Why cheap guitar brands keep changing their names

Summary

Know Your Gear Podcast with Phillip McKnight

Episode Title: Why Cheap Guitar Brands Keep Changing Their Names
Date: July 30, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Phillip McKnight answers a wide range of guitar-related questions from listeners. The main theme centers on why cheap guitar brands constantly change their names, but the discussion also meanders engagingly through topics such as guitar nuts, tonal differences in cabinets, the realities of budget guitar manufacturing, notable personal gear stories, and honest opinions on tools and buying habits. Phillip's candid, detailed answers mix personal experience, technical know-how, and good humor, making this episode both highly informative and relatable for beginners and seasoned guitarists alike.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Do Cheap Guitar Brands Keep Changing Their Names?

• Brand Proliferation and "Newness": Affordable brands often rebrand themselves or launch sister brands to capture the "next big thing" excitement among buyers.

  "It's all about, you got to have the new brand. I, I don't believe it's true and I don't have any evidence. ... I kind of feel like there's like only five or six dudes and they're just creating new brands all the time." (33:40)

• Factory Sourcing / Same Guitars, Different Names: Multiple brands may come from the same factory, sharing specs and quality, only with different logos.
• YouTube's Impact: Brands and factories pay close attention to trends emerging on YouTube, using guitar reviewer feedback for product development and features:

  "They're learning from you. When I was at Cortec, they showed me where they went through videos of mine. ... That's why we do this now." (38:10)

• Consumer Perception & FOMO: The allure of a “secret” or “underground” brand appeals to the guitar community, until the novelty wears off.
• Why Brands Disappear: As the "mystery" fades and recognition of sameness spreads, old names fade away, replaced by fresh brands to keep the market cycle going.

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2. Listener Q&A Highlights

• [05:00] Brass Nut for an EVH 1978 Eruption Guitar

  • Phil walks through how to source, shape, and install a brass nut, emphasizing it's not as hard as some may think.
  • Suggests watching his video "Turn a Guitar Into a Super Strat" for a step-by-step.
  • Key Quote:

    "Cutting a brass nut is not harder, in my opinion, than cutting any other kind of nut material... You just get a stock brass nut... shape it literally with sandpaper, sandpaper files. There's no special tooling needed for brass." (07:18)

• [13:35] Mesa Oversized vs. Traditional Cabs

  • Oversized cabs = more bass, especially useful for down tuning.
  • Key Rule: "Bigger cabinet, bigger base." But deeper is more important than width/height for actual low end.

• [18:45] Thoughts on "Goals" (Fouls?) Guitars

  • Phil discusses the endless cycle of new "budget/novelty" brands, what drives their rapid turnover, and why he’s cautious about reviewing new brands until they reach a certain traction.

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3. Cheap Guitars: Trends, Quality, & Psychology

• Budget Guitars Are BETTER Than Ever:
  Even the cheapest modern guitars (Glary, Firefly, Harley Benton) are "semi-playable" for beginners and fun for experienced collectors/modders.

  "I could, I could, I. That's what I. We were talking about earlier. I turned a guitar into Super Strat. That was a Glary. ... The point was the guitar was semi playable." (54:10)

• Not Just for Beginners:
  Most people buying these aren’t novices, but experienced players looking for fun/novelty/something to mod.
• The "Laundry List" Approach:
  Factories watch YouTube and add popular features: stainless frets, roasted necks, bone nuts—whether or not it truly matters for a guitar at that price point.
• Yin and Yang: Good and Bad:
  • Positives: Ultra-affordable playable guitars, access for cash-strapped players, innovation in features.
  • Negatives: Quality inconsistencies, misleading advertising, same product recycled under new names, and “unicorn dust” upcharging on more expensive guitars that isn’t justified by major functional improvements.

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4. Guitar of the Week: Phil’s New Gibson SG 61 in Pelham Blue

[1:21:00–1:47:00]

• Personal Story/Shopping Experience
  Phil shares a wild Guitar Center tale: Dust storms, price tag errors, and unexpectedly good customer service led to him scoring a dream Gibson SG at a steal.
  • Key Quote:

    "I've never had this experience at Guitar Center, so I just want to thank Guitar Center for this." (1:26:32)

• Review and Demo
  • Gibson 61 SG, Pelham Blue, Maestro Vibrola, 61 pickups, lightweight (~7 lbs).
  • Phil demos the guitar through a Magnetone panoramic stereo amp ([1:39:00]), noting the “therapy” of clean tones and the Cadillac-like vibe of the trem system.
• Discussion Around Price Justification, Exclusives, and Value
  • Phil’s take: Unique colorways, limited runs, and store exclusives really scratch his “guitar as personal art” itch, especially after years reviewing gear for work.

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5. This or That: Chorus Pedal Shootout

[2:13:30]

• Pedals Compared: Boss Super Chorus CH-1 vs. Boss Waza Craft CE-2W
  • Blind AB test with audience live voting.
  • Both room and livestream listeners overwhelmingly preferred the CH-1—Phil agreed.
  • Key Observation:

    "With distortion, I thought again, the CH1 sounded better. Definitely. That’s where that one shines..." (2:25:10)

  • Pedal Nuance: Waza Craft is technically a souped-up, future-forward reissue (in Boss philosophy), but real differences come down to taste and context.

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6. Honest Gear Rec: Tools, Setups, and What’s Actually Worth Your Money

[2:38:00]

• Stu Mac vs. Music Nomad “Keep It Simple” Kits
  • Phil breaks down both popular all-in-one setup kits. Verdict: Both are often overpriced for what you really need.
  • Most essential: The Music Nomad string action gauge for visibility and use, and the ESP spanner wrench for quality.
  • Tip: Buy individual tools as you need; don’t get caught by the bundled-up “high price for convenience” trap.
  • Bonus:

    "Let me show you a new tool that I’m in absolute love with... magnetic helping hands." (2:44:00)
    Phil demos a $25 magnetic soldering stand—his new favorite bench tool.

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7. Buying Habits: Navigating Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and the Used Market

[1:52:00, 2:00:00]

• Best Use Per Retailer:
  • Buy new from Sweetwater (photos, weights, better service), used and exclusives from Guitar Center (returns, regional availability), tech stuff from Sweetwater (service plan), cheap basics (strings, cables) from whoever’s fastest/cheapest.
  • Open about affiliate relationships, but underscores:

    "95% of all the dollars that come into this channel come in through basically two sources. YouTube is my number one source of income and Patreon is my second second source." (2:17:10)

• Sweetwater vs. Guitar Center (Merger?):
  Not likely—different business models, different core markets.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "So many times people see my videos as an endorsement, not as analysis." (45:10)
• "The worst thing for [budget brands] is they don't get to see the mistakes. They just lose you as a customer." (38:40)
• "[On cheap guitars] ... really, a Fender CD60 acoustic, they just were having that manufacturer stick their Harley Benton brand on it. So it was just a slightly cheaper CD60." (50:00)
• "I love inexpensive guitar as much as I love an expensive guitar." (55:10)
• "Guitars are like main courses and side salads. For side salads, budget guitars are awesome." (1:59:00)
• "Tools are about function. ... The Music Nomad string action gauge is what I use every single day." (2:47:00)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:05] – Podcast intro; quick update on Shauna’s health.
• [05:00] – Listener Q: Brass nut for EVH guitar—how to do it yourself.
• [13:35] – Mesa oversized vs. traditional cabinets: tonal differences.
• [18:45] – “Goals”/“Fouls” guitars, the cycle of rising/fading budget brands.
• [33:40] – Why cheap brands change names & the role of YouTube in product trends.
• [54:10] – Cheap guitars: history, value, and how modern ones are better than ever.
• [1:21:00] – Guitar of the Week: Story and review of Phil’s new Gibson SG.
• [1:39:00] – Demo: SG through Magnetone panoramic stereo amp.
• [1:52:00] – Used gear, exclusives, where to shop for what, Sweetwater vs. Guitar Center.
• [2:13:30] – “This or That”: Boss CH-1 vs. Waza Craft CE-2W chorus pedals.
• [2:38:00] – Gear talk: Setup tools, honest picks, essential bench gadgets.

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Episode Tone

As always, Phillip’s delivery is direct, approachable, and laced with personal anecdotes, occasional sarcasm, and authentic love for both gear and the guitar community. He’s frank about his own biases and transparent about industry/YouTube relationships, making clear that his first loyalty is to listeners’ needs and honest knowledge-sharing—hence, “Know Your Gear.”

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If You’re Short on Time...

Jump to [33:40] for the main theme about cheap brand name shuffling;
[1:21:00] if you want a deep/detailed Guitar of the Week segment and killer demo;
[2:13:30] for a practical, blind-pick pedal shootout;
[2:38:00] to cut through the BS about tool kits and discover genuinely useful gear tips.

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Summary

An essential listen for anyone wanting a deep, honest look at the realities of budget guitar brands, the psychology of gear marketing, how YouTube shapes trends, and how to navigate gear buying—plus plenty of hands-on advice and a dose of guitar therapy along the way.

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Transcript

[A]

