The reality of the guitar industry, probably all business, period. But in this guitar industry, which. That's what we talk about on this channel, they're no different than bands. You know, they're together, then they break up, then they get back together. It's just how it kind of works. So, yeah, there's two. Two. I own one of each of the Bill Lawrence pickups. So I have a Bill Lawrence, which is usually not. Is. Says Bill Lawrence usa. That is the. That is not Bill and Beth Lawrence. And I apologize if it's not Becky. Thank you, Tommy. Becky Lawrence. I apologize. Thank you for catching that. I knew it was something like Beth or Becky. Thank you. So Becky and I just know this is kind of. Here's the only story I will tell because the person that's involved in this story isn't in the industry anymore, okay? So, as you guys know, I'm a huge Nuno Bittencourt fan. Huge, massive Nuno Bittencourt fan. At one time, I owned, like, every version of the N4. And then I now have the swirl one that you guys all know. And all of the Nuno in 4S that I owned were later ones, not the early 90s one. I didn't have any money in the 90s so much as the 2000s. So when I did get money and I had money to buy the new in force, I got the new ones that are USA made. And they always said, you know, bill Lawrence usa. And so I once said to a person who's no longer at Washburn anymore, who was in charge of that guitar, I said, so is the Bill Lawrence USA the real Bill Lawrence could pick up? And this is what he said, which I like, because it doesn't disparage either party, but it explains things. He goes, I don't know. He goes, I don't even care. We picked that version because they put Bill Lawrence USA on the Pickup. And that's better marketing to say USA on the pickup than the Bill Lawrence that, which was Bill and Becky Lawrence, that didn't say USA on the top of the pickup, even though they were made in USA, too. So that's why they chose that. And then he said, and this again, this guy, you know, not in the industry anymore. He's retired, he's gone. He said. But I'm pretty sure Nuno uses the other Bill Lawrence because he goes, that's. I think, what's. What we were using when we first made the first ones. So be what. What you want. I can tell you in the somnium guitar, I did try both Bill Lawrence pickups. And, you know, yeah, I could probably go like anything. Like this one had a little more high end, a little bit more aggressive tone, and this one, but they were relatively, really close. So it's one of those things, like, if you have to ab something just to hear a minor difference, it just doesn't matter to me. It's just not. I'm not going to make myself crazy over that. I don't know. Hold on. The chat moved really fast. All of a sudden, I lost the thing. I was. All right, let's. Let's go over here. Oh, I should probably pay attention to what. What Amanda's doing. Amanda sent me this from Blackwell says question, what affordable brand rolls? What affordable brand rolls? Fretboard edges. Well, I mean, essentially affordable is a hard term to say because if I spit out an answer, 50 of you are gonna go, what? That's not affordable. So when I think of affordable brands, I think of. Of brand names. I think a Fender is affordable. And they roll the fretboards on a lot of their guitars. I don't know. You'd have to watch a bunch of my Deep Dives and see who rolls them. And not, you know, the. The problem is. The problem is you. It's. At this point, I can't make this many videos as I've made over the years and then try to retain, like, every detail of every Deep dive. Does this make sense? That's why I started documenting it, not only for you guys, but for me, too. Trying to reference back what sticks in my head right now is a company that is like a Fender made in Mexico. Strat has a slightly rolled fretboard edge, and it feels pretty good. Lee says sire. I've tried a bunch of sires. The problem with sire, so you guys know, just to be very clear, the problem with sire, for me, in talking about them, is the sire. Deep Dives I did the deep dives in themselves are becoming slightly problematic for me. And the idea that companies are watching these things in a way I never expected. And I'm slightly proud of it. I mean, I'm proud, but also it's been a little weird. So let me give you some insight on that. I've been doing deep dives now for years and what's happening more and more is that. And I don't mean when a company sends them the guitar. I'm talking about when I buy the guitar, whatever. The company's watching the videos and then they're sending me emails going, hey, we just watched your deep dive. Or they'll say something like, we just called everybody in the office and we watched the Deep dive and we're making these changes. And they send me a list of changes they're making. And if you look on my videos, just recently happened with Eastman Guitars, Eastman Guitars sent me a list of. If you guys didn't see the Eastman video that I recently did, let me go to the email, let me go into Eastman folder. Should probably look in the East Eastman. Okay, ready? This is what they sent from that Eastman video. They said they are going to change the output jack to a higher quality one because I said that theirs was not very good. They're going to look at addressing and changing the neck heel so that it doesn't protrude as far. And they said that didn't occur to them that the basically the tele version of their guitar has a different neck heel. So maybe they'll just convert both of them to that neck heel. They said, talk to the team and they said, oh, and they're going to make the headstock out of one piece instead of adding the wings, which wasn't even a critique of mine. It's just something I showed in the video. So the reason I say this is just because that's most recent it's happened. So Sire, the guitars I reviewed in the Sire videos, those deep Dives, they're irrelevant because Sire changed all the specs from those guitars. Everything that I picked on as a negative is now not in any guitars going forward. If you go to that video right now, any of my last Sire videos, you'll see in comment sections, you'll see the comments. I can't control it. They're like, hey, Phil, what guitar are you reviewing? Because I can't find this guitar now this, this, this feature set, it's because they went in and they changed it. I, I've had it flipped the other way Too, by the way. I had, I did a deep dive twice now of a lower price affordable guitar company where a high end guitar company immediately contacted me and said we. They literally bought the guitar I reviewed and then they dissected it and then they enhanced their guitar from it because I think it's because. Funny, Hawkhead. Thank you for saying it because you're gonna, you're. You're perfect. He says it's. Phil is a guitar influencer. Now see, here's the interesting thing, Hawkhead. I appreciate you giving me some credit as like, oh, they're gonna listen to this guy. They. No one cares about me. The information though is the information, right? When you're measuring things or when you're showing something, it's tangible, it's not so much like, oh, I so notice. Like, I'm not saying if I said, oh, I think they should start, start making these guitars in different colors. Notice I don't have. They're like, they don't care what Phil thinks. They're like, if I said, hey, I think they should make these guitars $13 less. They don't change the price. They don't care about what I think. But when I highlight issues or things in the video, they look at those things and then they, they do two things. They. I can tell what they're doing. They all do the same thing. They look at the critique and then they gauge the comment sections and they see how many people reacted and agreed with that or disagreed with that. And then they're like, wow, I was shocked to see so many people say, oh, I, you know, I didn't. They didn't realize that people, guitar players were focused on that. So my point to this is with sire is like, that's one of the problems with Sire for me right now is that when people go, hey, what do you think of the sire? I'm like, I haven't tried one. Because the ones I've tried, they, they've. They've adjusted and changed. I will get some sires on the channel. Okay, so, so, you know, I have some really cool stuff coming, so I'm very excited. And sire is one of the things I want to try to add on. We're trying some new things on the channel that are cool. What I mean, trying new some things is like before it's like I buy it or the company sends it. We're trying a third idea which is, you know, you know, so you get. You'll see the, you'll see soon. So basically, so I don't have to Upfront So much cash all the time for these things and then you know, and then worry about it. Doug says, hey Phil, I have an older Les Paul supreme with a gold truss rod cover. I think it's brass. I polished it with fret polish and now it's not as gold. Should I try Brasso? Yeah, I would try Brasso for sure. What I would do is I would. Brasso is. Yeah, this is the stuff took me back to the army anyways. Brasso. Yeah, I would, I would use Brasso and I would do the underside and then see how it reacts and then do the, the front side. I mean that's the best thing is the inside is if it's brass it's going to be brass. One piece all the way through. Right. Because they don't coat things in brass. It's usually solid. A very rare, I've never seen brass plated stuff. So if it's. And the reason I tell you that is because it could be like a gold plated thing and that is different. And I'm not, you know, I'm not as informed in that area. Like if they're gold, what they're using is it some kind of chroming process? Whatever. But, but anyways I would, I would take Brasso and I would do the underpiece and because if it's brass it's going to be solid all the way through brass and then. Yeah, so they. Okay. Somebody said fill out a flashback. Yeah, well the military is one of those things. Like you just. It's ingrained forever. They're good at one thing. I don't care what branch you were in or what military in the world you were in. They are very effective at whenever they teach you it sticks. They're very effective. Just like the information does not leave your head. Step van Joe, this is also from Amanda says. Hey Phil, what's a good replacement pickup for an American Pro 2 Telly. I have tried a bunch. Don't like the stock ones. Looking for something ceramic or high output. Well, you know, I'm broken record but I love the BG 1400. It's one of my favorite high output pickups. It's the Billy Gibbons 1400. I didn't buy it because of the Billy Gibbons name. In fact, when I bought mine they were in the custom shop only. And actually, you know, it's funny, let me, let me actually give you some funnier thing about that. I bought the Billy, the Billy Gibbons, the bg. I don't think they're actually called Billy Gibbons. I Think they're just called BG 1400s. Anyways, when I was a Seymour Duncan dealer, I would sell so much Seymour Duncan. Like that was just the thing. As you guys know, I'm a huge JB fan. And we'd sell a lot of Seymour Duncan. We sold a lot of DiMaggio. But that was. We were the only DiMarjo dealer in the state of Arizona. So, you know, if you came in the shop, that was the only thing, you know, Guitar center is in stock. DiMargio very much. But. But Guitar Centers had a ton of Seymour Duncan. We still outsold them. We just killed. I'm pretty sure Seymour Duncan. We were the top Seymour Duncan. We had to be. We're the top Seymour Duncan seller for pickups in the state, Arizona, for year after year after year. That's why I know Kathy Duncan and that's why she came to our store. And they would come by all the time and. And say, like, you guys are killing it. And so what I would do is I would constantly put in orders for Seymour Duncan and everything to get the end column pricing. The best pricing was like. I can't remember. It was like 28 pieces. And sometimes you just didn't need 28 pieces. So what I would do, right, is I got smart over time. And as I would learn that I could order, let's say, I needed. Because what they would do with Seymour Duncan, and they probably still do this, is they would. You would do 28 pieces to get in column prices. So that was a minimum. Okay. And everybody's like, well, that doesn't seem like a lot. It's a lot, right? I mean, it's like two, three grand and. And two, three grand in pickups