My instrument rant

Alright,
I'm gonna do a rant about guitars. Because I can.
(there will be many typos)

First note i'd like to say is i'm left handed. Growing up, good quality left handed instruments didn't exist at a decent non-ripoff price. I even learned to play violin right handed. That's a different story though.



So, as you can see, i've been doing this for a long time.

I've learned there are 2 distinct guitarists out there. "Brand Name" and "Whatever Works". The Brand names fall into two groups. Fender/Fender and Gibson/Marshall. Whatever works is just a mismash of stuff.

Being left handed, I defaulted into the Whatever Works group. Years ago, it was next to impossible to buy a proper left handed guitar. And on op of it, it was specal order, twice the price of the right handed equivalent, and you really couldn't try before you buy. It sucked. it's not hard to restring a right handed guitar to lefty, but depending on the design, you're dealing with hitting controls, inbalance and backwards pickups.

There are a few things you need to be aware of when restringing a guitar upside down. The nut (part at the end of the neck) can be replaced and recut for a few dollars. Depending on the bridge design, you're either in a world of hurt or easy world. Back to the Fender and Gibson thing. Your average Gibson guitar is built as a unique piece of art. The necks are permanently set, and the bridges are are designed in a way to maximize innotation* for the 'side' it was designed for. This kinda sucks for me. Fender style are a lot different. Those guitars are actually modular designed, and 90% of the clones are 99% accurate for fitting. You can swap out bridges, necks, bickguards, pickups, tuners, and so on and so forth. not only that, but the bridges are 90 degress to thwe strongs, and each of the 6 sadles on 75% of the models can be adjusted hanf an inch. This is great. buy a right handed guitar, put in a new nut, and re innotate it. Innotation is the whole bridge adjustment. happy times. Not quite. Two things. 1. an upside down Stratocaster is horribly imbalanced. if you let go of the neck, it will drop to the floor. and 2. the pickup closest to the bridge is angled in a way that the higher sounding strings are brighter sounding while the lower are thicker sounding. This pickup is also used amost all the time for lead guitar.

The pickup isn't hard to fix. I put in a full sized humbucker (im not not gonna explain it, google is your friend) and there we go. The balance thing is an issue to a lot of leftys. Some put counter weights in, i jsut decided to deal with it.

Believe it or not, two of my main beater guitars were right handed strat copies, healvily marty-modified (martyfied) until they literally fell apart. I plaed a lot.

Then the world changed.

Jay Turser. Jay Fucking Turser!

They make fender and gibson copies that are edging on lawsuit clones. They actually, from my opinon, are pioneers on the CNC precision guitar builds. These are not made by hand like most of the other brands. They are pumped out in mass and thus sold at very low prices. They also use good wood (really, I have a one pice alder body on one of mine. Expensive fenders are 5-7 pieces now). Ih, they make a lot of left handed guitars at no extra fee.

The electronics are complete garbage, but anyone who plays a lot ends up replacing pickups and pots with what they prefer, so it's a non issue. The first one i bought was actually right handed. It cost me $193. I wanted a guitar with a thicker neck as playing on slim necks with flat radisus was starting to hurt. I spent an afternoon plaging a wall of these things (wthout plugging them into an amp) to see what felt the best. Took me a while, but i ended up with one of the best necks i've ever felt married with a very responsive body. First ything i did was buy a set of used Mexican fender pickups and install them. The pups cost me i think $50.

I played that guitar until the neck wore oud and is now in storeage until I can afford to pay for a $200 complete refret (yes, its worth it).

Ok, so this is less of a rant and more of a story.

The second Jay Turser I bought involves an interesting, to me, story. I was at a local music store buying strings, and i noticed the store was being rebranded. They sold out to a chane store. The chain store doesn't carry Jay Turser. The old store did. Yup. SALE!. There were 3-4 left handed Jay Turser Strat copies on sale for $50. All had the protective plastic on them. Brand spanking new. I had to pay rent, so I bought the only non black one - red. I wold have boought them all, but i figured a warm bed was slightly more imprtant. I didnt even try it out. I jusat asked the clerk what the catch was, he said none, so i grabbed it and ran. $50 fucking dollars! It sat in my closet for a year or more. No point in using it - i already had 3 guitars in rotation.

The first jay turser died (see above) so i transplanted the pickups and it's been going strong for a year now.

Short recap: us leftys always get the short end of the stick, but it's changing and its fucking awesome!!!!!!

*if you look at a guitar, the strings are not all the same length. there is an adjustment to compensate for the width of the string relative to the incorrect, now standard, fret position. simply, the bridge saddle (fulcrum or node) has to be adjusted back and forth to compensate for the width of the string compared to the length. This is a whole thesis in itself and i dont want to explain it.