The know youw gear podcast. Hey, everyone. How's it going? Welcome to the Know your gear podcast for July 24th. I hope you guys had a fantastic week. I had an interesting week. A lot of good, and I'll share it with you. And some interesting. I don't think anything bad, but we'll give you updates. You know what, I'll just give you a quick update on Shauna, because some of you guys asked last week about her eye. So if you guys aren't hip to what happened about almost a month ago, she was fostering a kitten and the kitten jumped, and when it jumped, it sliced her eye. It didn't scratch it. It like literally sliced her eye and right across the retina. And so we had to take her to the emergency room and then a couple doctors. And she was healing pretty good. She had like a 2060 vision, then a 2030 vision. So she was getting there. She had what's called ghosting, where she sees a halo or a second, you know, thing image. And she was light sensitive. So she wasn't driving. She hasn't been driving for like the last month. So what happened was it started getting worse again. So we went back to the doctor as we had scheduled appointment anyways, and they sent us to a specialist. And now the specialist thinks they have it worked out. We'll. We'll see what happens. They're gonna know something on Monday. Now what they've done is they have, because she had Lasik 20 years ago, the cat, the kitten sliced her right where, I guess the flap, where they slice, like on the edge where they slice the. The Lasik. So what they've done is they basically put a contact lens in her eye that's like acting as a band aid. So. Because what's happening is every time she blinks, she's rubbing the scar. So. So they're hoping by Monday they'll see some improvement and know that's working. If not, she might be getting basically another procedure again. They said it won't be as. As bad as Lasik. So I'll just give you update on that. Okay, so we do have a guitar of the week. We do have this or that this week as well. Let's go ahead and grab first questions. This one was sent to me, Amanda, by Amanda. This is from Mort 2700 who says, hey, Phil, I have an EVH 1978 eruption guitar that needs a brass nut. EVH and Fender do not sell them. That's fine. Separately. And Fender Malmsteen is different. Yeah, it's A different spec. So I'm not 100% sure. What's the EVH? 1978 eruption. Let me look at the guitar. Is it a. I just don't know. EVH doesn't matter. Matter. Either way, we'll solve your problem. EVH 1978 eruption guitar. Okay. Oh, okay. So it's this. It's the stripe series, like what I have. That's what I believe is coming up. When I type that in, that's what comes up. Let me. Aviation. Okay. Yep. Let me double check. Navy age. 1987 eruption. Yep. Okay, cool. All right, so I'll show. I'll show you in a second what I'm looking at, and then we can take a look at one and I can tell you what you need because it's. Oh, wait, what? So it's an Eruption guitar, but it doesn't. It doesn't have a Floyd, so it predates the Floyd. So like when I look up 1978 eruption guitar, this is what I'm getting. Maybe you guys can help me. Keep in mind, it's a EVH thing. Remember my. Eddie Van Halen is the music man. Eddie Van Halen. So although I appreciate the stripes here, you understand, I. This is all predates when I was. I didn't listen to Van Halen. Definitely not in 1978, I was probably playing with Star wars action figures, so not even that I was actually paying with Tonka Trucks. I cannot believe how funny that is that I'm wearing the shirt. And that's exactly in 1978. That's definitely what I was playing with was Tonka Trucks. So. So if you could help me out, I'm going to go back to the chat. If you guys. Can somebody help confirm that is the guitar or not the guitar? Anyone? Bueller. Bueller. Okay, so without. Unless I get a confirmation, we'll move on. But I don't see anything. Basically, CVA is a stock trim. Okay, so stock trim. Okay, so not Floyd Rose nut. That's all I wanted to know because obviously I want to make sure he's not looking for a brass Floyd Rose nut. It's a traditional tremolo bridge with a larger headstock. Sure. Okay, great. So I actually have a video where I cut a brass nut. I believe it's on the. I turn a guitar into a super Strat and that's when I did that. The easy part is this. If you're going to do your own work on your own nut, cutting a brass nut is not harder, in my opinion, than cutting any other Kind of nut material, whether it's bone or. Or a graphite. I think brass obviously is the hardest of those three materials. But it's so soft. I was shaping brass plates yesterday, and I was doing it with a soft file, just rounding edges and stuff. So basically, what I'm trying to tell you is you just get a stock brass nut without seeing it. I don't know which style nut you need, whether you need the. The slender one that's for a Strat, or the thicker one that's going to be for. I'm thinking it is kind of like the Yngwie Malmsteen one. That's what I'm guessing. But again, I'm gonna keep trying to search for the guitar because every time I type in Strat evh. So obviously Fenders. Oh, I found it. Okay, cool. And it's exactly the nut. Yeah. No, absolutely. What I don't know is how thick. This is the EVH version. I'm not saying it has version, but this is what I'm seeing here. So what I'm thinking is let's get to the nut right there. Here is. It does look like it's thicker, but I can't tell from here. It might look the same, but. But they sell a stock brass piece that's right here. That's what I use in that video. And then you'll shape it literally with sandpaper. Sandpaper files. There's no special tooling needed for brass. It's such an easy material to work with. It's one of my favorite materials to work with. I was reshaping some base plates on pickups yesterday. Was it yesterday? Feels like it was yesterday. If not, it was the day before yesterday. And again, you know, I could use. I was using sandpaper and files, soft files. So no heavy course files. Like, nothing like that. No diamond files or anything like that. So it shouldn't be hard to do. You can absolutely do it. And then I can. I can take a look around. But I'm pretty sure you do not need a special part. I would actually start with the Fender stock. Fender one that you. That. It looks like a stray Strat. Strat Brass nut. I would be shocked. I would be shocked if the in Veh doesn't work unless it's a spacing thing, because I don't know what your string spacing is. So that's what you're going to have to do your research on. But keep in mind, if the in Ve one does not work because of string spacing, then you just need A like what I got, which was a solid one. Let me go back. And you're just cutting your own slots. I'm gonna say brass strap, brass nut, blank. Because that's. And here's one. This is exactly. Look. I mean, I don't know if you want to get this one specifically, but here's what you're looking for. And literally just google Phil McKnight build. Super Strat, something like that. It'll come up and it's me walking you through. I actually cut that and shape it. You'll see how I did it. It was pretty straightforward. So. All right, let me go back. Thank you, Amanda, for grabbing that question. Let me go here. This was Aura Borealis or a Borealis, says Mesa oversized versus traditional cabinet. What's the sound difference? Oversized, More bass. Bigger. Bigger cabinet, bigger bass. You know, so especially if you're down tuning and stuff, those Mesa oversized cabs are really great for that low end thump. That's basically the biggest difference. I don't know if necessarily the Marshall 412 talls, because they make a tall. Right. They make a tall cabinets a little taller. I would assume the same rule applies. Bigger cabinet, bigger base. I found very, very few exceptions that rule in general, whether. Whether it's a 412, a 212. 112. Bigger cabinet is bigger base. That's a good way to look at it. The differences would be sometimes. Sometimes cabinets are longer. Okay. And taller, but narrower. And then you lose some of the base because you know that. That lack of depth. I find that you don't get the low end that you're thinking of. But no, I mean, that's the main difference. And I don't necessarily ever look for an oversized 412. Traditional 412 is more than enough for me. It's a lot of low end coming out of there. In fact, I can get all the low end I need in a room like this off 112 or 212. But I do have some four 12s. Let's see. Oh, go back one more. Okay, Okay. Hold on a second. I don't even know. I've never heard this one's from Roll us. His opinions on goals guitars. I see them popping up more and more. I'm tempted to get the Jaguar. I thought this was brought up on one of the Patreon talks, and I think it was actually about it. Like a jazz master. Let me take a look. So let. Let me. Let me just put it like this. With the goal. Goals. Goals guitars. It's like they come up with the weirdest names. These guitars. Goals guitars. A lot of YouTube videos popping up. Guitargoals.com set your goals. I'm not seeing a goals guitar. Hmm. I don't see it. I don't know much about it but I keep hearing about them. But I will tell you, I just don't know. You know, I feel like, I feel like for the first five years I was on YouTube, somebody says fouls. Is that what it is? That would make sense because that sounds more familiar with what somebody was asking me about a jazz master the other day. Fouls Guitars. Fouls. And that comes right up. Okay. And I believe we looked at this before. Sometimes I can't remember when it was like a patron hang or this I'm looking at right now. Share what I'm seeing with you guys. Let's take a look at some. These are some Mustang copies. Let's go to guitar. So many pop ups. I don't know the difference in their series. So I'm just gonna say that this is a. Yeah, like a jazz master. That's jazz master. So this is the one somebody asked me about. I believe. I don't know much about them. You know, the thing about this is you got. I, you know, I don't want to lump them into anything. I don't know.599. You know, I've done so many videos of so many brands. I'll do this company too if it's, you know, if it seems to be popping up. The way that usually works in my world is these companies and I'm again this company. I'm not picking on them. Please understand. I'm not talking about them specifically because I don't know this company, but I'm talking about all the companies in the past. What ends up happening is all these companies pop, right? They, they, they make, they're the new. The way inexpensive guitars work. It started way back a long time ago when really with a ton of brands in the 60s and 70s. But let's just start with a Johnson brand guitars. It was a brand that you'd walk in a store and you'd be like a $99 strat. How do they do it? And then what happens is there's an. There's excitement built off of usually three things. The newness of the product brand, the price point and the lack of information about knowing about that brand. Okay. And reason why that that matters is a lot of players, they like to have found something new and exciting. It's. I actually liken this to finding a new band. You know, when you tell your friend, like, I heard this band, you know, have you heard of Fox? Everybody's heard of them. You're like, no, they haven't. You know, and then once they. Everybody has heard of them, you don't like them anymore, right? The band selled out. There's something cool about having a brand that is really cool that no one knows about, that you got for a score and you're in the area. In the end, you're in the know. And what I've kind of learned is that that only lasts for so long. Then everyone kind of like, the jig is up. Everybody knows that you have like a Johnson or a Stag or a Behringer or a Harley. Ben, right? Like, everybody out there is like, oh, yeah. You know, you're like, have you heard this brand called stag? You know, and it's really good for the price. Everybody's like, oh, yeah, they make inexpensive stuff. And it's almost dismissive. Cause it's really cool that they make inexpensive stuff that people can afford. Like I once said my first guitar was a JB player. I'm not exaggerating. If it was $2 more for that guitar, I would have never played guitar. There was no way my mom was gonna spend more than that. She had $120. That was what she was gonna spend that day. That's what it was. If that guitar was $122, I'd never play guitar. It's just never going to happen. So that was the budget. And so, you know, sometimes a budget is such a determining factor, but when we're talking about these brands, we're not talking about, like, you're starting out getting your first guitar. You're talking about people impulse buying stuff. And like I said, My first five years on YouTube, it was all about pedals. It was like there was always a new $200 pedal. All of us had $200 to spend. You know, you pay all your bills, you got a couple hundred bucks left over on the paycheck. You're watching some guitar tube and you're thinking, you know, where could I shove this money? And then somebody was like, you know, maybe for me, it was like, Pete Thorne. For a while, it's like I was watching Pete Thorne. I'm like, I need that pedal right now. And then you just buy it. And. And then that kind of died off because everybody kind of got pedals. And then I saw the second wave, which was the guitars, which was better for me. In the idea that I actually can critique a guitar very in depthly. I can't critique a pedal or an amp. You know, I'm not, I haven't, I didn't spend 20 years fixing pedals and amps, so I did spend 20 years fixing guitars. So when I look at guitars, I kind of assess where you're gonna probably see some potential problems, where they hide potential problems or where, you know, I could help get, give you guys some information, maybe give you guys some value and. But what I kind of learned with this game, the game of the cheap guitar game, is it's all about, you got to have the new brand. I, I don't believe it's true and I don't have any evidence. That's why I gotta say when I don't believe it's true. I have zero evidence to even believe this. It's more of a gut instinct. I kind of feel like there's like only five or six dudes and they're just creating new brands all the time. So like the, like, I kind of sometimes feel like the Groat guy is the Firefly guy. Who is the, is the, is the, you know, stag guy, whatever. Whatever the brand is. I mean, there's so many, I can't even keep track. I will tell you that I have had trouble with companies when they send me guitars where I've absolutely identified that this guitar that they've sent me, this off brand guitar is absolutely another off brand guitar. Exactly like they're sourcing it from the same factory. Same, same specs, same everything. They're just silk screening their logo on the headstock. And it made it almost impossible for me to do the video because I'm like, this is the same. I've already done this guitar just with a different name. Like, I can't do it. But the whole point of doing the deep dives is to see if there's anything like a good example is Firefly. Firefly. As far as I'm concerned, they were borderline lying when they started making guitars, which I made a video saying that like there's so many things that they're saying on the website that I cannot find on this guitar. I cannot, cannot find these materials, these, these. And then what happened, Firefly is. I think they just either changed. Maybe I got some bad guitars, maybe they changed. Or I think what they did is they all started learning from the YouTube