in a midsize store. I mean, it's not like you're flipping that every week, right? So. And so. And there's not a huge margin on these things because you're, you know, people expect to get like 10% off and stuff. So what they would do is let you order Woody's. And if you guys don't know what the Woody is, it's a pop in pickup for acoustics. Cause they were really cheap. They're like the cheapest thing that they sell. And if you ordered those, you could keep those as pieces. So you go like, give me 10 Woody's. And then 18 other humbuckers or single coils or whatever you're ordering. And the problem was I'd start stacking up with woodies all the time. And. And then, you know, and then you'd have to clearance them out because people are like, you know, and what was worse for us for some reason was the Woody never sold as well as the Dean Markley pop in acoustic pickup. So we would sell, you know, and I didn't want to stop carrying the Dean Markleys even, because they were selling better and, you know, because people liked them. So what I started figuring out was I could throw custom shop pickups on the order, and they took a lot longer to get. So what was great is because even though I had to order 28 pickups, you only got billed for what they shipped, right? So I would order, like, give me, you know, give me like four, you know, JBS and. And then four, you know, Pearly Gates and four, you know, 59s. And then, you know, a couple SSL, you know, SSL ones and whatever. You just go through the pickups. And then I go, oh, and give me a 78, right? Custom 78, which is like an Eddie Van Halen custom shop picking so pickup. So. So what I would do is I just keep ordering custom shop pickups, you know, at least three or four in every episode, every order, because they would take a month later to come. And, you know, and I got my pad and my orders up and it didn't have to hit it all one time. And then every once in a while you'd have something cool in the store, and people are like, I'm looking for a good pickup. And I got. You tried the custom 78. It's really good. So I got the BG 1400 set. I bought the neck and middle, our met neck and bridge. And it sat for a couple years and no one ever bought them. And then one day I was like, you know, you just. What you do as a store owner, you're like, man, I'm just staring at this dead product. I'm like, I'm just gonna buy them. So I bought them and stuck them in my telly, and I'm like, I love these. These are amazing. So I highly recommend them. I found them purely by accident. I would say it's one of my favorite telly pickups of all time. It's like you said, if you're looking for something big and punchy but still retains a telly sound, that's the way to go. Something like that. Otherwise, great tele pickups, like, what you're talking about, the, the. The DiMargio, the chopper, all those, like, blade pickups were great. The Joe Barden pickups are really great. You know, anything like that, Very punchy. Very big sounding pickups. But BG 1400 is definitely one of my favorite sets of tele pickups ever. So. So you know on the telly that a main telly play that has them. I even had Lindy Fralins in them. Had everything in there because I was like, I don't know, is there something better? Is something better kind of like, you know, and every time I'm back to those pickups. So I've just decided that's what's going to stay there forever. So that's, that's it. Let's see. I'm just looking sometimes, like when we talk about subject, I try to see if you guys have anything to add to it. I don't understand this question. Let's try it. BB23 King. BB23 King says, Will you recommend any guitar from $5,000 and above that doesn't come with rolled edges as a minimum? I don't recommend any $5,000 guitars. I, I've really come. Look, please enjoy. You know, buy your, your guitar. I, I have done it. It's, it's a thing for me. The problem I've had with expensive guitars and, and this is the thing and this is why, if you notice on the channel, I've been really focused on really expensive amps over the years. You know, talking about them is, you know, the expensive stuff. Recently I just did the Magnetonia and the video did way better than I thought. I was hoping for 10 to 20,000 views. It did 80,000 views, which was shocking to me. But the, the, the comments were very concise, which was like $4,000. That's crazy by the way. It's not $4,000, it's $4,000 with that cabinet. And that unfortunately is where I should have maybe, you know, I made the video and I give it to the patrons and then I see what the patrons say and then I make whatever adjustments to the video that the patrons had that video for a week before you guys saw it. And then I kind of make the adjustments for like feedback they focus group. So if you ever, hey, if you, if you want to see videos before they post but also have some input on them, you can become a $5 patron and just do that and, and trust me, I appreciate it for you. Literally you're paying me to help me make videos, but I mean, it's just, I appreciate it. So I didn't get a whole lot of feedback from that. I got a few people saying, yeah, that's pretty expensive. The, what's really crazy is the, the 112 cabinet's like $1399, $1400 cabinet. It's a very small company, very small company. And so my guess is they're probably building their own cabinets or they're buying them from somebody else. Most of the smaller guys are not building their own cabinets. They buy their cabinets from somebody else. So it immediately makes it much more expensive to make cabinets in small volumes and have somebody else involved if that's the case. But my point is the head was $2,700, which is expensive, but. But that's why I wanted the video. Because I'm thinking when I went and looked. So, you know, I was really interested in buying a Magnetone and I went on Sweetwater's website and I was thinking about reaching out to Sweetwater and saying, hey, if you want to send a Magneton amp, I'll do a video for it. You know, not, not keep it but like loan it to me and I'll do the video. And then that way it's great for me because I can try a piece of gear, you know, you guys would like me like try, like to try it and then if I don't like it, I just send it back and if I do like it, I can go, hey, you know, can I, can I buy it from you guys and you know, and figure it out that way. But the problem is Magnetone was an amp that was freaking me out because if I buy this amp or not, sorry, buy it. If they send me the amp and I hate it, I still have to make a video. And it's very, it's very draining to make a video of something you just don't like. When it's expensive, it's less exciting. It's fine when it's mid price, but when there's super expensive stuff. Right. So anyways, so I got Magnetone, reached out to me and I'll tell you this story because I think it's cool. How Magnetone reached out to me was because I'm a guitar addict and I buy guitars from everybody because I'm an addict. There's an amazing online store called Eddie's Guitars. It's where I bought my Sirs. It's where I bought my some of my music bands. And so I buy my guitars from a lot of dealers like Wildwood Guitars, Eddie's Guitars. Usually when I buy high end guitars, I usually buy them them from the Chicago Music Exchange, Eddie's Guitars, Wildwood Guitars, Wild West Guitars, I bought from them. What else? I mean there's a Bunch and I rainbow guitars down in Tucson. That's where the custom shop Strat behind me came from. That's usually where I buy my high end guitars. There's a couple reasons. One is the level expertise is much higher with those stores, so I can call them in it. When you're buying expensive guitars, you want somebody who knows what they're talking about. It's really hard to get on the phone with somebody and talk to somebody and go, hey, what radius is it? Or what's the thickness at the first fret and the 12th fret? And they're like, it's probably the average. Like if you really want to launch me into a crazy, which is very hard to do, is this. There's one thing that some only mom and pop stores do this. And I love mom and pop stores. I was one, but it's the one thing you guys do. If you guys, any mom and pops are watching this, please stop doing this. I'll reach out to a mom and pop store and I'll say, hey, I'm interested in this Gibson SG that you have on your site. Can you just tell me how much it weighs? If it's the right weight, I'm gonna buy it right now. And they'll go, and they'll go to the shipping box and they'll go, it's 23 pounds. I get that way more than you'd ever think. Somebody will go, oh yeah, this guitar is 31 lbs. Because they load the actual shipping box with the case and everything and they'll give me the shipping weight. And I'm like, no, no, I want the weight of the guitar. And they go, that's pretty much it. Like it's not 30 pounds. Anyways, back to Eddie's guitars. So there's this amazing guy named Granville and he was a sales guy at Eddie's Guitars and I bought guitars from him. And then Granville, he now is working for Magnetone. And when he went to Magnetone, he obviously remembered two things. One, I like guitars because I'm a guitar. I'm gonna say nice things like a freak. And also, oh, that guy does YouTube. So he reached out to me and a couple other YouTube channels you probably saw. Glenn Fricker got an amp too, because he told me, he's like, hey, I'm talking to a couple channels right now. And they had a budget. I'm just again up front with you guys on the channel. They had a budget and they're like, hey, this is, you know, what would you need to get paid to do A video or do a video. They didn't say paid like that. It's never another crash like that. It's like, hey, what does it cost to do a video? And I said, man, would I love to be able to try all the Magnetone amps. This is really where I'm at right now. If you could just send me a ton of them and then I could work through which ones I like and don't like, that'd be really cool. And I think that'd be really fun because to me, if you're looking at Magneton amps, I think, personally, I think the video I did was very good. I think I conveyed a lot of information. But if I was going to look at that MagnetOne amp, the three videos, is it. God, I feel bad when I go like I'm making a mess of his name. It's Josh from Casino Guitars. Is it Josh Casino Guitars? Why do I. Okay, if I apologize if I'm saying it wrong. I watch his videos. So Casino Guitars did the best Magnetone videos, obviously. And then. And then after that was a psionic audio. He took the Magnetone 15 apart and he kind of. From one that needed repaired. And even from being one being repaired, he gave a. Is it John? It Is it John? I gotta know now. I'm gonna tell you exactly because I don't want to guess. Hold on. Because literally he did the best videos, in my. My opinion. And it was. And he did them on Casino Guitars channel, but he also did them on his own channel. So let me find his channel and I'll share his channel. It is Jonathan. Sorry, Jonathan, that I called you Josh. So it's one of the. Yeah, it's one of the perks of being a name Phil. There's not a whole lot of f names Ph. Phil names. So they can't mess up my name as much. But. So yeah, the. Here, I'll even show you the video that I recommend is this one, the Magnetone Super 15. I watched his video and this. I did this when I was literally looking at buying one. And then absolutely, the best Magnetone video out there is Jonathan's again. And nothing wrong with the Anderton's guys videos. I just. Jonathan owns a couple and he was. This is it right here. Magneton amp Spires guide. This. This video. This is why I told the guys at Magnetone. I said, look, man, I am. That helped me a lot. Jonathan's video, breaking down the brand and how it works. I said, but it also. The brand is very confusing. So you'll see a couple more videos. We have a couple more videos. So anyways, if not, would you consider. Oh, I'm sorry, you guys got. I thought I was reading response. You guys are talking about something else. But anyways, the Magnetone stuff, it was really shocking to me because I was like, I just didn't know much about the brand and I wanted to learn about the brand. But the cabinets are crazy expensive. The amps are expensive too, but the cabinets are crazy expensive. And I just don't know why that is. Like I said, it's whatever it is, it is what it is. Okay, But I'm just always curious. Aren't you guys curious? I'm