If wanted, i'll go on about amplifiers at a later date.

omg you wrote a novel

is that you kickin it in the onesie?

it is. '85

Still wasn't even a gleam in my parents eye. Neither was harley for that matter. Old man!

(Recalling his whereabouts about 9 months before jmarty was born)....Whew. Not in Canada.

heres a question, any idea wtf is on the tv screen in the pic?

No idea what's on the TV. I was a kid.

on a side note; there should be a 'drunk test' thing before posting.

See what happens when you don't learn to play right handed...

Should have been born back in the day when the nuns just smacked you into right handed submission.

Course my youngest is a lefty. Probably play French Horn

you had me at "i'm going to do a rant..."
then i saw the length of the post and it all blurred into "yada yada yada blah blah blah"
because i really don't want to read a novel about your penis...sorry

EZErich wrote:

you had me at "i'm going to do a rant..."
then i saw the length of the post and it all blurred into "yada yada yada blah blah blah"
because i really don't want to read a novel about your penis...sorry

I actually wrote a thesis about my penis. All of my references were women though.

Since we are on the subject. I'm pissed off that Edy's Ice Cream only makes their Peppermint flavor twice a year (summer, before x-mass). I recently finished my last bowl and now I miss it already. Luckily, I have Triple Cholcolate Klondike bars to hold me over!

I got one. You know what pisses me off?

Little hyper-only-commandos that will whine about "teams" not because the numbers are off, no, but because a heavy-hitter is on opposite side. Said whiner was so whiny about "stack" that that he (CoughDiositoCough) moved to spec in within a minute and a half of the map starting and then whined about how there was no point in even playing until a shuffle.

So the heavy-hitter moved over to the other side. Amazingly the whiner joins that side (I know, I was surprised too...)

Original team now bangs its head against a brick wall for eight minutes with no headway. Said team starts losing rage-quitters. Now its down by three. Surprisingly it doesn't do any better. (I know, again I was surprised too)

Is there a peep out of whiner about "teams"? or "Stack"? Or maybe he might move over to fill the now three empty slots? No, now he's content. Now things are fair with him and he'll play.

Even teams with a heavy-hitter on the other side? OH! ITS TOO UNFAIR!!! I'M NOT PLAYING!!!

Other team is down by three and heavy-hitter is on my team? .... [crickets]

Look, I understand the frustration of a single player consistently deciding every map (although this heavy-hitter was at least changing sides every map) but why is it that the ones that can't stand to lose are the biggest losers?

You got a point alpha, but it doesn't top my Ice Cream bitch.

bankonit wrote:

You got a point alpha, but it doesn't top my Ice Cream bitch.

alpha- kick the whiner. When the whiner says, "Teams aren't fair," help the whiner by telling him you are going to balance the teams and then kick the fucker off the server. It tends to shut people up quickly- I think of it as being people friendly to the rest of the folks on the server.

TEAMS!!
STACK!!!

Hey alpha, since you have admin rights, just move the bum back to the team he started on or kick him. It's easy since you old like me and sen

Well he logged on, joined strogg, got smacked around for a minute, went to spec, whined and then joined strogg again when our heavy hitter switched over there. So he didn't jump teams. He just whined about possibly being rolled because the other team had a big gun, and then participated in the roll when his team had a big gun AND was up by two or three players.

I can handle one or the other, whining about stacking, and rolling with a stacked team that's also up in numbers, but doing both ... in the same map even, makes you a specific kind of tool.

I called him on how quiet he was a couple of times (ok, maybe three or four) and then went back to throwing myself into the fire. He stayed on for another five minutes or so and then logged off. Teams were even number wise by now.

I miss Dommafia That was one guy who for some reason had the magical ability to singlehandedly win games, but still swapped sides during a campaign like crazy to keep things even.

Never saw him do that much, though probably by that time was getting bored of game. Though it was something else when he dominated the sewers map using the tormentor

He was fun to play with. He wasn't a choad like a bunch of guys

bankonit wrote:

Since we are on the subject. I'm pissed off that Edy's Ice Cream only makes their Peppermint flavor twice a year (summer, before x-mass). I recently finished my last bowl and now I miss it already. Luckily, I have Triple Cholcolate Klondike bars to hold me over!

LMAO-----------I remember those days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

he said "Choad"

fodder wrote:

he said "Choad"

hehehehehehe
The most common meaning for choad is 'penis'. The origin of the word is obscure, though it may be related to the slang word choan for 'sex'. There has also been some speculation that the word comes from the Indian word for 'f*ck'. However, there are no citations to confirm this connection. Some people claim that choad refers to a certain kind of penis: short and stubby, uncircumcised, unusually wide, etc. These seem to be later variants of the more general meaning.

fodder wrote:

he said "Choad"

That's a 'taint'ed word.