channels, which I really think is really what's happening. That nothing has stopped me from believing that. When I go to especially like, you Know the lower price point factories. When you, when you, you see that they watch a lot of the YouTube channels, and I mean, all of them, you could have 250 subscribers, and you could be seriously influencing these manufacturers on an epic level. They're learning from you. When I was at Cortec, they, they showed me where they went through videos of mine. And like, this is when we stopped doing that. That's why we do this now. This is what we're doing here. That's why we're doing that. And it's not because you're an influencer. It's because you're essentially doing the R and D they couldn't see before. Seeing before. How it always worked is they sold a guitar to a customer who bought something inexpensive. The customer got it, and then they. They moved it sideways. That's where guitar players are a little trickier than some customers. Not everything gets returned. Sometimes it just gets moved. You know, give it to your friend, give it to your, your nephew, you take it to your local store, you trade it in on something else, and then they don't. And then you don't buy from them again. So here's the thing. The worst thing for them is they don't get to see the mistakes. They don't know there's mistakes. You just didn't buy again. So they sell through one time, but the second through, they only half sell through. So now they're learning, watching these videos, going, oh, okay. Now the other thing is, I've told you guys this before, and this is absolutely true. They also just take a, take a piece of paper, and they're like, okay, these people all seem to really like stainless steel frets. What else they seem to complain about? They really like roasted things. Let's roast the wood. Okay. They like that. Oh, they really like bone. I'm not exaggerating. This has been told to me by these manufacturers. They're like, this is. We know what you guys care about. This is all. You guys won't shut up. When they all make videos, whether it's a guy with a hundred thousand subs or a guy with 200 subs in his bedroom in the corner of his bed with his iPhone, he's like, oh, it's got a bone nut. And that just means it's good. So they make a laundry list, like I've said it before, of the things they got to put in these guitars. And so I go through these guitars. But generally speaking, so you guys know, when I do those Deep Dive videos, I, I only Tend to do them after I've seen that they've run the gamut. So basically, like, now it's on everybody's radar. See, here's the. Here's the way I look at this. For me, I'm not. I don't want to put these guitars on everybody's radar. I. I don't. There. There's no way. No one will understand this. I. I did a video for Firefly, of a Firefly. It's got a million views. I said, it's a piece of shit. They literally sold thousands of them. I say, I flat out accuse him of lying. And it didn't even matter. All you guys said was, man, you really like Firefly? No one will really hear what I'm saying. You know, we talk about. Talking about Harley Benton this week. It's been a big hot topic. I made a Harley Bitton video six years ago where I said, don't buy it. Buy a Charvel. And in the comments, you can see to this day, people are going, I don't follow your logic. A Charvel costs more. I was like, for the price, this Harley Ben, after you fix all the problems I found with it and stick good pickups in it, you should just buy a better guitar. Let's literally go find the video. I only have three Harley Ben videos. I did them all in succession, one after another. I did an acoustic, I did an electric, and I did an amplifier. And because they were the hot topic at the time, and I went through them, I thought the acoustic was good, even though it was, because it was. I know the acoustic was good because it's really a Fender CD60 acoustic. They just were having that manufacturer stick their Harley Benton brand on it. So it was just a slightly cheaper CD60. You just don't get the Fender logo, which on an acoustic doesn't have the same weight and power it does on an electric guitar. And. And on the Harley Bitton, I said, you know what? I said the fretwork needed work. The bridge was subpar. Not subpar, but it was not as good. And I didn't like the pickups. You may want to upgrade. And let's say basically, after you add pickups, pricing and setup into it, you're into the Charvel main Mexico range, which I thought was better. And. And again, not saying you shouldn't buy it. I was just critiquing it. By the way, that's the last time those guys ever talked to me. I have a lot of stories with last time. Last time, I find it's not what if I say something negative? I ever recommend somebody else's stuff on a video? I always find I'll never see those companies again, but that's fine. My point to this is, is that because so many times that when I do videos, people see that as an endorsement and not so much as me trying to just analyze a guitar and make. I try to not analyze them until I know they're on everyone's radar. So I'm not the one that's like, hey, Phil McKnight said this guitar company is the best. And I didn't actually say that in the video. In fact, very rarely do I say anything. Is very rarely do I say anything positive, period. Most of my positive stuff is just whether or not I. What issues I didn't find with it. So. But I do like stuff now. This podcast is different. Now, what I mean by this is different. Here we're discussing things. I talk about all kinds of stuff. My emotions, my feelings, what I think about guitars, how I feel about guitars. That's different. And why that's different is even though the podcast gets large, large numbers, there's just no comparison to Deep Dive videos. My average Deep dive video does 120,000 views. That's the average view of one of those, if you take them all up. And I think it's even higher than that now. And the average podcast is doing like 40,000 views. So it's a much different market, you know, a much more different, you know, push is what I'm trying to say. So, yeah, Jerry says the bad pro. There is no bad promo. Still promo. You know what? I learned that the funniest way I. Yeah, I've had videos where I've critiqued things, and I thought, well, you know, that, you know, we'll see how that goes. And then everybody's like, I'm glad you liked it. I'm like, I just said 10 things wrong with it, and I didn't say anything else. Okay. But, you know, I don't necessarily don't dislike it pretty much any guitar. I say pretty much. There's some guitars. I've. I've really had issues with the quality. But again, I try to not put a hundred percent or a huge heavy weight of what I feel about a guitar with one guitar. Like I said, one review is not all reviews. Does that make sense? So good or bad? Like, if I. So. And I tend to. If I give a guitar does not do well in a video, I tend to do it again another one. So. And you know, the way we try to do it is if a guitar comes in and especially if it's inexpensive and it's too good to be true, it feels too good to be true. We always make sure we buy that one so we don't use the one that hand. In fact, to now what we do with the companies, these small companies like this company, I don't know them. The false. If they reach out to us, I'm going to tell you exactly what we're going to do. We're gonna give them a rate. Now companies like them, you know, if it's something I'm willing to do, we're gonna say here's our rate and in that rate they'll pay us. And then we'll have somebody buy one of their guitars and that's how we've been doing it. So that they don't. They can't cherry pick me out of guitar. We can get a sample and usually I try to get two. So we try to get two now but it's tough sometimes it's difficult to get two. So not always, but sometimes. Let's see. Jim and chain says 120k isn't that bad. Yeah. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. I don't have a reference anymore. I can't tell. I can never tell. Nothing ever goes the way I totally think it's gonna go. But I can guess. I can always pick the big ones. Like I've never, I've never had a million view video that I didn't say was going to be a million views before I launched. I always knew like this is going to be a million views videos and I've only had like one, I think that didn't hit a million views. I go, this is going to be a million view video. And I was wrong. I'm pretty good. But so let's see. Vanilla, Vanilla Slice says the major brands are scared to death because they cannot justify their pricing. You know, there is, like I said, two things can absolutely be true at the same time. There are what I talked about, these import bands, brands. There's a lot of. There's some negatives there for sure, but there are a lot of positives. One of them is they make literally guitars that are playable, affordable. I mean people have extreme opinions in each direction. I don't really understand almost every inexpensive guitar, including the glary stuff. Like I could, I could, I. That's what I. We were talking about earlier. I turned a guitar into Super Strat. That was a galerie. We turned a Glary into a Super Strat. Now granted the amount of hours and time and effort and money and parts went into it, it was almost ridiculous. And why would you do that? But the point was the guitar was semi playable. When I say semi playable, I mean good enough to start playing, you know, guitar on it. The, the reality is, is that a lot of these guitars, it's tough because even I'm very, very aware of the fact that majority of people watching my entry level beginner guitar that I'm reviewing are not entry level players and literally have been playing for 20 years and they're going to buy the guitar and critique it like they've played about. I mean, think about this. If you're picking up a glary guitar and you've owned 30 guitars before that you are not only not a novice, you are experienced. Whether you have technical playing ability or not, you've put your hands on, you know, you don't have to be a race car driver. If you own, if you own 20 cars, I'm going to be able to say, hey, you can tell when a company's using cheap seats, cheap shocks, cheap things, you know. But I understand because I get what's fun about buying inexpensive guitars. I get it on the same. I love inexpensive guitar as much as I love an expensive guitar. There's just something about just guitars I can find. Something I find interesting about all of them to most degrees. Bird rocket says their first guitar was a plastic toy. Second was an unplayable 25 Kmart acoustic. Yeah, you know what, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, I've had, you know, back in the day at the store, we would have people come in with guitars saying, hey, I'm get, you know, I have this old guitar, I'm gonna give it to my niece. We just want to get it set up. And I'd go through it. I'm like, you do not want to pay me to fix this guitar. You could buy a new guitar for 150 bucks. I'm gonna charge you at least 300 to fix this message. You know, it's not even worth it. Or Maybe it was $150 of XMS, but it was just, it's just not worth putting money into this, you know, unless sentimental value. So, you know, there's, there's, there's things to that too. That's kind of like I said, one of the things I find most interesting is watching inexpensive guitars on YouTube. It's my favorite thing to watch. If you're, if you're looking at inexpensive guitars on YouTube. I'm probably watching your channel or listening to it. I'm really curious about them. There's. The reason is, is because the, the guitar market is a funny thing because simultaneously has driven its pricing down by increasing quality and efficiency to make good guitars inexpensive. While that, while this industry's done that, it's simultaneously figured out bogus reasons to make them super expensive. I'm not talking about real reasons. Like, real reasons are like labor rates. Look it, labor rate in California versus Indonesia, right? I mean, there's just, there's different cost factors. There's different, you know, cost factors, everything different woods have different cost factors. A lot of real cost factors. However, however, there is a lot of like, you know, unicorn dust selling, you know, that doesn't make any sense on why a guitar is expensive. Like, I've always said this and nothing's really changed my mind in the thousand deep dives that I've done that. I still think expensive guitars are expensive because they are unique and cool. And there is always going to be a price put on unique and cool. That's it. I think that's as bad, you know, quality, sure, but at, you know, but the problem with arguing quality, like let's take a $3000 guitar. The problem with arguing quality on $3000 guitar. I could argue that a guitar with almost $1000 or $1000 has equal quality in almost every really important measurable way, right? Where the quality of the pickups sound fine, the quality of the playability is fine, the durability is fine. There's going to be a lot of factors that are the same. And to me, arguing 5amapletop over veneer is all just aesthetics. It's just the feeling of it. You know, you want to argue the sound of that, I guess you can go down that road. I'm not on that road. I'm on the, you know, it's just something I guess cool knowing, you know, I guess like owning a real ring versus a fake ring. Maybe that makes you feel better knowing it's a real diamond versus a man made diamond. This is a real piece of, you know, hunk of flame maple versus a veneer of it. But to me, one of the reasons I don't like expensive guitars with like beautiful flame maple tops is because I think that you can make them. You can make guitars 300 bucks that look just like that. So it doesn't look impressive to me. And knowing that the piece of wood is thicker doesn't really impress me either. It's not something that, that Pulls me in. What I think impressive is, like, a cool paint job or, you know, a cool, I don't know, cool edition, you know, limited edition model or something. Yeah. Okay. This is a good one. It says Indonesians are famous for their wood. Wood carving and woodworking. Sure. And think about this and the Ensenada in the factories. There's three factories, Martin, Taylor and fender in Mexico. 