social.noyu.me

it's arrived and, heh, a huge parcel containing an electric guitar is actually really easy to carry under one's shoulder. i was afraid it wouldn't be, but i guess it is just a guitar in a box after all!

soon…

more teasing

lying in stasis, entombed but not forever?

she has been painstakingly freed from the rubble with surgical precision inshallah she may yet live

she is in one piece but she is weary and must rest, may madokami look over her and protect her

the white balance in that pic is wrong, the yellowing on the plastic has been interpreted by my phone's camera as the room having warmer lighting that it has; to my eyes it's an almost fluorescent cream colour

anyway wow haha i'm glad she's intact but she will need some Work

yikes, corroded alkaline batteries, i may have to do some work on the electronics too

passive electronics (hexaphonic pickup of some type -> volume pot -> single output) still work! and hey look i finally have a guitar that my VOX AmPlug3 AC30 isn't a massive pain in the arse to use with (tele-style side output jacks are not friends with it)

no signs of life for the active (midi) electronics unfortunately, gonna have to do some board repair i fear, or at least bypass the battery terminals

not going to lie as much as i love my i-can't-believe-it's-not-a-les-paul tele the strat i tried in a store felt really good and i think if i can get this thing back in shape i may well fall in love with it even with the strange neck

i cannot deny that the strat has the correct shape for a guitar and is the worthy holder of the default electric guitar status. i just have a thing for the telecaster

oh my god the seller threw in not only the midi pro adapter (which i knew about) but also a rocksmith real tone cable (which i believe is just a simple usb audio device). score

a peek into the belly of the beast

do any followers have any tips for how i might clean the corrosion on the battery contacts (i'd rather try that before replacing them or changing how this is powered)

Ernst Hemingway once made a bet he could write a tragic story in only fifteen words. He won the bet: “Squier Stratocaster Guitar and Controller, for sale, used only twice, couldn't commit to learning guitar.”

thank you to everyone who suggested using vinegar to clean the battery contacts. she now seems to be working!!! (but desperately needs re-stringing and the frets cleaning)

now that's what i call a relic guitar

strat shape fully contoured body, strat-style output on face, satin neck, circa 2.7kg weight… this is everything my other guitar is not, ergonomically, wonder how it'll change my guitar opinions

my measuring equipment is not reliable at this weight and for such an unwieldy object, consider that to be ±0.1kg

stumbled upon the old website for this by accident, cute https://web.archive.org/web/20110107151648/http://www.fender.com/promos/2010/rockband3

in a few hours' time your girl is going to have to learn how to restring a guitar

strings acquired (and a guitar stand because oh god the sofa cannot be permanently occupied by two guitars)

restringing Soon…

unlike my other guitar this one doesn't have a string-through-body design, the strings terminate right at the bridge, which should make things easier i suppose (haven't restringed the other guitar though so this hypothetical comparison may be worthless)

guitars on a scale from least guitar to most guitar

she has been destringed, unstrung, wingclipped, without killing anyone

the easy part of restringing is done :)

this image probably qualifies as guitar gore but uh, look, i've never done it before, the tuning machines on this have seen much better days, i didn't have a string winder, and i had to improvise something to physically be able to wind it. i'll fix these next time lmao

shoutout to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKFe8LpyBKA for the very very helpful guide (much better than fender's official one lmao)

nearly done!!! she's now within spitting distance of being in tune on fresh strings, after 10 long years of neglect <3

enter shikari? they torture rockstars with pliers.
enter hikari? she tortures tuners with pliers

oh my god this guitar is a lot louder than my other one, i think it's because that one's all solid with a very small amount of routing, whereas this one has an unusually large body cavity and hollow neck, so a lot of potential resonating chamber volume!

she's now as close to in tune as i care to put her (the hollow neck and the sorry state of the tuners give poor tuning stability so it feels a bit sisyphean to go for perfect), so here's what the Squier Stratocaster Guitar and Controller pickup sounds like ^^

fascinatingly having my ampsim pedal connected produces enough interference for the midi system to produce tons of false notes. i didn't expect the interference problems to go both ways!

with fresh strings, it's now a lot more pleasant to test out the midi stuff, but it seems i'll need to polish some of the frets more before it'll fully work

the Squier Stratocaster Guitar and Controller makes an admirable attempt at being both a guitar and a midi controller. i think the saddest thing about it as a guitar is just the plastic fretboard. having a part of the guitar you directly touch be made of plastic is really sad

i wonder if there's some kind of thin wooden veneer thing i could stick onto it to hide the plastic

ahaaaa i have figured out how to clean the frets well enough to make the midi/game functionality work. i was scared of using something inappropriately hard or abrasive that might damage the frets. but what is appropriately hard or abrasive? the strings!!!