always curious. That's why I owned a two rock. All this stuff I find that you can find somebody put a comment on that video, like, hey, why don't you do the cheaper stuff? And I go, I do that too as well. But I mean, but if I need a Black Star 30amp review, you know, there was 300 of them. You know, I'm like, amp reviews, when you look at expensive stuff and you can't touch it, there's just no information out there and no one give you insight. On the side, on the side note, on the side note, I love the, the, the, the Super 15 magnetonium. So I'm just telling you right now, I loved it so much. So somebody emailed me this morning and they said, oh my God, is your twin sister Friedman amp on reverb right now for sale? It is, Yes. I love my twin sister amp. I love the Friedman amp. I still have my small box. I'm going to keep my small box. But I don't know what it is. The Super 15, the Magnetone is just, it's what, it's 10% better than the twin sister or the dirty Shirley. That's in my opinion, it's just 10% better. And what I mean by that is it just cleans up. It gets way more gainy and cleans up way more. And this is the shocking part. It is one channel. And in that one channel, it gets more gain than the twin sister and gets cleaner than when the clean. When you have the twin sister in dual channels. In other words, like, it's more easy to use as a one channel amp than is a dual channel. So that's the, that's the main thing. That's the takeaway there. And I think that says a lot because I've, I've loved my twin sister now for what, four years? And, and before the twin sister, I Had the Dirty Shirley. It's my favorite amp, and I don't dislike that amp anyway. It's amazing. It's just. Literally, this is just a little bit better. So. And retrospect. So you guys know, everybody has a different opinion about this, but although the Super 15 is much more than you know, it's almost a thousand dollars more. It's a thousand dollars more than a Dirty Shirley mini. It's like $400 less than the twin sister. So in retrospect, it's not. Not far off. But that's not what I expected to happen. So you guys know. Okay, let's see. Let's. Oh, I think I want to say deja. Deja is how to say it says, the Casino Guitars walkthrough video was epic. Yeah, I watched it. Casino Guitars did a tour of their store. I watched it, and I actually had my wife watch it too. So, yeah, it was pretty crazy. That was a crazy video. Highly recommend it. Nuts to watch. It's a beautiful store. It's. My wife said it looks like a beautiful museum. I was like, yeah, it's like, very. It's got a great, great vibe. Very, very cool. See, let's go to another subject. Let's see. This is. I don't know how to say the name, but Amanda sent it. I apologize, but I don't even. It's a lot of letters, too, so I don't even know if it's a name. Says, I have a Strat that needs a new nut. I was thinking bone, but I was wondering if brass would last longer. Only had the guitar for 10 years. A brass will last longer, but I don't. I've never had a bone nut wear out on a guitar. I mean, it's not a. It's a wearable product, but it's not. It's not so much. So if, you know, even if you use the Tremolo on the Strat, it's not really going to wear down so fast that it's a problematic thing. You've had the guitar for 10 years. If you put a bone nut in it, you wouldn't be thinking about replacing it for at least 10 years. If you don't want to do it, then, yeah, you can add brass. I have brass nuts on. On a guitar. I know I'm even. I'm like, chuckling and. And, you know, it's. Some people say they sound different. My argument would be, like, probably on the open string, maybe different. But once you fret, I don't know how much interaction that's gonna have with the tone. It's not anything that, like I said, makes me want it or not. Want a brass nut. My main bass has a brass nut on it, so it's. Yeah, if you want. Forever. I would do brass, but I don't think there's any problem with bone or like a Corian. What is that? That was weird. Okay. Okay. This one is from Richard White. This was sent from Amanda. Says I have a Schecter C1EA semi hollow with coil splitting and piezo. It's awesome. Except in normal humbucker mode, the pickups are very dark until the volume is on the 10. Will the trouble be fixed that? No. This is why if you. This is why. This is why if you watch the video where I said the video where it says I made a mistake. And the. The guy who bought the guitar did some mods. One of the mods he did is he put a treble bleed in the guitar. And because PRS did not put a treble bleed in that guitar, even though they put treble bleeds in all the other guitars, it's because in that active system, the treble bleed's not going to probably react the same way. It's not. Not the same. So you can try it. I mean, here's the good news. Not only is it easy just to put the treble bleed in, you know, look for a few bucks, right, you can make a trouble. For two bucks, you can buy one assembled already. For four bucks, you can use alligator clips and clip one in. So if you haven't thought about that, that's a great way. I highly recommend to try treble bleeds. If you do treble bleeds with clips. Nope, not treble clips. Trouble bleed with clips. I just want to show you one. There's a picture, I'm sure, somewhere on the. Okay. With clips, images. Somebody come on, show me one. I'm gonna have to go in the shop real and grab one. If I don't see a picture one, I can't believe there's not a picture one. Oh, there it is. Here you go. I knew it. I was gonna say Stu Mek had to have one. Okay, so here's one. Oh, it's thinking stupid 10% thing. Okay, so this is it. It would look like this. So essentially, there's your trouble bleed. And then you. You have. You put on two alligator clips, and then you clip it on the two terminals on the volume pot. And that will work. So you understand it doesn't take you anytime, and you can see what it does and doesn't do. My gut says it will have little to no effect. It's because anytime you have a piezo system, they have to run the magnetic pickups through this preamp. It's why I've never really huge fan of piezo systems. It's one of the downfalls of them is that to blend them. It's all about blending the volumes. Otherwise, one is just too dramatically different in volume than the other. So that's how they do it, everything through it. I. What's funny was I was talking to Tim Miller, the. The, you know, the amazing teacher at Berkeley who's got his Tim Miller signature guitar. We were talking at an event once and he mentioned. He said that he tried the Zeus headless guitar and he had a piezo system. And he says he loved the piezo system, but the guitar just sounded lifeless to him. And I said, oh, it's probably because the magnetic pickup sounded dark. And he goes, yes, they were really dark. And I said, probably because they were running them through the preamp. Because they have to run everything through the preamp when they do that. And he's like, really? And I'm like, yeah, that's my experience. It's kind of like when people say Parker guitars. They're like, oh, I just don't like the way they sound. I have a Parker that does that has no active preamp in it. And the magnetics are allowed to be just like. And it sounds just like a normal guitar. If I plugged in the Parker and you're here and you a beat it to another guitar, just like it. Like a Schecter or whatever. Any other guitar that just has passive hiccups, you would go, oh, yeah, they sound all the same. It's. It's that interaction. So. But like I said, you could try it. I would try it. You don't have to use the alligator clips. But I mean, it's so easy to do and so cheap to do it. I would do it that way. I have links to those alligator clips. I think it's like $6 for like a hundred of them. So on Amazon. And you can do that, no problem. Hero Glob says, hey, are the new Magnetone Marshalish. Can an amp not be Voxish or Fenderish or Marshall? So I know very little about the Magnetone series of amps as you know. I just know what I've learned recently with research. So here's what I can tell you. The magnetone that I have now, the Super 15. And I'm doing the Baby Me 80 as well. Okay, so I'm doing a video of that as well. Those are definitely Marshalls. What is the Super50 look, I had, as you guys know, I've had a couple Plexis. I had a hand wired 100 watt plexi, I had a 50 watt non hand wired plexi. I had the studio Marshall, right? And the hand wired plexi was a mat. Oh, I had a, two vintage Plexis, real ones that came to the store and I, what I picked up real cheap one day. And the plexis, the 100 watt plexis are great. Just you, they, they to me, once you put an attenuator on them, they just don't, they lose a little bit of the top end magic that I like and just logically like they're just too loud. The Super 15 is to me is closest to just sounding like a cranked Marshall. At lower volumes, it's ridiculously low volumes. That's all. It's again, it's not magic. You can, I mean, I was playing the Blues Breaker pedal. It sounds good. Like I said through, through, like I, I, I think it's all just about, you know, just as I've told you guys, I like my Kemper and I like my Princeton and, and to me, in the world of any, all of us can have any great sound we want at any price point. There's just something cool about owning. I like the term artisan, although I don't know if the magnetones apply with being artisan because it's not one builder doing one thing. But you know, it's, it's kind of like I just tell you how I see things and then we'll move on to another subject. But it's like when, when I, when I review things, everybody has opinions. Like I have opinions and no one's wrong. That's the whole point with their opinions. But when I check out a piece of expensive gear that's not, that's expensive because like Magnetone or because like you know, maybe Amplified Nation or you know, you name it, right? A small builder, right? It's always small builders and guitar builders too. Small builders making smaller amounts of amps, right, at a fraction of volume than the mass produced guitars. The funny thing to me is when somebody goes, oh, I can get that for 300 bucks. I always hear this in my head. I mean no disrespect to this, but it's like, it's kind of like if somebody came over to my house and I went, oh, here's A painting that me and my wife were at an art festival and there's this local artist and he made this and we got it for 500 bucks. And they go, I can get that at IKEA for $29.95. I'm like, yeah, I get it. I know how to put pictures on the walls for $20. It's just sometimes it's cool to own something more unique or something. So that's. That's all it is. That to me, that's all it is. Like the, the Friedman's, the Magnetones, the Morgans, the. Whatever you want to call it, the Amplified Nation. There's just a little bit more happening there. There is a little more hand, hand selected parts, a little bit more refined. But I mean, I just. You just heard me play a pedal through an amp and I could plug my HX Stomp or a Tonix and I could get the same tones too. Just like I could own a. You know, you can own an Epiphone, you can own a Gibson and. Or you can own a Collings. It's really. To me, they're all just really good guitars. It's just whatever brings you joy, I will say. And then this is the last part, I just want to make sure, because it's. Sometimes I love talking about the. This part of the. The world of guitar versus the technical side, what we do. When the Deep DF videos, the Magnetone amp that I'm pointing at right now, the reason I fell in love with it is because I was playing it and I started writing songs with it and I started making music with it. And I can tell you that I can quantify in a video all day long, oh, this is quality components or this is quality workmanship. But at the end of the day, whatever it is that makes you play more. A company sent me a pedal yesterday and today I was playing with it. And after an hour and a half, all I ever did was a B it with other things and compare things and contrast things. And never once did I just sit and just play. And I don't know how to explain it. It's sometimes when I plug into something, something like I said sometimes why I like my Princetons. Why Somebody said, Somebody said, like I've. When I saw the Magneton, something that said in that video, like, I could just get a Blues Junior. Absolutely. I love the Blues Junior. To