1 in 5 people in Mexico actually play guitar. Right. I mean, that's really good. But don't confuse those things with the reality is this. I've been to the factories in Mexico, and I've been to the factories in Indonesia. And the workers are very hardworking people that I loved interfacing with and talking to and have a ton of respect for. And they are workers. When I say they're workers, they're good workers. They are not necessarily all craftsmen or craftswomen, and they're not necessarily trained that way. They're trained like a factory worker. They're just very diligent at working. So I'm just saying, like, I. I couldn't take a poll when I was at Cortech. It was too. Too big, you know, a place, even though I walked it twice in two days to know how many of the employees play guitar. But I was gonna. I'm gonna tell you that based on what I could, you know, on the left, on the. Just on the surface, figure out it was not a large percentage of people played guitar. So although great workers know how to use the machines, know how to do those skills that they were taught to do, they weren't necessarily, like. I didn't get the impression that any of them were, like, local craftsmen that came to work for the factory. They are people that came here and they were trained to do the job. And very. And here's how I can tell as someone who's lived in. I want to say poverty, I know what it's like when you get a real job and how that real job changes you on an emotional, physical, financial level in a way that you can't even explain. And that having that job is something that you hold on to. Like, it's like if this is your. Almost like everything around your life feels like it needs to be, you know, holding on this job. And I've been in that environment, so I can tell you. Like, you can tell. You can see it. I can see it because you go there and it's like, oh, I work here and I'm never quitting. And that's my cousin and that's my boyfriend, and that's my mother and. And these are my two neighbors. And everybody I know works here because this is, you know, this is the best job to have. That's the impression I got when I went to those factories. It's one of the best jobs in the area to have. I'm not giving you any facts. I'm telling you as someone who's. Who's had a job like that, you know, like, hey, I was like that when I got the army. You know, literally joining. Before joining the Army, I was sucking the gas out of my girlfriend's car to put in my truck because, like I said, my truck didn't run. Wait, back up. My truck backwards. My truck didn't run, but it had a full tank of gas. Her car ran, no gas. I had to suck the gas out of my truck and put in her car. I remember that because I was thinking, like, man, I can't wait to go. Normally you're like, I'm scared of base training. I was like, I can't wait to get a check. I just need a check. And so, so that's why I'm saying that's what I felt when I saw that. And if I'm wrong, I, you know, I can't tell you anything that's factual other than the feeling I had. Okay. The bug generator wants to know if the Fender Micro Tilt is convenient or a neck destroyer. I don't really have an opinion about it, per se. I just. I don't use any of mine, so. Most of my Fenders have the, the, the, the Micro tilt. So the Micro Tilt, if you guys don't know it's a screw on the back, they, they invented it in the 70s. Leo Fender actually invented it. And they put basically a metal slug in the neck. They put a screw, an Allen screw in the body, and when you turn it, it pushes. Of course, you got to loosen the four screws, or in the 70s, the three screws. And as this screw pushes, it pushes the neck. And you can tilt the neck. And then once you tilt it, you know, to the angle you need, then you just tighten down the three of the four screws. I'm saying three because sometimes the 70s guitars only had three screws. And you didn't have to shove anything in there like a shim. I'm not a huge, like, you know, it's kill sustain kind of argument, but I definitely don't think it's helping anything having a screw and having a gap between the two contact points of a neck and a body. So again, I'm not going to argue like, oh, you lose all your sustain. The guitar's unplayable. I just, I know it's not helping that problem. And I have no problem shoving a piece of sandpaper in between a neck and a body. So I just do it that, I just do it that way. It's, it doesn't, I don't feel like unless I, I, unless in, in the theory. And I think that's where they designed this idea from. In the theory that I'm on the side of a stage maybe teching for a guitar player and I got a problem. And that's just one adjust. Another adjustment I can use to get the guitar dialed in to hand it to them. Then I would probably use it because again, it's fast, it's easy. Don't, don't over complicate things. Get them the guitar so they can play the show. But I mean, at a shop, when I was acting on my shop and I'm working on your guitar, I'm not going to do that quick fix. I'm going to go ahead and put a shim in there, whether it's professional cut shim or a piece of sandpaper. So. And I originally used to use, instead of sandpaper, I used to use my own business cards. Thought, that's kind of funny. Just use your own business cards and cut them up. And I would do that because you always had to buy Vistaprint business cards, like in thousands. And even back then, no one took your business card. In fact, the only people took your business card were the people that are going to throw it away because they were just going to not buy anything. So they were like, oh, it's interesting. It's a good price on that. Can I have your business card? And like, okay. And then I hand it to them and go, you throw this away now? No, I'm just kidding. They would go and they would throw it away. So I would use them. And then over years of taking necks off, I started noticing that almost all the Fenders that had shims had sandpaper in there. And I was like, oh, I have sandpaper. And then I think it was 2000, maybe 8. Sounds right. Could have been 2007 was, I think 2007 was my first visit to the US factory and Fender. And I remember asking them about that and they made a comment that they have lots of used sandpaper laying around. So that's why it's a good, you know, back then, that's why they would shove it in the next because it was There was lots of it laying around. Just cut a piece off and stick it in there. So. Warlock311 says Phil also said that Jeff. Keith. Oh said to Jeff Keisel that carbon rods make necks dead. I don't think I ever said that to him. I think you're confusing. He had an artist tell him that, that they. They said that it makes the necks dead. I know that the. I know carb. I've talked about carbon fiber necks where the neck is carbon fiber and it's kind of so rigid that it just feels a little awkward to me. I do have carbon fiber neck guitars and I do like them, but I don't necessarily have. I don't think I have. And if I did back then, I don't have them anymore because again, I've been doing this for nine years. So if I had any strong opinions about carbon fiber rods in the past, I don't have them anymore. I just don't remember having any negative opinions or positive opinions other than, you know, I have. I have so many guitars that have carbon fiber rods and I even have some of the early. I have my Fender jazz bass, I believe, has the. The Fender carbon rods that are. They're wooden dowels, but then they wrap them in carbon fiber like their actual met. The rod itself is not carbon fiber, if I ever remember. But I like anything that makes the guitar I like. I think I seriously. I like anything that when I pick up a guitar, the guitar is in tune and the guitar is not, you know, backbone, forward bowed, jacked up, dead spot. I just want to pick up my guitar and play it. And it's because, as I've said before, and if I pick up a guitar and it does not play right, I'm just setting it right back down. I'm done with it. That's it. I have others. I have so many others. That's the. That's the benefit of having so many guitars. The downfall is that if a guitar does not hold the line, it does not do its job. If it's not great, then you find it just settling away. And then at some point you're like, I should take that down to guitar center and trade it in because I'm not using it. So I find the guitars that just do not aren't great, just don't get. They don't get the love. So I'm going through that right now. We're having monsoon season in Arizona. It's this. This room. This room in the shop have been as high as like 68% humidity in here and then. So which is high. We usually run about 50%. Right now it's back to normal in this room. 56%. I run about 50% humidity in here, 50% humidity in the shop. The shop stays 50% humidity and 72 to 76 degrees. That's where it stays. We keep it that way. But in here it's just. So the necks have all. Not all of them, but a lot of them moved. So. And then G. Davis says, hey, Phil, how do you adjust the nut height on a guitar with a locking nut? So he's. They're talking about this. The Floyd Rose locking nut. There is actually brass shims. So let's just go ahead and Google that. They may make them out of the things too. But I'm going to. Brass shims is the ones I usually have brass shims for Floyd Rose nut. And yeah, they make them other. Other materials. Let's. Let's pull up. I'm gonna pull up two. So here's. I'll pull up Stumac always. Like I said, use Stumac as your resource. If you don't want to buy from Stumac, I understand because the shipping kind of sucks. But here it is. You find the part. Shims for a Floyd Rose locking nut. Here's a set of 8. These are this style. I've had that style before. Then Guitar center has the other style that I say I've seen many times and used. Oh, I love this. Why did it do this? Oh, here it is. That's weird that I was like, I clicked on it in Guitar Center. Look. And Guitar Center's website sucks. Like, I see more details. Look, more details. And then click and then. Oh, now. Now it comes in. Okay, so this is it. It's just a little shim, right? This is a 0.2 millimeter, not shim. Does it say what this is made out of? But they make shims also for the saddles for a float rows. So that's what you're going to use, this shimmer. I've seen people get inventive and use all kinds of things just to understand. You could use a business card. Cut up a business card and stick it in there. But the problem is when you screw the nut back in either through the top. Some of the newer fluids, you're screwing two screws in the top. Some of the old style where like it uses a threaded bolt, like and it threads through and then it's compression. If you're going to not use the metal shims, don't compress the nut too Hard because you're just going to flatten it out. It won't make any sense. But I. I've seen it. It works. I mean, I've seen it all and it works. If it gets you through the day, it gets you through the day. And then you can, you know, you can make the. The official repair when you. When you get the real part. So. Okay, let's. Let's do. Now it's time for Guitar of the Week. Okay. So I. I feel like this Guitar of the Week I owe to Guitar Center. I have. I have had some pretty doozy stories at Guitar center over the years. Like a lot of you, you know, Guitar center is like, I. I heard. I saw a comment. I said, I didn't hear it. I saw a comment once. It said, go into guitar. Guitar center is a 50, 50 crapshoot if you're gonna have a good or bad experience. And I actually said that to Gabe too. I feel like 50 of the time it's great. 50% of the time it's not great. And there's always an exception to this. And the exception for me is I have friends that work at Guitar center. So when I walk in the store and I have my friends, I always have a great experience. Of course I go in, they know me, and, you know, I'm probably gonna buy something, so that's pretty good too. And anyways, so I have a good experience. I have sometimes less great experiences when I go to the other Guitar Centers. This week, I was getting some stuff done. So obviously when Shauna, because every time she was blinking her eye, it hurt because the scar on her eye. So she was closing her eye. And then because she had to close her eyes, she just took naps. So she was napping a lot. I'm rather loud, so I took an opportunity to run errands. So I ran errands. One of the things I thought I'd do is I'd go up to the Guitar center in Phoenix and trade and sell some guitars. I was going to sell a couple guitars to pay for the, the. The PRs from last week's show. Gotta pay for that now. So I'm gonna sell some guitars. Okay. And some stuff and amps and stuff. Sell some stuff and that make it easy. And. And if there's some money left over, I. I'll grab something. Right. That's great. Well, on the way to the Phoenix door, the traffic was absolutely horrible. And there was wind blowing and there was like a storm. We have haboobs. It's like Walls of dirt it went. The wall of dirt had not come, but it was getting bad out there, and I only got about halfway, and it was. I was already 40 minutes into this trip, and I'm like, man, this is gonna be another 40. This is gonna be, you know, an hour and a half drive each. This is gonna be bad. And then you have a forecast in your head. Once I'm on that side of town, it could be much longer to get back. So I stopped at the Scottsdale Guitar Center. Okay. And I went in the store and I said, hey, look, you know, you guys want to buy, you know, some stuff? Sure. Gave him some stuff. And while I was there, I was gonna pick up a pedal, was walking around, walking around, and I saw this beautiful guitar. And I didn't have any inkling to buy it. I just looked at it and thought, wow, that's really nice. And then I saw the price tag, which was very expensive, but on some kind of blowout deal, I was like, wow, they're really blowing this deal out. So let me show you what it's not. I know it's gonna make because this is gonna set the. It's a Keisel. No, it's a Fender. Nope, it's a Gibson. So here's a Gibson that I've been wanting. Okay. This is like a dream Gibson. This is not the Gibson I got. I just want to show you. So I love sgs, as you guys know. So I'm like. As you guys know, I put a Duesenberg trim on one of my sgs, and I like it, but this is the sg. I always wanted to, like a pale and blue, something cool color like this. And then, of course, with a, you know, a maestro bridge. And, you know, they're always crazy, you know, and they had one. They had a red one. It wasn't pale and blue. And it was like four grand. I was like, four grand? That's pretty crazy. And then I came across this other one, and I saw it, and I go, huh? And I looked at the price. I. That's really good deal. And so I picked it up and I played it. As soon as I played it, I was like, wow, I really like this. Everything about this, I like this. This is not in the budget. I don't know if I'm gonna get enough on my trades. Plus, I gotta replenish the. The, you know, the account for this guitar. And I'm sitting in my head going, well, you know, if I can get my 10% military discount, I think this will work. And Then it hit me. I'm like, oh, they're not gonna do that because it's already on discount. It was on discount. And so I take it to the counter. I said, hey, I'm interested in this. I don't even ask for the discount. I'm like, I just know it's not gonna go well. And then what happens is the storm hits the store. I'm not. Not exaggerating at all. The doors blow open like in a movie. Wind is coming in the store, leaves, cigarette butts. Everything's blowing. It's like, in the store, right? Things are falling over. Giant cardboard, Slash. It's like, wave. He's about poor. Slash about to fall over. Everybody's like, what's going on? One of the employees runs the doors, holding the door. They don't know what to do because they're like, do they lock the doors? Because there's people in the store, and one. And there's probably people in the. Want to get in this door. So they lock one of the doors. Two employees are holding the door like it's a. If you haven't heard about Arizona monsoons, they're bad. There's a dust devil happening in this in the parking lot. It's, like, throwing things around. Now, what happened in all this chaos is. And I hope I got the names right. It's Nick and Mason, I believe, are the names. And I apologize, guys, if I got your names wrong. I made a point to try to remember them, and I thought I did. What I didn't know was the guitar was regularly, so they had a price, and then they had it on discount. Well, they had put the wrong price tag in there. And so when they scan the guitar, it's actually a much higher price. I didn't know all this. I was watching them try to fight back the storm. And so apparently while I was there, I've never had this experience at Guitar center, so I just want to thank Guitar center for