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What IS That Bright Cap Across The Volume Pot on A PRS For Anyway?

What IS That Bright Cap Across The Volume Pot on A PRS For Anyway? Hi guitar gang. As you may know, I've became fairly well known for upgrading the pickups in PRS guitars; and I'd like to address one of the main questions that comes up when folks are replacing the pickups in their PRS. The "Bright" cap! First, what is it? It's a small-value cap soldered across the first two lugs of your volume pot, Second, why is it there: to increase the brightness of the pickups. Simple enough. Let's...

Best Way To Clean and Polish your Frets - Don't Use Steel Wool!

The Best Way To Clean and Polish Your Frets (Don't use Steel Wool!) It happened again last week, I was sent a pickup to fix, and when I took a look at it the problem was clear, STEEL WOOL! You see, when you use steel wool to polish the frets on your guitar, you end up with thousands of tiny steel bits EVERYWHERE; and those bits will be strongly attracted to your guitar's magnetic pickups. What's next? Best case scenario is you wind up wasting a lot of time with sticky tape, tooth picks, and...

Post-Covid: How Much Should You Get Paid To Play Guitar?

Howdy Guitar Gang! It's summer of 2021 as I pen this blog. Like all of you, I have spent nearly TWO FREAKING YEARS without playing gigs. That's like living without oxygen ... or food ... or water ... combined! But yet, here we are, still somehow alive and the world is trying REALLY hard to get back to some sense of normalcy after Covid sent us all burrowing into our caves wearing face-masks, gloves, and being afraid of our friends, neighbors, family members, and maybe even the family pet....

4th of July 2021 - Live Music Is Back!

Holy cow y'all! I think Live Music in the USA is back, and the old saying is Sooooo true: "Ya don't know what you've got until it's gone!" For musicians, man, has the last couple of years sucked ... big time! Getting out and making music with other humans is the zenith of what our world is all about. Take THAT away and we all turn into sad blobs with eyes. Okay, maybe I'm being a little overly dramatic, but not THAT much so! But in the last few weeks (basically June through July 4th) I've played...

Taming the Fender Twin Reverb Amp: From Twin Reverb to Princeton Reverb!

Howdy guitar folks and welcome to 2021 and the "new normal" ... but this time we ain't talking at ALL about COVID-19 or lock-downs, or any of that crap ... we're talking about a trend that began a number of years back: SMALLER AMPS! All throughout the 1950s through the 1980's amps just kept getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder. But then it all began to change. Thanks to readily available great PA systems and in-ear monitors, what everyone NOW desires are amps that can sound MASSIVE whilst...

Post-Covid Live Music Playing Etiquette

Okay gang, last week I got all giddy about having (finally) gotten out and played a live show, my first since COVID-19 killed everything. In that blog I carried on about how fun it was to get out and play, and when you look at the photos, you will notice that NOBODY is wearing masks. That was at a redneck/army base club in the army town of Clarksville, TN. Them "good-ole-boys ain't afraid of nuttin'! But you may not be so lucky at every club so be prepared. Especially in the big cities,...

2021: Time to Get Back Out and Play!

Howdy guitar gang! Man, was 2020 a "B with an itch"! and so far 2021 has not been much of an improvement. If you're like me you've been asking yourself "when will the world be normal again", and as a guitar player "when can I get back out and PLAY LIVE GIGS again? Right? Well as I pen this blog in late April, the answer for me was last Friday. It was a fill in gig for the Swamp Monsters, a band I'd never heard of. They played a lot of Zydeco/Creole and Tex/Mex tunes, many I'd never...

Best Replacement Speaker For Fender 68 Custom Twin Reverb Amp

Whew! We made it. This is the last installment on the series of speaker upgrades for Fender's awesome "drip-edge" Custom 1968 re-issue series of amps. This blog will focus on the big daddy of the bunch the Twin Reverb. This is a seriously cool amp, and I have some serious deja vu going on as I think about this amp ... because it is SO much like the amp I carried to hundreds of gigs in my first high-school band! Yep, that's little-boy me, with my JBL equipped Twin Reverb that literally...

Best Replacement Speaker For Fender 68 Custom Pro Reverb Amp

Howdy gang!So this week we continue looking at the possibilities for improving the tone of the already awesome sounding "drip-edge" 1968 Fender re-issues. If ya have not already, you might want to head over to my blogs on the 1968 Custom Princeton Reverb and Deluxe Reverb. This week we will look at the interesting 1968 Custom Pro Reverb. Why do I call it "interesting"? Well, because, while it is using the Pro Reverb moniker, the Pro has NEVER been in this configuration ever before! So, same old...

Best Replacement Speaker For Fender 68 Custom Deluxe Reverb Amp

Hello again fellow gear-heads! So, LAST WEEK we started a four-part series on the best replacement speakers for Fender's latest re-issue series the "drip-edge" 1968 amps. We are going from smallest to largest, and so this week we will be discussing the best replacement speaker for the '68 Custom Deluxe Reverb amp, which produces about 22-watts via a pair of 6V6 tubes and feeds it to a single 12" speaker, ie: a formula that is proven like none other. Like every other Fender "Deluxe" model, this one is a...

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