me, a Blues Junior with a compressor pedal and a light overdrive. Oh, yeah, it's a fantastic amplifier. Who would argue that? I mean, I'm sure somebody's gonna say it's not great, but I think it's fantastic. But it's again, whatever inspires you to play and whatever makes you feel special or unique or happy or whatever it is. This is an emotional thing. And yeah, that's it. So. Okay. I know. I feel like was like the spiritual part of the channel now. Okay, so let's. Let's go. I'm stacking up some super chat, so let me hit a couple of those and then I'll hit some of the other guys. Which guys put on the main thing. Let's go to Connor, who says, hey, I'm having trouble handling the leads soldered to each wire from the bobbin. Okay. So I think. Are you talking about when you're making a pickup? He says, can you show how to wire up plus orient the four leads from the two wires on the humbucker? So I think you mean when you're making the pickup, but you could be mean when you're just soldering like a four wire or a five wire. Well, it's four wires and then two grounds, of course. Yeah, we could do a video on that. It wouldn't be until June or July, just because we know it's coming up soon. For repair content, we have a bunch of stuff that's just in mid production right now. Matt says. Hey, Phil, any advice on guitar straps that won't damage nitrous? Nitrocellulose lacquer. Your strap should not damage nitro lacquer. Unless, of course, it's laying on the finish all the time. Even leather would be problematic. The. Just so you know, my gold top Les Paul that I love, it has some issues around the strap buttons because whoever had it had a strap and they left it all the time. It's just some of the downfalls of nitro, man. You gotta literally take the strap off when you're not using it. I wouldn't leave it on the guitar. It's not. I. I don't know of any particular types of materials on straps that are more problematic than others. I would imagine anything that's more rubberized than. Than not. But again, that's just a guess. The. The only thing I can tell you is, is that if you have a nitrous size like a guitar and you're worried about the strap damaging, it would just make sure it's not on the guitar when you're not so much when you're not using it, Just not for long periods of time. So, you know, long periods of time is more than a Day or two, whatever. You know, just keep it in the lower. You know, keep it away when it's not in use. S. Riley says, hey, what amp FRFR would you suggest for the Helix tone at home? So I have gone through tons of the FR FRFRs, in my opinion, for whatever matters. I think line 6, the FR line 6 sounded the best to me. I did. The head rush was okay sounding. The Friedman was okay sounding. I hear and I. From people that I absolutely trust. And when I say trust, I mean I trust their ears. I. I trust that they know a great sound, that the Fender FRFR is hard to beat. It's just amazing. So I've not tried one. So maybe that's something I could probably try as frfr. But in my. My other experience of going through all the frfrs I went through, which is a ton of them, I just found that the line 61 was the best. Which is funny because I was. I thought the Friedman was going to be the one. But no, it was the. For line six. But I would definitely consider especially I think the Fender wins less money. I don't know. I have. Who else just came with an FRFR recently? Another company just came out with one. I haven't tried that either, but Jose says, happy Friday. I'm looking for a small box 50 head inexperienced with the PRS HDRX50. I did not like the PRS HR DX50. That helps. When I say I didn't like it doesn't mean it's not good. It's just. It did not resonate with me. It just. I don't know what it was, says any other favorite 50 watts with a great Marshall sound in that range. I mean, there's lots of great sounding Marshalls that you don't have to go to the Friedman level to get. Well, first of all, you know, understand it's compare and contrast. Okay, so when I say I didn't love the Marshall Studio plexi, basically the studio version, I didn't. I don't mean I don't like it. I mean, comparatively speaking, I preferred. I prefer the Friedman versions of the Marshall tone at lower volumes to the small smaller. Like in other words, I prefer Friedman's smaller lunchbox amps to Marshalls lunchbox amps. Sound wise, just me a preference. And I now prefer the Magnetone over the Friedman's for those particular marsh tones. Now, keep in mind, the small box to me is a different animal than what Magnetone. Magnetone. Think, like I said, think early A era, you know, British sound Where the small box is kind of more of a later 70s, 80s kind of sound, which is cool. More more modern take on a Marshall, like hot rod Marshall. But I mean there's tons of great amps out there. But like I said, I. You could even consider any of the Marshalls for sure. So what else? I'm trying to think who else that's popped. I mean, Dark Gene does a great 1 watt plexi amp. That's great. If you need something that's one watt. It sounded fantastic. But the, the Pacific hrdx, I just didn't. I don't know what it was. It was fine. It was just. In fact, I actually feel worse now because I don't want to say it was bad, not because I'm afraid to say it's bad. It's because I don't think that's even fair. I think it's just. It didn't do anything for me. It was emotionless as an amp. I just remember plugging in going, yeah, this is an amp. I thought it was okay. I thought there was better amps out there in that price point. That sounded good, but. And then don't forget, you can stick a great Marshall pedal, sounding pedal into an amp. By far. It's still what I do most the time. I still am using just a clean amp and then a Marshall pedal. So there's tons of choices out there. There's pedal pal, there's lpd, there's UA Audio, there's Karl Martin, just to name a few. Okay, hold on, I lost. Okay, there's the screen. DJB says, hey Phil, I just bought an Ibanez Prestige. Is it normal for the guitars at this price to need a tech setup? Nut seems high. Any, any New York techs you recommend? I don't know any New York techs per se that I could recommend. If it's a Prestige, I'm assuming that it's a locking nut, tremolo system guitar. If that's the case and it's high, it's got a shim in there. So underneath your locking nut from the side, just take a flashlight, hit it. Look on the side, you'll should see a thin little probably brass colored like gold line. So the nut will be most likely black or Cosmo black, which is just like black chrome, like onyx. And then underneath it you'll see a thin little gold line. It'll be really hard to see. Maybe it's silver, but that's a shim. There's a metal shim under there. You could just do that yourself. You could take that shim off. Why is it there? You know, if you learn anything from the deep dives, you know that the manufacturers are shipping guitars to get to you in a playable condition, not best playing edition, right. They're trying to overcome the fact that most things now are shipped twice. Think about that. Logistically, the, the deep dives, if anything, have taught me, but also other manufacturers that this is just the way it works now. They ship a product to someone and then that someone ships it to you. And then think about this. Because of reverb and secondhand selling online now, a guitar can get shipped multiple, multiple times, right? Shipped from the manufacturer to the retailer, retailer to you, you, to another person that you're selling it to because you're getting rid of it because you know, whatever reason. So all that shipping, it's. You're almost like you have to figure out, they have to figure out how to make a guitar playable to us, but also how to survive all the shipping, right? And survive it in the idea that, you know, the neck doesn't literally backbone and you get it and it's unplayable. And think about that. And if you get a guitar out of the box and it's unplayable and it's not even about getting your favorite preference of setup, it's about you being like, oh, I bought a dud and this needs to go back. This is defective. So they need the guitar to at least play when you get it out and you can strum a chord and play and go, okay, this isn't my preference, but at least it's playable. It means it's somewhat quality and therefore it's worth investing more money and time into versus I don't know where I'm at right now, but I just bought this with a 45 day exchange at guitar center and I think it's going back, right? Like that's not what their goal is. So they're all going to ship a guitar that, yeah, the nut might be a little high. I've say this in the videos all the time. They cut the nut slots a little shallow. It seems to be a very, very conscious, conscious decision to make the nut slots a little shallow than they should be. It makes a conscious decision to give the neck a little bit more relief than it needs to be. Again, because again, they're just trying to make sure the guitar is playable when they get out of the box. So in your case, that's probably the case. But it's not uncommon for any guitar to need some Kind of setup. It's a guitar should come to you playable. Playable is very easy way to explain. You should be able to strum a chord and play a scale and it should, that should function. Unplayable means literally what it sounds like it. You have dead notes, you have no sound, you know. Right. You strum it right. There's issues or crackling or it's buzzing really really badly. None of that is within the realm of playable to me. If a guitar comes and you play it and you go yeah, it's, it's plays but it's just doesn't. It's not the way I love it. You know. I have been not talking about the heritage guitars behind me by the way, but somebody on this, on this chat asked about adding the poker chip to the three way switch. So I got a poker chip and I stuck it on three way switch. You can see where I'm pointing at right now. It was very easy by the way. Somebody said how do you do it? I thought I was gonna have to remount the poker chip hole bigger. Nope. I just took off the the nut, stuck the poker chip in, put the nut through back and it was. That's now it's done. Because I did that I thought let's take the time to restring it, set it up and make it great. I absolutely love this heritage. Now that I put the time into it. It was okay when they shipped it. All I could really tell you guys was it was great. It's quality guitar. But it wasn't. I didn't love as much as the first one. Even though I liked the frets that were taller. But now after putting some time into it again adjusting and it took a lot of adjustment. Adjust the bridge and then it was like, you know, a little buzzy. And then I adjusted it up and I straightened the neck and then it was like okay, it's not buzzing but now it's not as playable. You just kind of find the sweet spot. So tweaking the guitar to your to your specific taste is, is totally acceptable when it comes to a new guitar is to adjust it to best that it can be done to that. Nellis says. What do you think of the quality of the ple job that Gibson does? Well, ultimately most the Gibsons I have received that have plex have been fine. The only negative I have seen to plek jobs is that it is a machine that is run by a person. And I. I've talked to a couple people and I. I've really overall I'd like To point out, I. I couldn't say nine out of 10, I feel like that's too high. But eight out of 10, which is pretty good. It's a pretty good statistic. Eight out of 10 times. I think a plex job is going to give you a great guitar playing guitar the other two times. What I've noticed is the machine sometimes gets a little aggressive with taking off fret material. I find that sometimes when I'm like, we know, we talked about that first heritage guitar that showed up. And I said the frets were just way too low. And some people pointed out they're like, Philip, those are medium jumbo frets. Like, do you not like medium jumbo? No, that guitar, I measured them. Those weren't medium jumbo frets. Now, they probably started as medium jumbo. Here's what I think happened with that first heritage guitar. I think somebody put it on the Plek machine and was determined to make the frets perfectly level, even if that meant grinding off half the fret material. And I don't know that to be 100% true because I wasn't there. You know, I'm just giving you my, my