this. They called. I don't know if they called the store manager or the general manager. They called somebody. I didn't hear any of this, but all I know is when the dust settled, literally, they go, hey, just so you know, this guitar is more expensive. It had the wrong price tag on it. And I go, oh, so it's more expensive? And I'm like, oh. So I'm right. As the words about to come out of mouth, which is, it wasn't meant to be, they go, we got the manager to honor the low price. I'm like, wow, okay. I'M gonna share you guys. So. So, you know, and I don't know. So you know, I don't know if guitar said it in this because I'm like Phil McKnight. Maybe that's a YouTuber power. I mean, I did interview the CEO a couple of times, but I got the impression they just did it because it was a mess, their mistake, and they were eating it. I don't know. I just know I was very. I was blown away. I was like, well now. So, you know, this is my birthday weekend. My birthday's coming up. And so I was like, oh, this will be my birthday guitar. That's how I'm trying to justify it, even though I just got a guitar. But what's great is they really gave me good value in my trades too. So I was like, this is all working out. Okay, so let me show you the guitar. So what we have here is a Gibson 61 SG with the 61 pickups in the 60s. Neck in pale and blue with the. The maestro vibrola. So it's this typical 61, as you guys know, that's one of my favorite SGs, the 61. So it's got the, the thinner neck, but it's not thin neck. And, and it comes with the actual. Look, it came with the. Let me show you guys. Actually came with a real case. Not that I'm into cases, as you guys know. Cases are not something I'm interested in. But it came with the real, the real case, which was unique. So how do they have this priced? They had this priced at 16.99 regularly 1999, but really it was 22.99. It's $2,300. So they honored it. And so obviously I was like, well, okay, I'm definitely getting this now. So that's, that's what happened. So he's like, now you can relate yourself. I know, I thought the same thing, but so, you know, look wise. I think it's beautiful. But to me it's just. It plays great. In fact, I said, I just, I kept playing it in that room. It sounded so good. And so today for guitar of the week, I'm going to show you the guitar, but I'm actually going to play through the. The magnetone. So this is the magnetone amp. In fact, I'll pull that up. Let me pull up the magnetone amp information for you guys. This is a 210 inch speaker amp and it's two. It is two 12 watt amplifiers. So that has two separate 12 watt amplifiers running through a tent. So it's like two Princetons. I mean, literally, it's what it is. So magnetone. This is a funny, funny, funny that I'm using this. I didn't do it on purpose that I'm using this amp for the story because. Okay, so it's the. Let's pull it up. The magnet tone, panoramic stereo, two 10 inch speaker, two dual 12 watt amplifiers with tremolo and reverb. I'm going to go ahead and turn on the mic. Got it. Mic'd up. I know I don't have it. Stereo mic'd up. It wouldn't help anyways in this current rig. Let me turn this off. Maybe not hit all the pedals. Okay, so we should have no pedals on. Yep. All right, There we go. Switch camera angles to this angle, Sam. Now it's got tremolo. I'll turn on the tremolo. There you go. Here's tremolo. Okay, let's turn the tremolo off. Okay, this is just back to the reverb. All right, so I'm sure we need a little overdrive. I'm going to use the Blue Note by jrocket audio. I'll just use a little overdrive real quick. The overdrive is going to make the reverb sound really, really reverb y. So I might even switch the reverb off. But we'll just try it with reverb first. Okay. See, I can just keep playing and that will get boring for you guys. So crazy, right? I thought, you know, I never had that ever happen in my life. I've actually had the exact opposite experience. I was once in a guitar center, and this is pre Covid, and they had a used Gibson ES335. And they had it for. I forget the price. And I go. And I remember seeing the price tag. It wasn't like, whoa, crazy. It was just a good price. And I was like, okay. I played it. I loved it. The sales guy comes up and I said, hey, can I. He goes, can I help you? And I said, yeah, I'd like to take this. And he says. He grabs it and he goes and scans it. He goes, oh, they put the wrong price on it. It's like $500 more. I'm like, oh. And I'm like, okay, so now what? And he's like, it's $500 more. And I'm like, oh. I'm like, oh, well, you know, and. And what was funny about that is I remember, like, the $500 or more made it and actually not a great price. I thought it was really weird, but so I've had that experience. This amplifier has a funny story too, that ties into this whole story with this as how I actually got this Magnetone amp. Was. There's a. There's a cool guy named Granville, and he was a sales guy at Eddie's Guitar. So I would buy expensive guitars for him. And he. He didn't leave Eddie's guitarist, but he got a. You know, he got the job to be the product manager for Magnetone. And because he knew I was a YouTuber and he knew I'd buy guitars, he called me and he goes, hey, I'm the Magnetone guy now. And we were talking and I told him a story. I said, he goes, I'm gonna send a Magnetone out. And he goes, what do you. What do you think? And I said, well, send out the, you know, like the. The. The M80, baby. And he's like, okay. And I said, hey. And here's the story I told him. I'm gonna tell you. I was at the guitar center in Scottsdale, Arizona. I walked in one day and I was in there and with Ralph, and I saw this Magnetone amp and I plugged into it. It was one of the greatest sounds I've ever heard. It just when you played, you know that. That it's always this, right? Just. I love that. So. And I hope it didn't over blow the mics. It's pretty loud in the room. But anyways, I. I said, I. I was playing it at the guitar center, and I was thinking, I gotta buy the Sam. I gotta buy this amp. I know it's gonna be crazy expensive, but I gotta buy this thing. The employee walks up and I said, And I look at him and I go, I'll take it. And he goes, sir, could you stop playing that amp? He goes, that's. That's a customer's. And I'm like, oh, it sold. He goes, no, a customer's trying out guitars today. And he brought that from home and he just ran home to get something. And I go, okay. Ralph saw my face, like, you know, like. And he thought. Because I'm sitting and I guess Ralph said I looked like I was being scolded by the employee. So Ralph comes over and he's like, hey, what's going on? And I said, oh, nothing. This. This. This amp I was trying is great, but I guess this customer is not for sale. So I unplugged from it and I said, hey, I'M sorry. And the employee's like, no problem. It's not like a negative experience by any means. Just, you know. But the problem was I got home, I go, I told Ralph when we left, I go, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna buy that amp. And I went on on Sweetwater website, because they are Magnatone dealer. Guitar center was not or still. Still kind of isn't. Little fun fact for you guys. Guitar center does not carry Magnetone, but they do carry the Slash amps. And that's because Slash liked Guitar center so much that even though they don't carry Magnetone, he asked if Magnetone would let Guitar center carry just his Slash amps. So they do. So anyways, so what happened was when I went back home and I looked on Sweetwater's website, all Magnetone amps look like this. And I didn't know which one I played. And so I told Granfill the story and I said, why don't you send out the small star lighter? And he's like, okay. And the next day he calls me and he says, phil, I was thinking about your story at the Guitar Center. And I go, yeah. And he goes, it's definitely the panoramic stereo. That's what you played. And I go, are you sure? And he goes, I know it. And so he sent it. And I got here, opened out of the box, and I went. And I just did that. So crazy expensive. But for the record, for those that are looking up and seeing the astronomical price on this, understand it is two hand wired Princetons. So if you guys don't know, two hand wired Fender Princetons would cost you about 60, $400. So it is essentially two hand wired Princetons. All right, so let's do the thumbnail real quick and then we'll take questions on the guitar. Let's unplug the guitar. Do that. Okay, ready? Here we go. Guitar of the week. Do that. Here we go. What a guitar. Okay, so any questions on the guitar? Michael says the SG is wonderful. Yeah, so some of you guys probably gonna ask this later. And I always forget to say it's super light. I don't know what the weight is, but light. It's an sg. It can't be seven pounds. It feels like six and a half. It's probably seven, so. So seven pounds. What do I think of the Vibrola? I actually love it. I mean, for what I'm doing, you know, just your light trimmel. I feel like this plastic thing feels really cheap. I don't Know if that's because this, this is a different vibrola than the normal one they use on the expensive ones. But it's just. You can feel the. The I want to take. I'm gonna probably smooth this off with a razor blade each side and then smooth it over with some, some, maybe some wet sand or maybe some micro mesh and just polish this out. But you can feel. It just feels, you know, a little, little slap together feeling. Just that piece right there. Other than that, I mean, everything else feels pretty good. Like I said, it did not need a setup. I actually lowered the action just a second before the show started, but I really didn't need it. I just thought a little bit more. So I think I'm just an SG person I like. I think, I think for some reason being a Strat person all my life and a Strat shape person all my life, you know, whether it's be like the Ibanez RGS and stuff or the Jackson Dinkies or stuff, I just feel like out of all the Gibsons, this, when this sits in my lap, it feels Strat. Like to me, it doesn't feel like a Les Paul. It feels totally different. And. And I know they get top heavy when you wear a strap, but I use this. Just use a nice quality strap. If you guys know, I use the DiMarzio locking straps for like most of my guitars, like 90, but for this I have a nice leather strap. Use a nice wide leather strap and. And I don't have any issues. So. But I mean, 16.99 with the case brand new. That's crazy. That's the opposite experience. When I bought the dented one and they were like, we'll give you 10 off, I was like, that's pretty crazy. So, so really nice. Steve says his SG is 6.5 pounds. Yeah, that sounds about right. This one is light, so. And it says it does have a thing. Oh, yeah. Well, you know what's funny is for me, I've been wanting. You know, I told you I put the Duesenberg trim on a bunch of guitars and, and I like that trim a lot. I have the Bigsby, obviously the Bigsby on the, on the. The Gretsch, obviously the Jazz master has the Jazz master trim. I just. Something about those big. Like I said, I always call it the Cadillac Tremolos, right? These Tremolos. That's what I think about this tremolo. It feels like the same kind of vibe as those. It's real. It's not quick and precise like a Floyd Rose. It's not, you know, sharp, and it's. It's just like I said, sitting on a couch, driving down the road, like in a big, big cushy Cadillac, you know, you got nowhere to go in a hurry. That's how I feel about those tremolos. Like, that's the. You strum something, you play something, and when you grab the tremolo arm, you're not in a hurry, right? It's not. Let's. Let's see how this goes. It's. Don't worry, we'll get there. We'll get there. And I find it. I find those kind of guitars through clean amps like this to literally be therapy. I, I, when I'm stressed, because I get stressed about once or twice a week, usually something's going on. I, I can come in and just play like the Amplified Nation or the Magnetone or one of my Fender amps, you know, just all those styles amps, the Morgan's, I have a car, you know, all the, all the clean amps that just sound really great. You grab one of those guitars, you play through them and, you know, and no, just have fun, man. Just chill, relax. Like I said, I got nowhere to be in a hurry. It's like sitting on a sandy beach. It's. In fact, it's exactly like that. I think I feel the exact same way when I sit on a sandy beach. Okay. It's a maestro. Brian says the only thing he doesn't like about the SG is the neck feels further away than his Les Paul's. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's. It's wacky. Out positioned out far. That's totally night and day. Yeah, I actually like that there's times where I, I actually want it to be closed in. And I find that the, the what? Feeling like the necks, like, spread out like this and then sometimes enclosed, right. I. It's kind of like the same thing. I have the same effect on me that the thickness of a neck does. Like, if you give me a guitar that feels closed in, and the next thin, I'm just gonna shred. I'm gonna try and fake. Why fake shred? But I'm just gonna be like, yeah, let's go. It's, you know, right. Rock out. If you give me a neck or if you give me a guitar that's a little spread out a little further apart, and the next, just a little thicker again. Now I. Now I'm gonna soften my approach, slow it down a little bit. So that's one of the things I'VE learned to appreciate over the years is sometimes the neck. I don't want it super thin. I don't want a neck. Want different feels in the guitars to take me down different roads. Because again it's not like look, if I was a. If you're, you know, you're a professional artist. A lot of the guitars are about recreating the songs you. You made. So you're maybe gonna own these guitars because they were using a song. I, I don't have that. To me it's about what do I feel like this week, what do I feel like today? You know I, I have what I call home. Home for me is gonna be like a Strat style guitar and playing with a mid gain. That's where I like to play. But I like to take breaks from that. So Raincaster pilot says bass players like longer necks. You see what's funny though. But remember as a bass player I play shorter necks. Isn't that funny? I play short neck basses so maybe it's just an effort to try to get them all about the same. Yeah. Spencer says I could play an SG or 335 all day. You know I love 335s but I find that the SG sounds to my ears sounds more like what I think the 335 should sound like and the 335 sounds more like what I think the SG should sound like. Like I want my 335 to sound like the SG when I play it but it doesn't. It always seems brighter. It's. The attack is a little quicker. It's not as soft and there's a little bit you can do with pickups on that. But a lot of it's just construction design. So so and. And then this is also something to point out too. I have a theory. I don't know this to be true. I didn't ask them at the guitar center but I'm wondering the reason they also were able to to to do the price match was. It's a guitar. It's a. See it says new and exclusive. So this is all in on Sweet. Our Sweetwater this on guitar center and musicians friend so it's theirs. This is where I think they're getting smart. I you know I think this is like when Sweetwater does this just like guitar center. I think this is one of the smartest things they can do. Look I would love you know if small dealers could get their hands on limited stuff like this but it's just too hard. You know you Got to buy a lot to make