Recent content by Mr. B

Lately there have been dozens of postings with obviously fake Seymour Duncan pickups from China on Ebay. I filed a report on several of them because I hate to think that a lot of buyers are going to be taken advantage of. In every case Ebay's finding was that the counterfeit product "didn't...

Looks like Ibanez decided to add a tiny bit of bling to the TMB100 and charge an extra 200 dollars this year. They have added a ash veneer top and some binding. Other than that, it is the same bass. No pickup improvement, no improvement to the active circuit, no added versatility, no upgraded...

All the online retailers are playing up their "great deals" like they really have something to offer, but I have yet to find any example of a price that isn't still so high it's insulting. For example, a Mexican made Fender P/J Bass is now "50 dollars off", and is only $800 instead of $850. That...

I have had the set installed for a month or so, so I thought I would post my review of the pickup set. I have the Occult Classic set in a 26.5 scale Ibanez RG with Swamp Ash body and Maple neck. I had the Ionizer set in the guitar previously and thought they were great, but maybe a bit too...

Just saw this from Casino Guitars. As a school teacher, I am about priced out of the guitar market at this point. Over the years I have really enjoyed buying and selling different guitars to try out. Close to a thousand now for a Made-in-Mexico Fender, 500+ for a Squier or Epiphone, a...

I need help expanding the practice amps I have for a student Guitar Club at my high school. (Full-on Rock-n-Roll Electric Guitar club, not acoustic classical guitar) My favorite amps to use for that class are the older Roland Micro Cubes. They take up very little space on the counter, they...

I have gone a bit crazy for Short Scale Basses lately. Here is my take on the four in the title: Fender Mustang: Great feeling neck, although there is a bit of neck dive. Pickups are standard Fender PJ sound. Nothing spectacular. I have replaced them with Duncan vintage PJ versions, so that is...

I've been cleaning and checking setups and restringing my guitars all morning, and I was just wondering "What if" I could only pick one guitar model, and it was all that was available. Which guitar model would I pick? Meaning that if you picked a Tele, you couldn't also have a strat...

I have replaced 3 sets of Jazz bass and PJ bass pickups lately with full sets from Seymour Duncan. On each Jazz bass pickup, the wiring lead comes out the "wrong" side of the pickup requiring you to bend the wires back under the pickup to get to the controls cavity to be soldered. Is this...

I may have gotten myself into an impossible situation here. I have really been enjoying shredding on 7 and 8 string guitars lately, so when an older 9-string Ibanez RG showed up at GC for a good price, I grabbed it. The guitar is fantastic, but the pickups are god awful. I mean, if you were...

The Virtual Hot Bridge and Virtual Neck just showed up on Ebay. They aren't mine, but I hear people wishing they were still made pretty often. thought I would point it out...

I'm a relatively new bass player, but long time guitar player. I bought an older, beat up Squier Vintage Modified Jazz bass (with Duncan Designed pickups) to keep at school for the students to play on during guitar club. I never left it there because I have had so much fun playing it myself. I...

I'm wondering if anyone has owned or installed pickups in the guitars with the newer woods that Ibanez and others are using now enough to get a feel for what works and what does not work. After thousands of pickup swaps in hundreds of guitars over the years, I have a feel for what usually works...

Got a new Kemper Profiler amp yesterday, and so far it appears to be the worst purchase I have ever made. Running it very simply from the mains out on the Kemper to two KRK Rokit Powered 6" studio monitors. Ignoring the Kemper crashing, another glitch that made all models sound like they were...

One easy, and greatly needed, mod for Ibanez Hum-single-hum RG and S-series guitars is to add a resistor (to ground) in parallel with the middle single coil's hot lead so it "sees" a 250k volume pot instead of the 500k it is actually connected to. Every Ibanez I have done this mod on sound...