educated guest of years of experience of like looking at frets. You know, I've seen this a couple times where somebody just grinds the frets down to the point where like these just. There's not enough meat on these frets for me. But they are perfect. And pluck machines have. I've seen them do that as well. The good news is when they have done that, my suspicion is that they've done that to correct some kind of bump or hump in the neck or some issue in the neck. And it's. So, yeah, it's the best playing that guitar was probably ever going to play. But it's not my cup of tea. Yeah. Susan says, so the Plek is only as good as the person running it. Sure, of course. And keep in mind the person after it, the plek is not a complete process. It is not like it doesn't do everything from start to finish. There still is a tech at the end who does their finish work. So a Plek machine is like all machines, it's a positive thing from the worker because again, some, some things are tedious. You know, they're tedious jobs. They're hard on the body, they're hard on the mind. And so when machines can do that, it's better for the person. The other thing is safety wise, right. It's not as, you know, dangerous as. Let's Say CNC work and stuff, but I'm just saying it adds more safety to them, but also it gives you consistency because it doesn't give you the bad day job worker. But yeah, ultimately plek is fallible. Like anything else, it's just, in my opinion, a lot less fallible. So the. So if somebody said, hey, I got a guitar. I get this all the time. I get emails all the time. The people go, hey, Phil, I got a guitar. It was plaque. It's horrible. Yeah, that can happen. The difference is you're 1 in 500 people, and you could have got that guitar. And I know that doesn't mean anything to you, because either way, you were the one that got the screwed up guitar. But what I'm trying to tell you is there was probably 499 other please customers before it got to you. Where another way of doing it is. It could have been 1 in 50 or 1 in 100. And that's just how it works. And, you know, that's why I always tell you with all guitars, somebody will go, hey, I bought a $10,000 custom shop, and it's horrible. Let me show you why. And they send me pictures. And I go, yeah, because people make mistakes. But percentage wise, it's less likely to happen than a $200 guitar, right? You expect to see a much higher fail rate on a 200 guitar than a $10,000 guitar. It's just how it works. It's. It's. It's like. It's like in a prior, you know, my friend. My friend worked for our microcontroller business, and he was like, hey, look, our clients, Jaguar, and we make the microcontrollers for the airbags to go off. We make the microcontrollers that tell the airbags when to deploy. As the car is flipping, each bag has to deploy in a certain order, and they want the fail rate at 0%. And you can understand probably why the fail rate needs to be at 0%, because at 1%, that means somebody's dying, right? That's 1% of the. Of, you know, so. And that's too many people dying. But in a guitar, a 1% fail rate is just the inconvenience of having return stuff. So it's like I said, I. I don't want to be that customer. You don't want to be the customer. But also, you know, unless you got somehow stuck with it in a weird scenario. But it's really hard today to buy a quality product from a quality retailer and not have some Kind of return, especially if it's defective. Yeah. Rock Rocket Boy 1969. That's funny. Rocket boy. And then the year we land on the moon. That's cool. Says I had a strap plucked with no issues. Yeah, that would be the. I would say that if I was to ask a thousand guitar players that had plenty job done, how was it? I would expect somewhere between 1 to 5% to tell me it was not great or they didn't know, I didn't notice anything. And then the rest would say it's fine. I would imagine that'd be the rate I told you. One of my favorite things I ever heard was I was in a high end factory once and the, the factory manager, I was talking about cheap guitars versus expensive guitars. And he said, it's not cheap versus expensive. It's fast versus slow. We can take a lot longer on a guitar. And what happened? That conversation. Maybe I told, I told that story a thousand times, but maybe I didn't tell you the lead up to that. The lead up was he was talking to me and he was showing me things and an employee came up and said something to the effect of like here, this guitar is not right. This is a blah blah, dude, what do you want me to do? And he looked at it and he's like, you know, he's doing the thing. And he's like. And he's like, yeah, go back and maybe go ahead and pull the frets and rethread and do the thing. I'm doing his accent, I'm sorry. And you know, he's like, and do. Do the thing. And he was going through the process and then I said something to the effect of like, oh wow, you gotta almost restart that whole neck. And he's like, yes. And I go. He goes, yeah, as a whole day to that guitar's, you know, whole whole other day to the process. And, and I said, yeah. I go, that's why these guitars are better because they're expensive. And that's when he corrected me. He says, no, they're not better because they're expensive. They're better because we take more time to build them. That makes them more expensive. Slow versus you know, slow versus fast guitars. And like he said, fast guitars will get lucky. And so a guitar that was made quickly can be as good like a $200 guitar. Here's what he said. I agree. I 100% agree with him. Maybe don't make it extreme. Okay, 200 versus 10,000. Let's take it to $500 versus $2,000. A $500 guitar can be as good or if not better than a $2,000 guitar. But this is my argument and this was his argument. And I love it when somebody says, oh, 2000 guitar is a ripoff and all this stuff. You could be right. But here's what I would argue if I, if you had to put something of value on the, on the line for a bet, right? And I said, I will pick 200, $500 guitars and I will pick 2005. Sorry, let's back up. I will pick 100 $500 guitars and I will pick 100 $2,000 guitars. And we're not going to bet which ones are which one's better. We're going to get bet how many have, you know, which one has more defects, which one has more failures. A smart person's betting towards a $2,000 guitar, right? Because if they're charging more money, they are supposed to be taking more time. So that's, that's sometimes all you're buying. I, I said this once before, I picked up a 100 square strap. It's one of the best playing guitars I've ever played. But I went through like 20 that day in the store and I just remember like going through them and one was good, one was good. And I was like, wow, this one's amazing. My, yeah, it was 1 in 20. If I picked up, if I pulled 20. In contrast, if I that day had pulled 20, 20American made Fender US Strats out of boxes and one played great, I'd be furious, right? But having one $100 guitar play amazing was like, wow, that was a find. So that's just like I said. So the argument is really simple to this point. You don't need to spend a lot of money for a good guitar. But if you don't want to spend money, you have to take more time to. And more diligent, be more diligent to find those gems. Case in point, this crazy guitar that's behind me that cost me $100 where the guy shoved a pee wee neck into a Hagstrom. It is an amazing guitar. Everybody's came over and picked up the guitar, said the same thing I do. It's like, yeah, it's got mojo. I go, yeah, it's got popsicle sticks shoved into it. It's just, it's just it. But that guitar, I mean, I, if, if you watch that video and your takeaway is I should go to a store and buy a junky guitar for 100 bucks and I'll have an amazing guitar. I bet you out of a hundred times you're going to have 99 people sad because it's just not gonna. It's just. It's the luck of that draw. Okay. Oh, you know what? And a side note, because somebody said something really smart and I thought was really interesting. Somebody's made a comment about that Hagstrom, the. The Ikea caster. They said, you know, it's not even that he got it right. You know, the guy who put this guitar together. It's that probably he was tweaking on it for years, like, adjusting. Adjust. And I'm like, you know, I wish I would have thought in that video. That is a fantastic point. Right? He probably shoved the neck in there, and it probably was atrocious. And he made an adjustment. And it was probably atrocious, and he made an adjustment. And then over time, through adjusting on the guitar and adjusting things, it just kind of settled into a nice playing sounding instrument, which is interesting. So proving again, that guitar was not made fast, it was probably made slow over time. See, so that's my. That's my thought. Let's grab a comment that Amanda grabbed. This is from Casey Lee. Says, Phil. I love the channel. Thank you for saying that. Just bought a 19, a 1993 Martin D35, and it's been in a case forever. What is the process for rehumidifying? Or should I just take it to a luthier? Well, I wouldn't disparage you taking to a luthier because it's a very fine, beautiful acoustic guitar. Humidity with a guitar. I don't know if there's an issue with introducing too much humidity to. To it. You wouldn't be wanting to introduce anything more than 50 humidity anyways. So. You know what's great about a guitar is it's kind of like a plant, you know, like, I don't know anything about plants, so maybe I shouldn't use this analogy. But here's what I think I know about plants. You pour water in the pot, and then when the water, you know, somebody's like, this is how you kill plants. When the water is on top of the soil, then that's too much water, right? But as long as it's sucking in the water, it's probably good. I don't know if that's true. I'm just looking for a good analogy. My point is, if you take a humidifier and stick it in the sound hole of that guitar, and next day it's dry, then it's probably a good idea to put more moisture in it and go on from there. So you just want to keep the. Keep it humidity. But it's okay if you want to take it to a luthier and have them check it. It's a beautiful instrument, and it's expensive, and you don't want to get it wrong. And, I don't know, you're in. And remember, I'm also factoring in this. I don't know your environment, where you're at, what it was exposed to before. But with acoustic guitars, I'll tell you what I just pay attention to is just make sure they have their available to humidity speaking. Which, see, humidity in my office today is 48%, which is really high for us because it just rained the other day. So I tend to freak out once it hits the 30s, like the low 30s. That's just too dry for this many guitars. So I usually don't try to add humidify. I have not humidified the room in a month or so. But if it drops, like, if I come in here one day and it says 32%, I'm gonna turn on humidifier just a little bit. Not so much to humidify my guitar, just to stop them from being dehumidified. So Josh says that plant analogy was the most Arizona thing Phil's ever said. Yeah. You know, it's funny is I kind of realized that when I was saying it, I was like, yeah, I don't know. We don't. Our plants, they're just, you know, they're lucky to be alive. Okay, so Paul says, hey, will you be doing anything on the Guild Sunfire? Sunfiner Sun. I think it's Flyner Deluxe. Would love to see your review on it as I value your thoughts. Thinking about getting one. And maybe I. You know what's funny is the Guild guys reached out, apparently at the NAMM show through Instagram. If you guys reach out through to me, through all these other ways that you reach out, first of all, understand that I don't check any of that stuff. So luckily, what I have is an amazing wife. And this is what I have. I have. They're both in here. So it kind of worked out great. It is not very common. This happens. Okay? But here is my phone, and here is a clone of my phone. Okay? So the green one's mine. So this is my phone. And then there's a clone. This is literally my phone cloned. And that is what Shauna has access to. She has a clone on my phone to access Things like Instagram. Because Instagram and the TikTok and all that crap, it's almost impossible to get to do on a computer. And so when you send messages that. Messages that way, usually if you get a response, it is me, but it's usually prompted to me. In