these companies make something like that. So. And then. Okay. All right, let's go on to. Adam. This came from Amanda says Hey Phil, I'm looking for inexpensive 335 type guitar. That is the best bet the Epiphone. Any others to consider? So let's. I'll give you. I'll give you a couple suggestions that I've had. Good luck with that. I like for 335 style guitars. I think epiphones are fantastic. Actually amazing. Actually after Epiphone I would say it's hard now you have to find used ones. But I always like the Washburn ones and of course all The Ibanez style 335 style Hollow bodies are fantastic as well. So I would say all those are great. The. And then if you're trying you didn't say so. But just for anybody interested. Firefly does have some Budget 335 copies that are just ridiculously cheap. So again why I mentioned that is we talked earlier about why you know why you know not all the inexpensive guitars are now made for beginners. That it's about the you know us guitar collectors buying them. But one of the things great is I. I always call like main course and side salad, right. So some guitars for me are main course guitars. I'm gonna play them every day, all the time. Some are side salads. Like it's not something I'm gonna play very often. I just like to have it for when I'm in that mood. And. And I all of my guitars that I have that I have like this SG perfect example. Every guitar that I have that's a high end guitar now that it's not a main course guitar. Another guitar I don't play very often. I did absolutely have an inexpensive version first. So it's really nice when you get like that. I mean you know Fireblade's like 250 bucks and you can get a 335 and you can get it and it's. It's not going to be great. Right. It's a pretty decent guitar. They can. They obviously can fit and finish it well enough to be playable and nice. If you can get a used epiphone you're always better. A used is always better. Right. Like I said. And if you're cautious, if you're concerned. I said cautious. Concerned about used guitar center used. It's why I've supported guitar center when I talk talk about them and. And you know staying around all you know for and not Going out of business. One of the things I want Guitar center stay around for is that I think they are one of the best ways for most consumers to get used products. So some of you guys are lucky and you have a good local store. Like I have Zim's guitars and he does really good for used and inexpensive guitars. So like if you notice sometimes I'll tell you guys, like I sold my guitars at Guitar center and sometimes they tell me sold them to Zims. I sell the inexpensive stuff to Zims because he can flip that. He can't sell the expensive stuff. So I'll bring him some stuff that's like mid price and instead of trading it to him or selling it to him, because I do a little hybrid of both, right? Try to sell a little bit so I can put the money back in the channel and trade a little bit so I can also get gear for the channel or sometimes for myself. Right? It's one of the joys of this. Some of the stuff is just for me too. But what's nice is sometimes I'll consign it to him like, okay, you can have it until I can find something to trade. So we just did that recently. He had a guitar and he's had it for a while and just wasn't selling in his store. And that's fine. And sometimes I might take it and take that to Guitar center. But in this case I'm like, I just found a bunch of pedals and I go, hey, you know what, let's trade for these pedals. I can use that for this or that videos. Ironically, today there's a pedal for this or that that came from Zim store this week. It's literally like how I can find. That's how I can justify sometimes this stuff. Like, hey, you know, yeah, I don't really have anything I want here, but maybe I can make videos with this stuff and that's good for the channel, but. And then at the higher end stuff, I'll take the Guitar Center. I will sell certain things to Patron members and to you guys outright as well. It just depends. It usually you gotta understand for me it's always gonna be about time, how much time I have. Like for instance, right now, what's going on is Shauna is, is obviously hurt. She can't drive, she's trying to rest her eye a lot. You know, she's keeping the house a little dark because she's have light sensitivity. So just to be frank, I'm not ever shipping you guys or anything or Doing anything for you guys. That's always her. I. I might help if she's. She's bogged down. She'll tell me like, hey, can you box this up? Or hey, can you do this? Or hey, can you go with me to the post office? I take her to the post office a lot, but just saying so. So sometimes like this week, I'm like, I got no one to help sell me the help sell these guitars. So I'll just take them to guitar center. So. And they were too expensive for. For Zims because his out of his price point. So. Brian says, I have three guitar centers within an hour of me and they all have the exact same crap. I'm not interested. That's again for guitar center for me is used. I have a. I have. I have a thing now, obviously, because I just got this sg. I have a thing for their limited edition stuff. So I have the blue katana. I didn't buy the blue mini. I wish I did. They have a blue mini and I bought the black one. I check it out the last minute. It didn't cost more. I just didn't do it. And then my Fishman amp, that's behind me. Switch cameras here. Right there. That's a guitar center limited edition color. So normally it's brown. So and then. And then I have the green Studio Les Paul. That's a guitar center exclusive color. And so, you know, it's not just guitar center. I have a bunch of exclusive color stuff with. Excuse me, Sweetwater. Try not to burp for you guys. I'm sorry. And like my Amplify Nation here, I had a custom color in custom color. I like custom things. That's why I like Kiesel. That's why I tell you guys all the time. One of the things I like about Kiesel, I like having cool, custom, unique stuff. This has to do with nothing more than two things. For the last 20 years, I've either been in a music store or I've been making YouTube videos. I'm around guitars all day, and it's great. And I don't actually get tired of it at all, but I necessarily don't want to own the things that I'm using for work daily. So, like, you know, I'm like this week, I played three different guitars from three different companies, and they're all cool. But I like when I come in this room, I like to pick up my guitar and I'd like it to be, you know, that crackle thingy, right? I like it to be Something different than necessarily what I've been checking out a week at least visually especially. So. Yeah, and I, and, and I, I've said this for years and I really believe this limited edition stuff. When they do it, what's great is it ends up becoming like custom shop stuff because when they stop making, you don't see people with it and you have something unique and cool. What if Sweetwater bought Guitar center or if Guitar center bought Sweetwater? It happens all the time. Competitors buy another one. I don't think it would ever happen. Well, in this case, keep in mind Sweetwater is not big enough to buy Guitar Center. They're big, but not big enough. So Tar center is not big enough to buy Sweetwater either. But a Guitar center is the bigger company. It's like $2 billion to Sweetwater's $1 billion. But barring, look, no one can predict the future. So I'm just going to give you. It's an educated guess. Here's an educated guess. Guitar Center's business model is the exact opposite business model Sweetwater's interested in. Now obviously Sweetwater's business model is something Guitar center is interested in. But Guitar center also has its problem, which is it's not hard to figure this out. Guys. Guitar center has 300 stores. That's their business model, brick and mortar. What it gives them its advantages is it gives them lesson programs, which I don't think is a big advantage because it's a little advantage, but it's not huge. But the used gear, Sweetwater can't figure it out, right? Look, we, we. I would love to be using gear exchange all the time with you guys. I like it, but there's nobody on there and so I'll try and use it as much. And I try to buy something on there when I can. But sadly enough, reverb is the dominant force. You go on reverb and if you look, if you're looking for something and you're trying to find it at a price point you want to pay, you're going to find a lot more of it on reverb and you, you find it and you buy it or if you just can find it, period. Guitar center, what's great about Guitar center used is Guitar center used as a way to buy something used. That's maybe something a little scary for you. That's what I use it for. I'm like, I'm kind of interested in this thing and if I buy it from somebody on reverb, peer to peer sale. And I don't like it? Well, I mean, I guess I could return to that guy, but then I got to pay the return shipping and I got to call the guy or email the guy and say, hey, I don't like it. And there's nothing wrong with it. It's just, I don't like it. So it's not like a real. And a lot of people are putting, you know, non returnable, which I, I don't disagree with. I do that too because they're not a store, I'm not a store. I don't want to be dealing with stuff he's returned. Where Guitar center is totally different. You can buy at a Guitar center and take a chance on it. I tell you guys all the time, if you're thinking about using, trying to use Keisel, man, Guitar Center's got tons of used keys and you can have it delivered to store, pick it up in the store, try it in the store and, and you don't even have to leave this, leave with, leave with it at the store if you don't like it. And the worst case scenario, you're out the shipping, which their shipping rate's really cheap. It's like 20, 30 bucks to try a guitar. It's pretty realistic. So that's their advantage. So basically that's my way of saying that I just think Sweetwater and Guitar Center's business models are so totally different. And as someone who works with both those companies to some capacity, I can tell you that the way they think and work are so totally different in a ton of ways. I don't really have a preference for either one. Like, you know, how they, how they work on the YouTube side of things. I just can tell you as a customer, look, if I buy a guitar new online, I only buy from Sweetwater. I bought my heritage from Sweetwater. I buy my guitars new. If I'm buying a brand new guitar right now, I'm buying it from Sweetwater. If I don't get it from my mom and pop, I'm only going to buy it if I can actually see pictures of the real guitar and I want to know the weight. So Guitar center doesn't do that. I don't even think about Guitar Center. I never buy any new guitars from Guitar center on their website. Okay, that being said, keep in mind, because of the way I have affiliates with these companies, I get a much deeper discount if I buy from Guitar center. So I have to pay more to get. So that just tells you a lot right there. Not only do I buy my new guitars from Sweetwater, I pay more for them because I get an affiliate link click, you know, which is for me it's like a discount, right? But amplifiers, when I bought my 412 cabinet, I recently just bought a 412. I bought it from Guitar center because I got 10% off. And they ship it out of a warehouse just like Sweetwater. There's no difference to me on how it came. So if I buy, if I buy guitar strings, I'll buy them from Guitar center, sadly enough, because I get 10% off. However, however, sometimes I buy them Sweetwater because Sweetwater will get them to me in a day and Guitar center takes a week. So like everybody, I think I make a lot of decisions based on my situation at the time. What I'm looking for, what, what those companies do. Well, there's certain things that mom and pops do well. I think it's great. Certain things that I think Guitar center does great, like used inventory. Because again, it's used and it's if you have any issues you don't have, you're not stuck with it. And then if you want, like I said, if I buy technology based stuff like my Blackmagic stuff or my Rodecaster, all this stuff, all that comes from Sweetwater because it comes with two years of service. So that's the way I, that's the way I, I, I do that up. And right now, luckily they all seem not care that I don't seem to be not so much loyal. But I don't seem to like, I like, look at this show and today's show. I'm like, yeah, I bought this Guitar Center. I bought this Sweetwater. I'm sure it's not helping either one of them be talking like this. And they seem to not care. So because, because of what I said, I don't think they're interested in each other's business models. I think they actually see it as different, like different customer bases. Because again, like me, not different customers, like totally isolated, but different customer needs. So how I broke it up. What are the pros? Okay, so what is the pros to purchasing a PRS Modern Eagle versus the Custom 24? Well, PRS Modern Eagle is going to give you thicker neck. So if you want a slightly thicker neck, the custom 24 is only going to come with the thinner neck. So neck's going to feel a little smaller. And then the Modern Eagle has the single coil in the middle position so you can get those in between sounds. So if you really like the Stratocaster position for the Modern Eagle. Modern Eagle will give you that more so than the, than the custom 24. And is the modern Eagle Eagle 22 frets? I thought it was 22 frets. So that's also. You get two more frets on the custom 24. And why that matters is not because you get two more frets. That's great if you play up there, but like me, I don't. But it's like the assess g we're talking about. It makes the, it makes the neck feel a little further out. So it's not as closed in. So all of it's going to be in the feel, I think. So do you like something a little. Like I said, it's more traditional neck 22 frets with slightly thicker neck. Or do you want something a little faster? 