Jean-Luc Pickguard

Bargain!

That will certainly be worth a try if we get a sunny day soon, otherwise I could stash it in the loft until summer arrives

I saw this Guild M-240E Troubadour on the cash converters website when they seemed to be doing a Dutch auction as the price was dropping by £20 every few days. It got to a price where it would have been rude not to press the 'buy now' button, so I did that. It arrived the next day very well wrapped but on unpacking it there was a definite odour. After a wipedown with kitchen roll slightly dampened with febreze and then a piece dampened with water, the guitar is no longer malodourous, but the gigbag is taking a bit longer to destink. I've used approximately half a bottle of febreze so far on it inside and out, and it is currently sitting zipped up with an open tub of bicarbonate of soda inside. It only has a trace of the smell now if I get my nose right up against it but any other tips to get rid of a weird smoky smell from a gigbag will be gratefully received. If it was a tatty old gigbag I'd put it in the bin, but apart from the smell it could pass for brand new, and its a good quality well-padded bag with embroidered Guild logo. The guitar itself it lovely. It is parlour sized and has a solid sitka spruce top and a DeArmond Tone Boss passive soundhole magnetic pickup which sounds surpringly good. There was a bit of rattle on the low E string as the fingerboard was almost dead flat. I had to remove the pickup to get to the truss rod adjustment, but after a tweak and refitting the pickup I now have a little relief in the neck and the guitar plays very well with a good lively feel and bright tone.

The Sad Bag Of Shaky Jake — Humble Pie

Brake My Body — Pixies

Sit Down — James

Senses Working Overtime — XTC

William Hill It Was Really Nothing — The Smiths

Rise — PIL

Ridiculous! if a squier topped the list they could at least spell it correctly.

A Walk in the Black Forest (Gateau) — Horst Jankowski

Short and Curlies — Rolling Stones

Diggin' My Potatoes — Leadbelly

Not available in the UK yet, but I've just installed Mullvad VPN on my iPad so I can pretend to be in the US & watch it on netflix.

I prefer flatwounds so I put a short scale set of status hotwires on mine, as I had a spare set, but as they are no longer available, I would probably use ECB81S Chromes if I got another mini P.

Hot Poop — Frank Zappa

Good job!

I wonder whether the tail lift issue has been fixed with the v2 bridge on my 2024 4003? I suppose I'll know in a few years, but it would be daft if this has not been addressed in the design.

Can you post a pic to show how the string is wound around the string post of the A tuner?

In October I bought this one -> https://amzn.to/423AdgY . For £15 it was a massive upgrade from my previous crappy one from Maplins. When making up a loom, I can now use lead-free solder for back of the pot connections without needing to worry so much about effing up the pot.

My flatwounds — The more played in they are, the better they get. I can't see myself ever needing/wanting to change my Ashdown ABM600 evo iv for another amp.

If only there was a way to design an eight string with a way to separate the signals from the normal and the octave strings like a more advanced version of rick-o-sound to go to two separate amps (or mixer channels for recording)

Famous Blue Raincoat — Leonard Cohen

The Murder Of Love — Propaganda

My rig is set up in the rehearsal studio, so I had forgotten that the FS-4 has a captive cable. It sounds to me likely that the FS-4 has a fault. It is probably worth opening up the pedal unit and its jack plug to see whether any wire(s) look like they have become disconnected. The issue may be something Ashdown have encountered previously so it might be worth raising an enquiry with them: https://ashdownmusic.com/pages/contact-us