it turns out my strings (fender nickel-plated steel 9 to 42's as the owner's manual demands, though they're classic smooth-core rather than modern hex-core type) easily scratch off whatever corrosion has accumulated on these frets, and frets are meant to tolerate bending :)

so the process goes:

• turn on midi system, connect to a synth i can easily hear
• select a preset with no decay (organs are easy to reach, press red button ten times)
• for each of the 132 fret segments:
  • play note picked
  • if it cuts out when bending, bend till it doesn't

80 minutes of finger callus speedrunning later, here's what the fret segments for the first string look like now. you can see how there's now a slither of the underlying shiny metal that's been re-exposed on all of these

but i begin to suspect i do not value my time and energy…

…so i am going to just order some kind of very fine-grained abrasive pad, yet another set of strings, a set of new tuners, and a string winder, and resume next weekend

but now i can play the first string with the midi system, so that's cool!

hey everyone check out my new one-string bass

(this is of course [rot13]gur Ebynaq FP-7 Trareny ZVQV Fync Onff 1 cerfrg orvat pbagebyyrq ol gur Fdhvre Fgengbpnfgre Thvgne naq Pbagebyyre[/rot13])

the playfeel of midi guitar when using a guitar-like instrument preset is really… interesting

one of the grub screws has fallen out of its saddle at some point since i last took a photo of the bridge lmao god this is such a cursed instrument

almost wonder if i should replace the saddles too (ideally not the entire bridge…) while i'm at it…

hmm the problem with replacing the tuners is that i don't want to buy the cheapest possible ones (i'll surely regret it?), i don't want to spend close to or more than $100 (too much for a guitar that cost $350 in 2010), and i don't want to buy whatever fender originally put on it

at the same time, i don't want to change the appearance of the guitar too much, and also more than anything else i have no idea how to judge the quality of these things, but i don't want to have to lean on someone else for advice yet again… so many “buts”

an unfortunate thing about owning an old, cheap squier from 2010 is that the tuners are not in one of the standard shapes you'll find sold on, say, thomann. they're these weird things: hexagonal, closed, with staggered screws

i've found a few forum posts online mentioning them…

in case anyone else should find this thread in future, here are other places i've seen them mentioned:

• https://www.tdpri.com/threads/are-there-any-replacement-tuners-for-these-90s-squier.1074079/
• https://menga.net/squier-tuner-replacements
• https://www.instructables.com/Rehab-and-Upgrades-for-a-Fender-Squire-Strat-Plus-/ (no text mention, but one of the “more images” under “step 1. dismantling” has the same tuners)

i fear we might be getting to a set of options that looks like “replace the tuners with exactly identical ones from some ebay seller that somehow has those” or “drill new holes” if i insist on replacing the tuners. man…

a few sellers seemingly have a replacement with a slightly different button; https://guitaraudio.com/genuine-fender-squier-old-style-99-06-affinity-strat-chrome-tuners-keys-set claims fender part number of 005-5404-049 which i can't find elsewhere, and others claim a part number of 005-5404-000, e.g.
https://www.guitarpartsfactory.us/005-5404-000-Fender-Squier-Tuners-99-Affinity-Strat-Chrome-Diamond-Style-Set-6-0055404000 and https://darrenriley.com/homepage/fender-squier-affinity-tuners-0055404000/

if they aren't lying about the parts being genuine then presumably this is new-old-stock

then there's https://www.stewmac.com/parts-and-hardware/tuning-machines/solid-peghead-guitar-tuning-machines/economy-covered-gear-6-in-line-tuners/ which was linked in that forum thread…

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175599165185 is an interesting ebay listing and the source of the attached image. the suggestion it makes is that readily obtainable 6-in-line tuners with vertically aligned screwholes are appropriate for replacing the dreaded diagonally-aligned squier ones

of course, that requires drilling, soooo

a funny thing about economies of scale is that it's seemingly much easier and cheaper to just buy a new set of saddles for this bridge rather than to get one (1) screw to replace the one that fell out

well, mr thomann, you make a compelling offer (€12), i guess i'll take it

one concern i had was that perhaps this guitar's bridge is unusual in that it has to be grounded for it to function (assumption: fret sensing works by testing if a fret segment is currently grounded by the strings+bridge) but apparently grounding the bridge is normal? cool

i wondered before if one could get thin wooden veneer strips to make the guitar more appealing. turns out yes, and they can be remarkably thin, cheap, made of very appealing kinds of wood, and entire businesses specialise in this niche (for guitars!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgVAQo0SXBk

i'm not saying i'm going to buy such a thing, but it's very interesting to discover it not only exists, but is a well-filled niche

though applying the word “tonewood” to a veneer is rather amusing

tfw you accidentally do the blur meme when taking a photo of your guitar stuff order

the HOSCO fret polishing rubber is magic, it is making it easy to remove the corrosion (example quick before-and-after with a little rubbing; there's now a clean strip of metal, not just a hint of one), i just gotta uh, remove all the strings again to make this easier lmao

the life of these perfectly innocent strings, so full of promise, cut so tragically short