24 necks or 24 frets with a thinner neck, go a little faster. So. Tom Vi says in the corporate world as a, as a pod, you need to cover your ass. It's a beautiful how you seamlessly travel through speaking freely and catching things off the cuff when needed. The thing that's the thing that works for the channel here is when it comes to companies, bulletproof, I literally make. I could, I could not work with any company on YouTube at all and be financially sufficient. I say every year, I say it over time. They all know it too. 95% of all the dollars that come into this channel come in through basically two sources. YouTube is my number one source of income and Patreon is my second second source. Keep in mind, when I, if you're a channel member, I put you in the lump of the YouTube side because you're part of that YouTube. I look at it like who's where the checks come from, right? So think about this. When you think of how you make money on YouTube, it breaks down like this to me. There's basically four avenues for me of financial. I'm gonna say five actually, I'll give you five is YouTube income. And then patron, those two there, that's like 90%. Okay, maybe even 92% of all my income for the year. For, you know, if you're counting all the dollars where they came from, I'm talking about just for this channel. And then the. Then you're gonna have next will be affiliate clicks. Affiliate clicks are when you click those guitar center clicks. Musicians, friends, Sweetwater, Stumac and Amazon. I think those are the ones we use now. I don't think we use any others as far as I know. Technically, if you buy know your gear merch, I'm gonna, I consider that an affiliate click too because keep in mind you click it, they ship it, they do everything and I just get a royalty and I get a piece of it. Right. It's a small, it's a smaller piece, it's not a big piece. So in fact sometimes like I'll make more if you buy a pedal. Well that's not fair. It's a different price. I make more if you buy the same. If you buy a know you're T shirt and you buy some guitar strings at the same price from like Guitar Center, I make more if you buy the string from guitars and I did off of the T shirt. No, not complaining, I'm just explaining then. So in order, we're YouTube, then we're Patreon, then we're affiliate clicks, then we're sponsorship dollars. Sponsorship dollars include the gear because the gear is, is we. We have to value that financially and that's mostly how it comes as gear. Very rarely do we charge. We do charge for videos, but it is rare and I always kind of explain why we do that. There's a ton of reasons. It usually has to do with my log of just how much time I think the video is going to take to make it. And, and then I said there's a technically a fifth Avenue. The fifth Avenue would be like my pickup selling my actual product. So. And now I'd say that's the least. That's definitely the least thing. Right. But so what I'm saying when I say that, understand that it's not like I'm. I tell companies like screw you, I don't care. I just, there's no real actually work for you. Whether you like to hear that. Whether you believe it or not doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you believe it. I'm stuck with it. If you guys don't like what I do, you won't watch and you won't patron. And if you don't do that, then I lose, I'll lose the income that I have coming from YouTube. So I'm very in tune with what you guys want more so than the companies which is why constantly have at odds with the companies. The companies really don't understand this logic a lot lately it seems like some do. Some are really great. That's what I was saying. Some, some do. I think Sweetwater and Guitar center get it. They're like, they obviously, you know, they had me come out and interview their CEOs. They understand that I work for the people who watch the videos and that I'm not gonna burn that bridge. Why would I burn 90% of my income, Right? Those guys, they'd have to pony up money way differently, way more to kick you guys out. A perfect example of this is this podcast is sponsored by Patreon Channel members. Companies offer us on the regular to become the sponsors. We'll sponsor it. Here's the. Here's the thing. We don't need them to. And so what's the upside? Let me ask you this, just to be frank. We're always talking Frank. This is back into the show. Let's be frank for a second. Why would I let any company sponsor this show? For what you're paying for it? That doesn't seem right. They'd have to pay at least double, right? Double. And then if they pay double, I have to think, what's the downside of that? I have to tell you guys, hey, guys, I'm not doing Patreon anymore. I know I'm. Now it's going to be sponsored by Gillette. I'm just making up stuff, you know, and, and then hope that some of you don't go, oh, it was so much cooler when it wasn't sponsored by a company. And I don't lose some, some of you from that. Because the irony of this is, well, then if I lose you, they won't want to sponsor. Why would they sponsor? They're only trying to get access to you. They're not trying. It's not like they like me. And it's not. They're going, I love Phil so much. I just want to give him money. They're like, no, I want to give. I want to get my stuff in front of the eyeballs. 1400 eyeballs watching him live. How do we get stuff in front of them? And, and so like I said, that's, that's, that's the thing. So when they pitch me ideas and we talk and we do stuff, that's why sometimes I think, sometimes people say the videos feel different the way I kind of approached it. And I go, yeah, it's because I'm thinking of it from the consumer side. I like to say it's ethics. I feel that there's an ethical part of this element that it's important to me, but it's also because you're the boss. So. So that's just how it works. And, and, you know, so I shouldn't have said Gillette. You guys are really focused on Gillette. So. All right, Steven says last week's, Last week's Guitar of the week was sponsored by mixing pills and alcohol. You know, I have never had so many friends reach out to me or just as talking to them and tell me, I cannot believe you told that story. All of them. I was like, when I heard it the first couple times, like, oh, yeah, what am I gonna say? And then after a while I was like, okay, well, you know, it happened. So look, man, I gotta talk once a week on this show. Whatever happened that week, usually the only thing I got going to talk about. So I go, it's what happened. I thought I'd talk about it, but yeah, it was. It was interesting. A lot of people told me that's happened to them. In fact, I learned a lot from my friends and family members. Like, oh, yeah, this is. Apparently it's a known thing. Don't. Don't mix wine and a muscle relaxer. I mean to say, you know, when I say it's a known thing, if I would have thought about it, I would have known it was a bad idea. I just didn't think about it. Didn't, didn't. Wasn't, wasn't. Wasn't something that was in my forefront of my mind. Let's go ahead and do. And now it's time for this or that. This week's this or that is. It's fun. I'm going to tell you guys something this week that I usually don't tell you, which is I'm going to tell you what the petals are. Let me turn on the light here. So this or that this week I'm gonna need the cable. Are. I feel like I'm gonna tell you guys. And then half you're gonna leave because you guys don't care about these pedals. But I'm gonna tell you anyways. So they are chorus pedals. And I don't know why I'm telling you that, because you'll figure it out. One second. So this particular pedals I'm really curious about because sometimes this or that's about a couple things. One is to see what can you guys really hear through YouTube? What can you really hear if you don't know what's being presented to you? But also, how do I feel about it compared to you, considering I'm in the room. And then the last part, which is really what's happening today. And I've done it to you a couple times, but I never told you guys, so I thought I'd tell you is sometimes whether you realize or not, you're having a celebrity death match. In other words, I'M showing you two products because I'm planning to get rid of one. And I. And I'm thinking, I think I know which one. And funny enough, you guys have. It's happened once now where I decided something had to go and I picked the thing I liked and not the thing I didn't like, and I did the this or that, and then you guys did not agree with me. You picked the other thing. And then it got me thinking and I kept playing with them and then I ended up agreeing with you guys. So I was like, oh, maybe they were hearing something I wasn't hearing. So we're gonna go ahead and start. I'm gonna run clean. I'm still going through the magnetone amp. The only difference is because the magnetone reaver is pretty intense, and I don't want it to be that intense for a chorus. I'm switched it to a Big Sky Strymon reverb. So it's still gonna be Reverby, but it won't be as huge as the. As the magnetone. Let's go ahead and start the poll. We're going to start with probably switching camera things. We're going to start with that. We'll start with that first. Turn it on. It's on. And it's chorus. I'm going to neck pick up on the guitar. Let's play the chorus and see what happens. Okay, let's go ahead to this. Now we're on this. Okay, go back to that. Okay, so I feel like. All right, so we've. We've tried both. Let's see where the voting is. I think we have 9,000 votes. Let's try to get to 150 if we can to see if the numbers change. Usually when we have it so dominant one side, I don't have to keep playing and boring us all to death with it. Let's move the table over this way. And I'm gonna call it 150 votes. 156. We're gonna end the poll. Where do we end up? Let's go ahead and turn this off. We ended with the winner being that. Now here's what's interesting. What's interesting is I picked that as well. Let's go ahead and swing the arm out. Look at that. I picked that. So I picked that as well. So what do we have? We have the Boss Super Chorus. CH1 versus the boss was a craft CE2W. Now, of course, what's interesting about this is the Wazircraft costs lots more by the way the Wazircraft I bought this week used at Zim's guitars. So very very good pedal. So I thought when I was playing it in store I go oh this would be good this or that because I have the super chorus now here's what happened to me. It happens to everybody. When I was at Zims I was playing the super or the waza going this is the greatest chorus ever. And then I came home and I abed it and I thought well actually my super core sounds pretty good now. I bought these pedals both used. So let's for funsies take a look at see what they go for. I we could go off new prices too but boss ch1 okay, looks like it's going for. Let's pull it up here here on the website. Looks like $69 $65. I think I probably paid six 60 bucks. 65 bucks. 65 bucks. Here's one for 75. So $69. My guess is what it's a new. It's a hundred. Well brand new. It looks like $131 is what somebody's asking here. Is there any other new ones? Another one for $131. So $130 new. And then of course this one says mint which I have a feeling is is is it's actually new in box and they're just trying to liquidate it. So one hundred twelve. So one hundred bucks. But with an average sale price used of sixty to seventy dollars. We'll call it seventy is fair. Okay, let's take a look at the boss waza and then I'm going to share something fun about waza that some people know but most people do not. I thought it was really funny. So Here is Wazecraft CE. Let's type in the rest of it. Cell 2W2 standing R2W standing for WAZA2W. Okay so looking at these looks like I'm looking at brand new $241. So obviously $110 more new. I paid 165 used I believe is what he had it marked for which was I thought was a good price. I didn't really price compare him or anything. Looking here used 200 bucks. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I paid 160. Maybe it was 169. I know it wasn't too because I paid I bought the blue sky from them for 199 as well. So we did on trade. Like I said I trade a bunch of stuff. So considerably a lot different priced between the two Pedals again, this is another example of one pedal, especially something like this. We're not talking about the cheap guy versus the expensive guy. These are two quality made products by boss. Obviously the Wazakraft's made in Japan. The CH1, I have a current one, so it's made in Malaysia. I'm just giving you the references where they're made. Something to fun to note is what. What was a craft is so was a craft. I think the definition is a type of craft. Right? So like witchcraft, right? It's like Waza Craft means what? Means let's see if we can look it up. Means. It means the art and technique. It means the art and technique, right? Okay. The WAZA craft series, it represents premium, premium guitar pedals. What's interesting is the WAZA name isn't important. It's why it exists. So a little fun fact about Boss pedals that a lot of you don't know. Okay. Boss never reissued pedals. They never reissued anything. So when they discontinued a pedal, they never made that pedal again. And the reason is, is their corporate mantra is never look back. In fact, never look back. It's like on the side of their building. So they don't look back. They don't make. They don't make reissues because they're always looking to the future. They're creating the future. And when they made Wazecraft, what they did was this was a way that they created an idea to go, well, what if we reissue it but with a modification? So WAZA crafts are always the original petal style and then there's a switch and you can get like a variant from that. And that's the looking forward thing again, like how would it be today? Right. So I think that's kind of the logic. So you get the original pedal reissued, but then what would it look like if they made that pedal today again in the future? Looking forward. So a little fun fact for you. So at least that's what the, the Boss guys told me once at an event I was at. They were telling me this cool story. So. But interesting enough, I should also point out that when it comes to whoops, go this way. When it comes to the Wazircraft pedal right here that I'm pointing at the ce, I have an original one too. And the Wazir Crafts does sound just like it. So it's. At least I thought it sounded pretty darn close. So. But interesting. So I picked the same thing as you guys. I picked the lesser expensive chorus pedal and I didn't play it with gain. Lots of distortion. But I'll tell you, with distortion, I thought again, the CH1 sounded better. Definitely. That's where that one came. Shines is in with high gain. If you're trying to get this. Not the Zakkwyld thing, but that heavy chorus, heavy distortion sound too. I like that as much. So that was kind of fun. I liked it. I liked it. I like it when we all agree. I don't think we have to, but it's kind of fun. It makes me feel like, oh, okay, there. You know what it is? It's not that I think, oh, they think like me or they have the same taste as me. It's, oh, whatever's happening in this room must be translating to you guys because. Because that's what it's. To me, it was mostly about, let's do one last subject and call the show. Let's do. Warlock says, hey, did you ever get a chance to do a Saldano versus Energy Astro slo? I did not. I've gone through all the Saldano stuff. I have a Saldano head. I like it. I have the Saldano module from the Synergy. I like that more. Not because it sounds better than the Saldano, but functionally, I can get the Synergy head quieter. I can get the fuller sound that I like, that the Saldano gives me at a much lower volume with the Synergy without using attenuation. And I actually like the Saldano pedals. Again, keep in mind, what I'm comparing is practice volumes. This is something I found to be consistent in my experience, which is when you're playing like the real Friedman head versus the Freedman pedal, and people go, oh, man, the pedal doesn't sound like the head. It doesn't. But when you play quietly, the pedal sometimes sounds just as good, if not better, because it can. You can. You know, you can tweak everything so it sounds fuller at lower volumes where the head really has to physically have some volume to get there. So that was my experience with that. Okay. Oops. Go back. Hold on a second. Okay, so this one, his name's Gooch Puff. So Amanda grabbed this. Gooch Puff said, hey, Phil, I wanted to know what is a better deal? The Stumac tune up set up tool kit or the music Nomad Keep it simple kit. I want to do setup on my. Neither. I don't. I have both. Both companies have sent me both, and I. There's nothing. Look, there's nothing in those kits that you just can't buy a couple things and have it. If you want to do really good setups, I mean, obviously, look, everything I'm doing to diagnose a guitar when I'm doing a setup, I would. That's all you're going to need for. For. Let's see. Let me think. Trying to think. I know we. I have lists of the tools I think you need for a good setup. Let's actually. You know what? Let's do this. Let's just make life easy for both you and me. Let's look at the Keep it Simple. And I know they keep changing the name of it or at least keep it simple. Because my problem with the Keep it simple kit is I love. I love the idea. So this is it, the Keep it Sent bundle. I don't think you're talking about the bundle though, right? Hold on a second. Keep a simple set. Yep. Let's look at the bundle. Let's actually analyze this for a second. This is obnoxious. 