other words, Shauna will say, or my son will say, they'll say, hey, Phil, this person messaged you. You know, do you need to meet me? You need to message him back. So anyways, Gilda, I guess, reached out nam. And so I reached out back to him, said, hey, I'd love to do a deep dive of your guitar. And then I haven't heard back from him, so we'll see. That's my long way to say that, but. But yeah, there's just too many ways to. To check things. I just. I can't stay up on. On it all the time. I just try and it just doesn't work. And the main reason is, is because I can. It happens to me way too many times. I can sit for literally six hours straight here at my desk, checking emails, doing stuff, corresponding with somebody, and then look and go, wow, I didn't get to anything. I'm supposed to do that, actually, you know, that I need to do to. To pay the bills, so to speak. Not saying that that stuff is important. It's just, you understand, you got to do. Got to do work too. Okay. So Brian says, old man river phone. I know right now I got two to lose in the lake, so. All right. You know, it's funny is for a short time, we had. I had two different phones. I had two phones with two phone numbers. And that's how we did. I had one for business and one for personal. And it just. That got too confusing for me. It's too much craziness. And then they came up with the idea. They cloned it. So they have a clone of it. So it's cool. The cool thing is if you call my phone. Well, first of all, if you call my phone, anyone who knows me knows you never. I'm never going to answer. If you're a good friend of mine, if you're a really good friend of mine, if you know me really that well, you call my wife. You don't even call me. There's no. Larry Mitchell does not call me. He calls my wife. Ralph calls my wife. They'll. Sometimes they'll. They'll copy me on the text, but if you message me or if you call me, it's you. Who knows when I'll get to Answer it. I, I will. I. I stay the hell away from phones like there's no tomorrow. If, If I can get. If I can. If I could get away with never having a phone, I would never do it. So, you know, I would never have a phone. Okay, this we've gotten too, too. So I'm getting out of control here. Let's get back to. Let's get back to finishing up this show. Otherwise it's. That's not going to finish either. Michael says, hey, Phil. Second guitar cab from Guitar center that they got took on trade and sold me V30s pulled and crap inserted. Tell Guitar center that wrong speakers need to be disclosed. Well, here's the thing about this. Let me tell you two stories and this, and then we'll, you know, this will kind of help you, Michael. So. Although. Although. Well, let me just put it this way. My guess is incompetence over, you know, deceit. Okay. Especially with Guitar Center. Okay. I've seen Guitar center do a lot of stuff, and Guitar center is not a. It's not a robot. It's a bunch of people. And a bunch of people are all different. So. Yeah. Is there deceitful employees at Guitar Center? Of course there are. There's deceitful employees everywhere. Are people committing scams? Absolutely. And, and are mom and Pops doing. Absolutely. Are all kinds of people doing. Yes, employees do it. I mean, look, I told you, I used to work in a corporate environment. I used to have to, because I told you I did. Oracle, Davox, I did all that stuff. And I had 400 people. Well, 438 people I was in charge of every day. And one of my unfortunate jobs was to find somebody doing horrible things and then fire them. And they would do all kinds. Talk about if I could start a podcast, just telling you all the people I found and fired. Right. Let me. Let me tell you a funny story. This one will blow your mind. Okay? So the company I work for, okay. For safety reasons. Right. Had a. With Wells Fargo. Okay. I promise this is good. This will be a funny story because it's crazy. So what would happen is. So let's say I'm just gonna make up the company. Let's say it's called Texaco. Right? Because it wasn't Texaco, but I'm just saying it's Texaco. And the company was in Tempe, Arizona. What it would do is we called. We had our name as Texaco. It was like Texaco, Arkansas. Right. We just didn't want anybody to know where the company Was right. So. So what happened was this is so in the building, they would have be customer service, there would be loan origination, there'd be collections. So here's what I had to do one day as a job, I had. I had the CEO come to me and they said, hey, look, somebody is stealing tens of thousands of dollars from customers, and we don't know how they're doing it. I had to help figure out how they did it. So here's what they did. They were ingenious. This employee figured out that every time you called a customer and said, hey, you need to pay on your loan and your past due, and you could wire money through Wells Fargo, right? Okay, so what they would do is they'd say, well, you would say, hey, send $385 to Texaco. You know, Arkansas. That's the name what this employee figured out, which took me weeks to figure out. They figured out that when you go to collect money from Wells Fargo, you don't need an id, Right? You just need to know who the person sent the money to. So you walk in, you don't have to show any id. Most of Wells Fargo's don't have any cameras. This is back then. Remember, I've been out of the business for a while. They literally. You can go into different cities, you can collect any of the Wells Fargo. So even if you're in Nebraska, you can go to California and collect it in California. So you can always hit different Wells Fargos. They would go in, and if so, what they did one day was they decided they would call customers and go, hey, you need to pay $385. And the customer go, okay. And they go, and you need to send it to Texaco Phoenix. And the customer would pay, and then they would get off work, and they would go to a Wells Fargo, and they'd walk in and go, I have a $385 waiting for me for Texaco Phoenix. And then Wells Fargo would pay them, and they would do this thousands of times throughout the week. And it took me forever to figure this out. This customer, this. This employee was just in thousands of dollars, but it gets crazier. Then we found out with the FBI that this same employee was doing this scam, not only at work, but they were stealing people's dogs, right? They were stealing people's dogs. And so what they would do is they would literally. Sorry, back up. They weren't actually stealing the dogs. What they would do is like, let's say you had a dog, you had, you know, you Lost your dog. And you have a lost dog flyer, and it says, hey, little Tippy is missing. They would call you up and say, hey, I have your dog, Tippy. But actually my neighbor has it, and my neighbor's abusive towards it, and I want to go get the dog, but, like, I'm afraid. So if you could Wells Fargo me, you know, 100 bucks, I'll go get your dog and meet you with it. And they would just, same thing, go, hey, my Wells. My name is John Smith. They would give you, like, a name and every. All your. All this information, but really all they needed was the name to go get the money from Wells Fargo. So basically, that's my way of saying is that's one thing I had to do there. One, There's a thousand other employees I had to find for. Find for doing stuff because they were in the system doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Right. My point to the story is, yes, it's possible Guitar center employees are pulling scams and doing stuff, but I find that in those stories, I have. Incompetence usually is the. Is the norm. So employees being lazy, not checking cabinets. Look, this is. This is a. I've said this before. I will say it again. When I had a store for 13 years, every single amplifier ever returned to us, ever returned to us, was missing the power cable. And everyone told us, we don't know why. I guess people just like to keep power cables. I don't know why. Like, I. My favorite story is a guy came in the store one day and he bought a Fender Mustang amp. And he's like, yeah, I got this Mustang. It's just too complicated for me. And I said, okay. And he's like, I just want to return it. I said, sure. I said, have you tried the Champion? And he's like, what's that? And I go, it's the same amp, just all knobs and no screen. And he plays the Champion. He goes, oh, you know what? I'll just exchange for the Champion. And he goes to register, and he hands me the Champion in the box. And I look at the Mustang and he says, yeah, I don't have the power cable. It didn't come with. Remember, he bought the brand amp new? He goes, yeah, I was gonna tell you. I forgot to tell you. But the amp came and it didn't come with the power cable. I go, oh, that's. That's crazy. Okay, no problem. What are you gonna say? And so I exchange it out. He gets the Champion, and then he got a guitar stand and some Picks and some stuff. And he had all this stuff. And I said, hey, you want me to carry your amp out? And he's like, sure, I carry the amp. We go to his car. He has a truck. He opens the passenger door and guess what's sitting on the seat of the passenger of seat of the truck. The. The power cord for the amp. And he goes, oh, there it is. He goes, here you go. I didn't. I didn't think it came with one. So here's what I'm saying. Yes, crappy people. But I'm going to say most likely that some customers are taking out expensive speakers out of cabinets, trading with Guitar Center. Guitar center is in check because they don't care. And then the employees that sell it to you, they don't care because there, you know, if you watch the interview with Gabe, it was very enlightening. But you see, you see the problems. You know, there's a lot more deeper problems at Guitar center than we discussed in that short interview. They're a retail company that has the suffering of high turnover from retail employees. They're underpaid, they're underappreciated. And that's just part of the problem, right? That not even bringing up the fact this is hard to find good help, you know, Period. But so I'm just saying is the real question I have is, is this. First of all, that's why they're supposed to have a good return policy. So if you get it. And Michael, just because I believe. And I'm just going to check. Okay. Because I believe you sent this question to me through Patreon as well. So I'm gonna pull up the Patreon page, if you don't mind, because I believe there was a second part because I queued it for our bonus podcast on Patreon. So let me just make sure that I go and find the original question you posted, because then your question now is good. Thank you for. You didn't need a super chat. But the. I thought there was an extra part where you said they were giving you a hard time about returns. And that's really probably more than more. I don't know if you deleted the. The original. Okay, so I thought you said that they were giving you. They were. They weren't taking returns. That's a. That's the bigger issue. So what I'm trying to say is, look, do I think you should buy a speaker cabinet, then find out that it has the wrong speakers in it? Do I think that's right? I don't Think it's right? Do I think it happens? It absolutely happens. And because it happens, you. You have to be. You have to understand you can't correct them. You know, the reality is Guitar center is doing, in my opinion, as much as they can do when it comes to selling cabinets, which is they're selling them used at a good price. Guitar center is way cheaper on average used price than Reverb is. And some people are gonna argue with me that, and it's because they're gonna find the scenarios where they're not. But I literally have spent about $3,000 in the last six months at guitar center through guitars and pedals and stuff used. Because I keep going there because I find it cheaper there than I did at Reverb. Okay? So it's not that I'm a. Like I told you, if I were at a gas station cheaper, I'd probably buy it there. It's not loyal to Guitar center anyway. It's just I'm finding it cheaper. But they also have a better return policy. But in that case, like I said, in your situation, you're going to have to do due diligence of checking. Now, if you're taking it back and they're not taking it back, all I can tell you is, is this. When it comes to a corporation, that's the best thing about a Guitar center or if it's a mom and pop, right? The. The truth is you