HOSCO #1000 Fret Polishing Rubber 👍

circa 110 minutes of scrubbing later, every fret is now at least slightly shiny

after another three hours of scrubbing, well, these frets are still a long way from ideal, but this must be the best they've looked in a very long time!

i am really very impressed by just how resilient, versatile and gentle this fret polishing rubber is, incredible tool

removed the one of the tuners from the Squier in the hopes of lubricating it. this finally lets me see who made it (JIN HO) and what the hole diameter is (~8mm but i really am not confident measuring wooden hole diameters with this caliper, big error bar); shaft is 6.0mm

casing on the Squier JIN HO tuner is fairly loose, you can peek inside without damaging it (i am not going to try to pop it open, seems risky)

a peek in from the other side

some carefully targeted injections of tiny drops of the white teflon gunk seem to have put this first tuner in much better spirits!

accidentally popped the second tuner out of its case. BEHOLD, THE MECHANISM

oh the third tuner is really loving the Plausibly Deniably Carcinogenic Gloop, smooth as butter now, might need to go back and re-apply to the first two in the same way i did for this one because clearly this time i got it perfect

can you tell that i'm now very much at the “having fun” stage of amateur guitar tech 101

all the tuners are back on the headstock now!

they're all easy to turn now… but some of them are too easy, and tragically i know why that is, and it is due to one of my several unforced errors from being impatient last week. kids don't copy me i do not always act wisely

i think i managed to get the string winding right this time? this time i unwound and rewound a few times as necessary until i got it right. you have to hold the string tight while winding and pay close attention… once again i am grateful for https://youtu.be/UKFe8LpyBKA this video

okay it is weird it ended up with that many winds though, i assume this is an accident of the un-winding and re-winding i did

i think this string winding is less bad than my first attempt at least, but i will research technique better before next time

at long last, i now have a more or less fully-functional midi guitar <3

(i need to adjust the string action and possibly the sensitivity though, sheesh)

oh my god i measured the string action it's somehow set at over three fucking millimetres no wonder this feels so awful to play lmfao

time to fix that

will set it to the fender recommended 1.6mm as a starting point

halving the string action and re-intonating just the low E string, nothing else, took me an entire hour 🙃

this bridge is… not fun to work with

possibly interesting detail of this guitar's bridge: whoever designed it was clearly concerned that the low and high E strings' saddles might slip out of alignment if the screws aren't level, so there's actually little indents in the plate for the screws to sit in for those two

i would not say the Squier Stratocaster Guitar and Controller is a good guitar if you don't enjoy the process of adjusting tuning, relief, action and intonation, because unusually poor rigidity of the neck means you'll be doing a lot of those. but it's kind of relaxing

it took four hours(!) but the action is now in the pleasant 1.5~2mm range, the neck relief is good, the strings are in tune, the saddles do not wobble and intonation is acceptable. she's now quite enjoyable to play, acoustically at least!

just need to tweak pickup height now?

here's what a DI of it sounds like now ^^

even with more normal string action and pickup height, one of the middle strings (was it D or G? i forget) was still registering far too weakly on the MIDI output, so it was time to finally adjust the fabled undocumented sensitivity pots hidden cunningly next to the batteries

oh you want MIDI guitar do you? I'LL GIVE YOU MIDI GUITAR!!!

(followers with a keen memory may recall that it was in fact one of the General MIDI distorted guitar presets from the Roland SC-7, which you're hearing here, that originally convinced me to learn electric guitar. lmao)

now that my Squier Stratocaster Guitar and Controller is in shape, i can finally play Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar!

it's hard but i am having fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4QQ5IDzxU

the real-time visual feedback as to what your hands are doing is excellent, i can keep my eyes off the guitar

that is, i suppose, an interesting advantage this game has over rocksmith

honestly can't believe how well the Squier is working now, i didn't notice a single fret tracking issue in the game which is so hard to believe considering the dire state this guitar was in when i got it. i'm really happy. going to have a lot of fun with my funny cyborg guitar

this interior picking exercise has been very thoroughly kicking my ass and continues to do so, but i do occasionally manage to 100% it (these learning exercises are going to do so much for my muscle memory lmao)