170 bucks. I have all this stuff. So some of it musicnomad sent me and then some of them required me. First of all, I've said this before. I really love the ESP spanner wrench more than their wrench. The Music Nomad one's thinner, which is nice because it gets under the knobs a little easier and has a foam pad on the bottom. But I bent mine like in a week and I was really annoyed. So the ESP1s, they're. They're bulletproof. I mean, I probably bent one too, but I bent it back. It was fine. I meant it like years, years later. I just think it's better quality thing. There's these gap gauges. It's cool that they make it simple. Like again, this is the whole thing. But you can get some gap gauges. You can get some at Harbor Freight. I think the main issue there is there's oil on those, but no big deal. So it's. Again, it's up to you. These things. I don't even think you need these radius gauges. I don't even know if I would. I actually, if you think if you're only going to get. If you're only going to do setups, I would get under saddle radius gauges from Stu Mac. They're far better for what you're going to need because you can put them underneath the bridge. They're going to be more useful. This tool, this. This is the Achilles heel of everyone. This is the absolute best, absolute best string action guide on the market. Keep in mind, it's because I'm old and I can't see for crap if there's not a lot of light in the room. Because as you get older, just darker rooms are tough. And filming what you don't understand. Like, right now I'm in the dark. I'm in the dark here. I'm in the dark in the studio. That's the irony of it. Like, you guys, it's like, it's really lit, really nice behind me, and there's front lighting on me. But essentially everything in here is pretty dark. Think of it like it's not like a dark room, but I'm like sunset, right? It's in the afternoon. Look to here is what I'm looking at. So my point is, looking at the white letters on the black background is so much better than what Stumac did, which is put black print on a steel background. And I told Stumac, I don't understand why they didn't do this. I said, why don't you recreate yours? Not only like the music Nomad, but use Lumen lay paint for, like, let it. So when I'm putting it underneath, it actually will glow a little bit. Or I can shoot a black light on real fast. I have a little black light flashlight, dude. It'd be like, be awesome. So anyways, that is the best string action guide. There are others. I have tried them all. There are tons that you can get for a dollar on AliExpress. I bought those. And there's a bunch you can get on Amazon for a couple bucks. And you know what? Some of them are not even accurate. So it's up to you. Will it get you through? Sure. But I mean, this is. This is a great tool. I used to buy these and give these away. That's how much I like this tool. This set here. That's okay. I have it. I don't prefer it. I absolutely prefer the Stu Mac one. This one is the one I have. I have this kit everywhere. I have three of these. I have one in my shop. I have one here. And I have one on a little portable tools kit that I take like a. Like an emergency kit everywhere I go. This. I find this to be way more useful for all the scenarios. I need this. In fact, here's why. Although this has this cool handle here, like a screwdriver. And then here you have like a socket set. You know, I never use this if I'm going to use this. If I don't have my real sockets and stuff, I use the spanner Wrench. It's right here. These are redundant tools for me. Okay? This Allen wrench kit is nice because it's pretty much all the Allen wrenches you need in a kit. However, the price they charge is so crazy. Now, again, you're paying for them putting this together for you, and you're paying so you don't have to think about it. So I'm not telling you, like, this is highway robbery. What I'm telling you is this is a lot of money for what it is, and you can get a lot of these tools for dollars, not tens of dollars. I mean, I think is this 170 bucks. I think if you gave me, maybe that's what we should do. Give me. Keep it fair. I mean, it's gonna be tough. I'd say 50 to $100. Here's where it's tough. This thing's expensive. This thing's like 50 bucks. But sometimes they're on sale for 35 bucks. There are some other aftermarket ones, but I've never found one as good as this one for having all the sizes I need, because you really. And this. And this is actually what I use for all my Allen wrenches when I'm on the go to. So I just think if you want to look at those systems, you can. But I think a little. A little bit of research, you can find all that stuff for a fraction of the price. Music Nomad and Stumac have seriously one thing in common, and I don't know what it is, and I really hate saying this, because I really like both businesses, but as a consumer, they have some of the best products and then some of the most blatant feeling, like a ripoff kind of feel like it just goes to the extremes. Like, wow, thank you for this tool and how great it is and how I feel like as a consumer, what would I do without you? And then the next thing I look at and I go, wow, could you have slapped a more ridiculous markup on a cheaper thing? They both kind of do it. It's kind of weird. And I'm not sure what that is. And it could be my mistake. It could be that these things. I'm just reading it wrong, and they're really, really hard to make, and that's why they're expensive. So, you know, it's like what I was talking about earlier about Guitar center and mom and Pops and Sweetwater and Reverb and. And, you know, you gotta be selective. You gotta. You gotta. You know, I try to. I can't try to Keep loyal to businesses I like so they don't go out of business. But I also try to make. Make sure I'm loyal to myself, too. My family, my pocketbook, all those things, too. So I think for doing basic setups, you can. Get much better stuff cheaper. Speaking of stuff, I'll give you guys a little bonus. Since you hung out at the end, let me show you a new tool that I'm in absolute love with. Like, I'm. I'm in love. I'm gonna marry this tool, okay? I'm gonna take it behind the bleachers and get it pregnant. That's a great joke. I stole that from Tracy Morgan. Okay, hold on. If you're like me. If you're like me, I'm gonna sound like a commercial right now. I have no affiliate with what I'm about to show you. If you're like me and you ever had to use helping hands, this is this thing I'm holding right now. You can use it to hold your. Your, you know, potentiometers and stuff, right? So if you're soldering, you can. I don't have a potentiometer right here, but I can, you know, just show you, like, clamp something here, right? You clamp it, and then that's how it holds it. And you can. Now you can sit this on your desk or on your bench and do soldering. This thing works pretty crappy. And this pan glass is pretty crappy. This is pretty crappy, but it's cheap. You can get this at Harbor Freight for, I don't know, under 10 bucks. So if you want to save 10 bucks, you know, spend 10 bucks or less, sometimes I think they're even cheaper. Found this. It was one of those. It was one of those Instagram scams where I saw it on Instagram and I go, whoa. And I clicked it, and it was like, $70 little. If you guys don't know this, please understand, anytime you see anything on Instagram, please never click anything on Instagram and buy it. Nothing. I'm not saying because it's a scam. They are. But when they're not scams, they're just screwing you. You can go. You just take the item that it is, no matter how. Even if they go, we're the actual company. Don't even trust that this company. This was $69 on Amazon or on Instagram. And then I went on Amazon and I found it for 25 bucks. So same same thing. So here's what it is. I'm gonna pull it up. I Got you guys all in suspense now. You're all like, do I need this? You're gonna need this. There's a bunch of them, different ones. Let me try to find the one I actually have. So here's a version for 2161. The one I thought one I have, I think I paid $25 for because it had different parts on it. Okay. Yep. $24.99. Okay. So here's what it is. So this is what's cool. How cool this is. What it is, is it's just a steel plate with a big foam rubber bottom. And it's kind of weighty, kind of heavy. And then you get magnetic helping hands. And there's different ones. Like, this one's awesome. This one's like clamp. Look, see? So. So what's great is if you have, you know, let's say you have something you want to solder, you can just do that, right? Or if you want to, you know, and there's. This comes with multiple. So, like, you can use these two to hold two things. There's even a magnetic magnifying glass. So let me show you this to you. This is the one I got. Helping Hands Clamp. If you need to search for it, you're just going to use magnetic Helping Hands. That's how I found it. Pretty easy. Helping hands clamp adjustable. $24.99. That's what I paid. I'm sure if you shop it, you can find it cheaper. There's a version here for $19.99, which is two of the things, but I wanted the four, right? So this thing's a cool tool. I. So I'm telling you, I bought it, I tried it. It was not exaggerating. 69. Some company on Instagram was like, 69 bucks. I'm like. So there's different. Different plates. But what's great is actually, once I did this, I just got a. I have a big sheet of metal that I could put underneath my. So you guys know, I put a big sheet of metal underneath my work mat. And these things are strong enough that they stick right through my mat. So I can actually just have them anywhere underneath my. My guitar now. But it's nice to have this. And what I love about this, which I didn't think about, it's so balanced, you know, because it's like a big square, and the foam is so nice that I actually was setting it on top of my guitar. So when I was soldering the other day, I just put this on top of my Guitar. And I just threw like a towel over the guitar. You know, I have a little rag and I threw this on the guitar. And then I just started soldering over this. And this thing's got. See, unlike this helping hands or it's got nothing underneath it. This thing, the solder. If you drop some solder, you're going to get right here. So it was, it was a pretty cool tool. So for 25 bucks, it's basically what I'm trying to say is, look, we have the Internet. Do some searching, type in exactly what you want, go to Stem Mac and use their website as a reference, right? If you, if you find good quality tools to stumac like I have, buy a tool from Sumac. If you find a good quality tool from using, buy it from them. When you find something like this, I thought when I saw this, I go, this sounds great. But when I sell $69, I go, that just sounds ridiculous, right? And maybe it's not. Maybe 70 bucks is the right price. I don't know. But it was 25 bucks and I got it delivered in an afternoon and I was like, and I got to try it. So my point is search around and, and you know, just, just do your what's best. But what I can tell you is, and when I recommend a tool to you guys different than anything else, I only recommend a tool that I use all the time, consistently. It's literally just the tool I use. So, like the strip, these, the. The musicnomad string action guide is what I use every single day. It's what I like, it's what I use. So that's why I recommend it. Because I know with tools, tools are to me where guitars, amps and pedals are. Opinion, which I think all this is opinion too. But you all just follow me. And if I say I like it or don't like it, sure, you know, this is my opinion. But. But basically you're gonna make the decision that's best for you for your emotional. Like, if you like the way a guitar looks or don't, you'll defect it in. Tools are about function. You know, who cares if it's like, I'm not saying this is cool because it's yellow, right? Like, I wouldn't go, well, I wish I was red. You know, it's just a good tool and it works. Okay. I think we did it. We solved all the world's problems. We learned a lot as a, as a group. We, we do have some videos. I have some videos coming that I'm excited about. Including a. A, I want to say, like a vintage guitar video. Not. Not really. And then also there's a guitar that you guys kept bringing up and I kept telling you guys I wasn't interested in, and then believe it or not, the. The Shauna was interested in it. So I'm doing my first ever deep dive on a guitar. And here's the. Here's the twist. I'm going to be diagnosing the guitar to see whether or not I think it's good enough for Shawna. Her has a guitar, if you guys don't know. Shauna can play guitar. She can play. She plays chords. She plays. She fundamentally just play. She plays ukulele and guitar. And she's been wanting a nice guitar. And it's been tough because there's no guitars in this house. No, it's tough because she doesn't want to take any of my guitars because she, you know, she doesn't know. And funny enough, the guitars that she would take are the guitars that I like and the guitars that, you know, the guitar she doesn't like, you know, that I don't use that much. You know, it's not working out. So we discussed getting her guitar that I would not use, and this is what came up. So that's what's going to be interesting about this deep dive is I actually have something on the line. Like, it's got it. It's got to pass the deep dive, otherwise it doesn't go to Shauna. So you'll know at the end of the video. I'll actually have to say I talked about earlier in the show how I don't really give a recommendation. I'm not going to necessarily give me a recommendation, but at the end of the show, I'm either going to say, yeah, this is good enough, and then I'll let you know if she liked it, or it's not good enough. And so it's not even worth it because all I'm trying to do right now is diagnose, decide if the guitar is good enough for her to have and if it needs any work. So. All right. Okay. So. Oh, Paul wants to know, is Shauna after electric acoustic? You know, she's after comfort. So she plays on the couch. So she likes playing on the couch. She wants an acoustic, but we're trying a couple different things. This is a hybrid, in fact, actually, let's be clear, acoustic. She doesn't want a traditional acoustic. We're looking at all the hybrid type acoustic guitars. So think about this. She's more interested in, like, a guitar that's hollow body or a guitar that's semi hollow body. Something that can resonate without having to plug into an amp so much. She's not looking for a rig, so to speak, but she doesn't want a big acoustic. She wants something very comfortable. So she likes something just something really more form fitted. So she doesn't like a big, you know, dreadnought. So somebody says a God. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see what she ends up liking. Okay, so on that note, I'm going to let you go. Thanks, guys, for a great show. And I will see you guys next Friday. The know your gear podcast.