just go higher in the chain until you get the answer, the right answer, which is, you know, it's. I, I will tell you back to corporate world. I, My boss, at my level, I was upper middle management. I don't know what you'd call that. Anyways, it doesn't matter. Just. Just say this. My boss was the boss's boss, right? Like, that was the guy. And he once said a great thing to me, which I thought was great. He said, your job is to take care of everything. I said, okay. And he goes, and if anyone is ever upset and they want to talk to me, just understand that I'm going to tell them yes. So he wanted me to know. And some of you are gonna have different opinions about that. I've had different friends talk about different opinions over the years about that statement. But I knew go I. What I appreciated about that was what I knew was when I was having an issue with anyone, an employee, a customer, whatever, I knew that if it escalated to my boss, they were gonna get their way. So. So I would make sure that if I didn't think there was gonna Win anymore. I just give them their way, too, because they were gonna go to him. But my point is, is that with you, you need to talk to a different store. Keep in mind, the best thing about Guitar center is if you go to return something or go there and you're getting a problem, go to a different Guitar Center. Those are just my suggestions. But I'm not shocked in any way that a. A Guitar center is. You know, you're getting a cabinet with the fake speakers. Of course they are. Because, I mean, it's what everybody's doing now. They're stealing the speakers. They're doing everything. People do all kinds of weird stuff, and they've been doing that forever. It's just so easy, you know, I bought and I still laughing about this. Before I got the magnetone amp, I decided I was like, maybe I need a Freedman again. So I bought a new Friedman PT20amp. Again, this is about two months ago. Three months ago. Three months ago. It was in January, so ish. I bought it from Guitar Center. I got it home, and I just wasn't getting along with the amp. I had one before, and I remember liking it, and I was just like. I was trying to go back, and I was like, no, I'm not digging it. So I took it to Guitar center, and I was. I said, I walked with the counter. I'll never. This is why I think this is hilarious. I was gonna exchange it for something else. I'll just exchange it. So I walk with counter. I put it. I put the box on the counter, and I tell the employee, I go, hey, I'd like to exchange this for something else. And he goes, okay. He goes, you have the receipt? And I said, yeah, it's right here. You give him the receipt, which was a online receipt. And he looks at it. He goes, I can just return it. I said, well, I'm just gonna look around the store if there's any. He's like, I'll just return it. I'm like, oh, okay. You know, he didn't care. And then he returned it. And he's like, yeah, the money will be on your card in a day or two. And then I got a little chime on my phone. I go, oh, no, it's already back on my card now. He's like, cool. And I go, okay. And then I walked around the store, I did a loop, and I wasn't really finding anything. And I go, well, I guess it worked out because I didn't find anything anyways. And I left the store and I got home, and I'll tell you the first thing I told Sean. I said, you know, that kid doesn't even know if there's a brick in there or an amp. He never looked in the box. He never looked in the box. It was an. It's a 1500amp. He doesn't even know if I gave him a 1500. I said, so that's what I'm trying. I was like, if I was his boss, I'd be pissed. I'm like, you didn't even check. What did this guy return? So. But luckily I did return the real amp. But anyways, so that's my. My point to you is that, yeah, I would say that's going to be a thing for a while, and you want to be cautious of it. That's my two cents. The funny thing is, I got another email about Guitar center, and a guy sent me a really nice email, and he said that basically told me a story about Guitar Center. And his story was. And I'll try to keep it brief because we're at the end of the show. And I got a couple more questions ago. He was saying that in 2005. So he said, look, in 1966, he got a Les Paul Jr. In TB yellow and he joined the Marine Corps. And he, you know, he got out and he basically like, kind of like my story, you know, got a good job, you know, started doing better for himself. And he's like, okay, I got myself a gold top. And then he got a Les Paul Supreme. So he never played the junior. In 2005, he took the junior down to a guitar center and he said, hey, I'd like to trade this in or sell it. And they said, okay, we'll buy it for 800 bucks. But they would only buy but not trade. And then he felt suspicious about that, so he left. And he went to another guitar center, and they offered him $1,000 for it. And same thing. Not trade, just buy. And he felt suspicious, so he left. He went to a mom pop. They said, they don't really buy that kind of stuff, but the Gibson rep will be here next week. And the Gibson rep came the following week. He met him, and the rep said, oh, my God, this is a 1959 Les Paul Junior. We'll give you 19,000 for it. And he said, gibson bought this Les Paul Jr. From him. And he said, this is a cautionary tale you should tell everybody about how Guitar center tried to, like, steal this guitar. Now, before I say anything more, I want to tell you that I took that story that he told me, and I went downstairs and I told my wife the story. I said, I want you. I want. I'm telling the story verbatim as I just told you. I said, can you tell me what you think? And she literally said the exact answer I'm gonna say now, which is the answer I had. She said, they weren't trying to steal it. They were just stupid. And I said, yes, I come to the same conclusion. I said, please tell me why you came to that conclusion. She said, because if they were trying to steal it, they wouldn't have let it leave. And I go, right, right. If they were trying to steal your guitar, they wouldn't have let it leave. The reality is, well, first of all, in 2005, the only thing you could have done to figure out what that guitar was worth is you could have had a guitar Blue Book, which doesn't tell you exactly anything, just gives you an idea. And it's only if you know what it is or so, right? Like, so if you told them it was 1966, they're probably going to think it's a 66, because they don't know anything. Also, they would just go on ebay and look. And so they didn't have information like we do now. It's a lot harder to give you a stupid answer now. Still possible, but a lot harder with the information you can get so easily. But the point is, I'm not saying they didn't try to steal it. I'm just saying the odds of two different Guitar center stores both lowballing you, but both letting you go without. I mean, think of this. They could have got you to 5,000. If it was worth $20,000, they could have got you five and they made a kill. They could have got to 10,000, made a killing. They could have figured out anything. The reality is, her gut instinct in the industry was the employees didn't know and they didn't care. And that's what I got from it, too, because they don't profit from it. The only. The only. See, where I would think they were stealing it is if the employee was like, guitar center doesn't want it, but I'll buy it from you. Right? That's a story I've heard not only from Guitar Center. Well, first of all, not only from Guitar center and mom and Pops. It happened in my store. I had an employee do the same thing. I had an employee literally sell a customer his personal guitar in the store over one of my guitars on my wall, just that just, they, that's what people do. So the. There was a guitar center employee that I knew of that what they would do is they would buy up every good guitar that came in the store for a while, like all the gems. And they got them dirt cheap, you know, guitars. And then they built a collection and then opened up their own store. So. So that's what I'm saying. I'm just saying to your guys, questions. Although I think it's. It could be deception, I really think incompetence is the key when it comes to those stories. So that's why you need to be diligent and double check your stuff, document your stuff, pay attention to what you know. Because it's not that I think, because if they were stealing from you, I think it would be well more obvious to catch. And I think in your situation you're just gonna. Yeah, just be. You gotta be. You gotta be diligent. You gotta take care of yourself. That's what I'm basically saying. So good job. Thank you Michael for that. Because what a great topic. And plus I hope you find what it is you're looking for. Keep in mind that's the other problem right now, where speakers are way more valuable than the cabinets. And that's what I'm seeing everywhere I go. And people are getting smart, you know, channels like me, channels like Kyle Boole channels. I mean there's tons of channels giving great information. But Kyle Bull has said the same. I've seen him say it too. And if you know his channel, he's an amp channel where we said the same thing like cabinet. Like no one will pay you anything for a four to a cabinet. But dude, there's literally no one will give you $200 for a four towel cabinet. But there's literally $600 worth of speakers in the cabinet. So people are figuring out like yank the good speakers and sell them that way. And then, you know, so, so you just gotta be cautious. Dude crush said says. Hey Phil, Greetings from North Phoenix, all the way in North Phoenix. Love the channel. Thoughts on the new Amplified Nation? Bigger bloom pedal. Bigger bloom. Well, good, good, good question. Thoughts on it? Well, I got an email I want to say Tuesday. Could be Tuesday. Monday or Tuesday we still was. I was feeling better by Monday. So Monday or Tuesdays, I know I was like in the, you know, back to work ish from Taylor Cox Amber Nation. Just all the email said was Phil sent a bigger bloom petal. I'm like, okay, so I have it right here. The. So here Let me show you. Okay, so this is the bigger Bloom pedal. If you guys don't know, Amplified Nation makes a pedal that's a dumble in a box. It's not not a dumble, which we'll get to in a second. And so he sent it for me to check out. So interestingly enough, I'm assuming, I don't know, that maybe he saw one of the episodes where you guys asked me about it and maybe sent it. I don't know, maybe just likes the channel. Taylor's been good to us, so. So I'll do a video of it, you know, because he sent it, which was really cool. This is an expensive pedal. So if you guys are not aware, it's like 400. And then if you guys didn't see, not a dumble just came out this week, which is the JHS pedal that's like 119. So obviously I'm almost tempted to want to buy one of those and ab these two just to see how close they are to each other. The other, the nottle dumble has one extra knob more than this. I'm really curious about this pedal as I have the actual Amplified Nation amp over there. So I mean the, the, the. The. Although this pedal is extremely expensive. Compare and contrast of these two price points. This is. This is 10 of that amp, basically. So. Basically so be interesting to see. I'll. I'll do that. Obviously you can hear it was plugged in my rig. I just wasn't. I just really have. Just basically getting used to. Used to it. So there'll be a video soon. That's my way of saying that if you guys, if you, if you guys want to see comparison of this since the Not a Dumble, I'll be happy to do that as a video too. Compare the two. So it'd be nice to see how far different they are. I don't know. Either way, we'll see. And then. But thank you for the question on that. We have Brad Guitar Miller says. What do you say? Says Phil. Great advice about taking guitars out of the case occasionally. Now I have the. Clean and polish the frets, change the strings, and get off the gunk. Yay. Yeah, it's a good idea, right? Yeah, I know. I got two people, they said like, because of you, I'm just like working more now. But hey, you know, those are scary stories. You don't want anything happen to you. John, thank you for the super sticker. Robert says if you were looking to spend $700 or less on a tube amp, Would you buy a used one or a new one? I would absolutely buy a new used one. So let's. Let's be very clear. On a budget, I'm always buying used. Think about this. Yeah. You know, the proof is in the. In what I do. You know, I have 412 episodes of talking for two hours at this point, whether you hate me or like, on you, but you know who I am. I. Whatever, I can be full of crap, but not 400, not 800 hours of talking. Somewhere, the truth just spills out of you. Okay, so the things I say and to care about, they just oo it out over time. Same with the videos. Right. What guitar would I buy at Guitar Center? I bought used one. What guitar would I buy at Sam Ash? I bought a used one. Notice what guitar I would buy at Sweetwater? I didn't buy used one. Well, they didn't have any used ones really. They had a small used area, but it was mostly new. If. What would I do on a budget? I will buy used. Always. 700. Right now you can get a fantastic tube amp. I To me, if I. Only if all my gear was gone tomorrow and you gave me 700 and said, Phil, what kind of amp are you gonna buy? It's going to be a. Most likely. I'm going to shoot for a Fender of some sort. Probably can't get a Princeton, but maybe if I can get a Princeton for 700 bucks, definitely, then go to maybe a Blues Junior Hot Rod Deluxe, maybe Hot Rod Deluxe before the blues junior, maybe. Definitely get one used under 700 bucks. If I couldn't find anything like that, I'm starting to looking for old PV classics, right? PV classic 30, PV classic 20, something like that. Can't find that. I'm looking at like Old Egg Nators, you know, the, the. The World Tour series, which are, you know, pretty good, right? Good amps like that. That's what I'm looking for, stuff like that. And if. And then maybe some, you know, you know, like I said, maybe even a, like the Mark Tremonti, you know, amp, you know, that'd be fantastic. You know, pick one up for 500, 550 bucks. Then of course, then there's the Marshall stuff. I mean, there's tons of great stuff. 700 bucks is a dream budget now, which is why I think people react. See, people think that when they see these expensive stuff, like these expensive amps, people are like, they're reacting like, you know, it's crazy what people spend. It's not that. It's Crazy what people spend is that they recognize you don't have to spend that. That's not where good stuff is. Good stuff is literally 5, $700 is like you said in a tube amp world you're totally fine. And that's not even going to the crazy bargain tube amps. I mean besides the Bujeras and the Wangs and all the other stuff, you can get totally really good deal amplifiers out there too. But yeah. Jim Star 2 says, hey, you ever check out an HM Strat? So the heavy metal Strat by Yes. I I owned one for a short period of time. I worked on a couple the. The actual 80s era ones. I have. I don't think I've ever touched the new reissues or if I have, I've just picked it up at a guitar center and tried it for a second. But you know, it was one of those like it was. I was a guitar on my radar for a while. If I could have got one in the color I want, in the weight I wanted and, and got my hands on it when they were out, when they just had popped, I would have bought one then and done a video or just bought one. But I just didn't have the opportunities. I want to thank Robert and also Phil for the super stickers. I appreciate that. And then we'll finish up this last, last question with Peter Cruz says hey Phil, hope all is well. I would like your input. Suggestions on flying with an electric guitar. Carry on thinking Majesty in a keisel case. Do you think two guitars in a double case is doable? Thanks. Love the show. Here's the thing with that. I. I would be a little scared to try to take two guitars on a plane in a double bag. The my experience with two full size guitars in a double gig bag, it's not going to probably fit in the overhead. So you got to go in the closet of the, of the guitar of the plane. And if you are in first class or if you're early, what do you call it, early access, whatever you call it when you first get picked to be on the plane, whatever priority, maybe you got a shot. Maybe. But I gotta tell you as a skeptic and I'm skeptical. I just go into every scenario going, I'm hoping for the best, but I'm expecting the worst, you know. Right. I would go in thinking, okay, I want to have this guitar and I want to be able to, you know, make sure it gets on the plane. So I think if you had a Majesty in a Keisel type bag that those Bags are good. Any of those hard foam kind of gig bags, smaller footprint the better. Of course. I think you'd be fine. But again, you got to get, you know, you got to get it, you know, on the plane. And, you know, and, you know, it's. You can be as charming as you want, but sometimes they just don't want you to let it on the plane. The one nice thing is you have a good shot in a key. The Kiesel style bags, that kind of hard foam bag, which is like one of those gator bags, they got hard foam bags. If. If you do have to check the guitar, which is. Would you want to gate check it? In other words, like, literally, they take it from you right before you go on the plane, and then literally when you come off the plane, they hand it right back to you. So always gate check a guitar if you can. If you have to check a guitar in port, you want to gate check it right at the gate, and then you get it right at the gate. Just like if you had a stroller or a wheelchair. I know. You know, look, strollers and wheelchairs are higher priority, but you understand, like, it's. You know, this is. You got to do what you got to do. If you gate check it in a hard foam case, there's a good chance it's not going to be damaged. If I was gonna. If I was gonna give you my ultimate confidence on that, I would say maybe not, like the majesty, maybe not a guitar with an angled headstock, that's what I would stay away from. I really feel pretty confident. Like, if I had a headless Keisel in a Keezel gig bag and I gate checked it, I feel like I would. It would be almost a miracle that they would destroy that guitar in that short amount of access they had to it. Even if they dropped it. Even if they dropped it from the plane on the ground, I think it would bounce. Jeff Keisel told me it would bounce in that bag and even told me I could do it, but I'm not gonna do it. He's like, if you don't believe me, do it. I'm like, I'm not doing it. And I know. And so, you know, he's know before anybody says anything. The way he said do it was he basically told me if I took a headless guitar in the gig bag and I threw off my, like, balcony of my house and it bounced, and if it got damaged, he would replace it and give me a new one. The problem is, is although I'm like, oh, that'd be a good video, I'm thinking. Yeah, but if it gets damaged, then I just ruined a guitar. I'd rather just him give me a new guitar for no reason and give that guitar away to charity or something. You see what I'm saying? I just can't actively destroy something if I think there's a chance it's gonna get destroyed. So. But back to your situation. I really think that, you know. Yeah, but two is pushing it. And it's because I can tell you I have friends that literally tour for a living and they're constantly, they got, they're constantly got stories, lots of them. Larry Mitchell's, I think it's his number one or number two Nags is in Australia right now because they wouldn't let him get it on the plane. He's a Grammy artist who's literally touring, who's literally. This is his tool of trade. Like this is. He needs this for work and the airline literally wouldn't let him get on the plane and he wouldn't check it because it's, it's, it's just too valuable to him. So he had a friend come to the airport and take it and that's where it's at until he gets back to Australia to go get it. So that's what I'm saying. I'm not going to sit here and tell you, like, oh, yeah, a lot of. I've heard people be very cavalier. Oh, it's easy. Yeah. Well, it's really easy. Please help out some of my friends who are literally getting their guitars, you know, and told no. Who depend on that guitar for his living. So I don't know. That's my, that's my cautionary tale. On that note, I want to thank you guys for hanging out this Friday. And for those of the patrons that are going to hang out tomorrow, I can't wait to see you tomorrow. And on Sunday, the, the mid tier Sunday and the next Saturday morning will be the bonus podcast for the patrons and the channel members. Thank you guys for that. For you guys, a little side note for the hanging out at the end, I just want to say this. So something that came up two weeks ago on the podcast and I thought I would just. The Die Hards will learn this now. I don't run commercials during the live show, as I've said. So there's no commercials if you're here live and then the commercials kick in after the show replays. If you're a Patreon member, you get the, you get a commercial Free. Or if you're a channel member, you get a commercial free version. And if you listen to the audio version, this version will be available tomorrow and it'll be commercial free on itunes, Spotify, whatever. The point that I want to tell you is that somebody said, hey, they're really. You're really loading a lot of commercials. YouTube made an announcement to some of the YouTubers early last month that starting this month in May, they're going to be increasing the frequency. They said it a totally different way than I'm saying it. So if somebody just. I'm paraphrasing down to what you need to know. YouTube is adding more commercials. They basically used to be, you had choices. You can insert your own commercials or you can have them do it. They basically took away our. They're not taking away our ability to insert commercials. They're just defaulting us back to the commercials. However, a couple of the channels that do well, and I want to say I barely do well, what I mean by that is I do hundreds of thousands, which is impressive. I'm, I'm very happy for that. But I have friends who do millions. And in my world, it's happening at this level, but it's definitely happening in millions. If I opt out of commercials, they're going to play the commercials anyways and then I just don't get anything. So I just want you to know it's not so much. Don't, don't be mad at me for the commercials. I just want you understand I don't have control of the frequency commercials. I apologize for whatever inconvenience that is for you guys. But even if I opt out, they're going to hit you with commercials to some degree. So I'm just saying I've given the options now. The options are you can avoid commercials hanging out live on the show on Friday, you can become a patron, or you can listen to the audio only version where you don't get to see this beautiful face and this wall of guitars, which is probably what you're more interested on. Maybe I can figure out how to post the picture. I'll post a picture somewhere of the guitars. And that way when you listen to the audio, I don't know, like I said, but if there was an option in the world where I thought I could actually get away with commercial free and. But there's just no way they're going to, they're going to run commercials on you anyways, so. And then like Nella says, you can do YouTube Premium. That's the other option too. Highly recommend YouTube Premium as I've have it and I don't get anything if you sign up for YouTube Premium. I have no agenda here. I just want to let you know that YouTube Premium is up to six people and you don't have to be in the same household. It doesn't have all those crazy rules that the other platforms have. So literally on my family plan is my daughter, my son who do not live with me, my wife and my friend Ralph who lives on the other side of the city to me. I and if I had a sixth friend I'd probably put them on the plan too. So I'm just letting you know and that's the $25 plan a month but I think it's regular 15 so I mean there's your options there. I just wanted you to let you know but mostly I wanted to let you know that if you're watching YouTube lately and you're seeing a lot more commercials, just the man doing what the man does and that's make their money. So I'm just. There he is. Alright guys, on that note, thank you so much for your time to the next time. KNOW YOUR Gear the Know your Gear podcast the Know your Gear podcast is brought to you by Patreon members Channel members and viewers who like and subscribe. Thank you for making this possible.