Mispositioned frets? (PICTURES!!!)

[Jumble Jumble]

The biggest issue with the neck pup being turned around is putting the magnets out of phase when used together. Although is some cases it can produce cool sounds,which was a trick used by Gary Moore and many others.

Turning the pickup round won't make the pickup out of phase. You have to actually wire it the other way round for that.

 

[Death by Uberschall]

The biggest issue with the neck pup being turned around is putting the magnets out of phase when used together. Although is some cases it can produce cool sounds,which was a trick used by Gary Moore and many others.

Turning the pickup round won't make the pickup out of phase. You have to actually wire it the other way round for that.

Ummm, I could be wrong, but I believe the North/South will make a difference.

 

[Cagey]

It does within the pickup, but not in the pickup's overall orientation.

 

[Death by Uberschall]

But it does make a difference when both pickups are played together.  :icon_scratch:

 

[Cederick]

Anybody looked at the fret closeup?

 

[Death by Uberschall]

I did, hard to tell without a fret ruler laid on top. But just from studying the picture, it almost looks as if the fret spacings are in pairs. Meaning two side by side are spaced the same, then the gap gets smaller or bigger for the next two depending on which direction you go, and so on. What I'm looking at is the shape of the perceived "box" the strings and frets make visually when looking at them together, if that makes sense.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

But it does make a difference when both pickups are played together.  :icon_scratch:

Nope. You can't switch the phase of a humbucker by turning it around. The clockwise coil is still at the north pole and the anticlockwise coil is still at the south (or whichever way round it is). You can only switch the phase if you remove the magnet and put it back in the other way round.

 

[Dan025]

The biggest issue with the neck pup being turned around is putting the magnets out of phase when used together. Although is some cases it can produce cool sounds,which was a trick used by Gary Moore and many others.

Turning the pickup round won't make the pickup out of phase. You have to actually wire it the other way round for that.

Ummm, I could be wrong, but I believe the North/South will make a difference.

unless you put the pickup in upside down you wont effect that. you can reverse the magnet itself though.

 

[riverbluff]

From that picture it actually looks pretty darn good.  If one of those was the original mis-positioned fret I'm impressed.  I'll say this, no matter what guitar you buy, there is always the possibility that there have been corrected mistakes.  It is up to the integrity of the builder to point it out to the buyer.

I'd have to say, give it a try and if you like it, then I would ask for a bit of compensation for the "fixed flaw" and then, in the immortal words of Ricky Bobby "never mention it again" (ie... be happy with the guitar and don't obsess about "is it really perfect or did I make a bad decision")

V/R
Bill

 

[DLD]

Could be an optical illusion. I ordered side dot size fret markers and the front of the headstock. I take it out of the box and think. damn, they are smaller than on the sides, they screwed it up. I measured it and they are the same size exactly. Given that there is more wood surrounding the fret dots on the fretboard face it seems to visually make them appear smaller...

 

[Tony Raven]

Here's a close up of the thing ...

Oh... crud. Okay, maybe it IS an optical illusion -- hey, stuff happens, & I've just watched a program by mentalist Derren Brown & now I'm not totally certain of anything :confused4: -- but my gut reflex is that the spacing suddenly tightens up at 22-23, almost as if the builder skipped a notch on the ol' ruler... or crowded the last two frets in to make up for a "minor" mismeasure. By eyeball, the tang slots shoulda been cut right about where the leading edges are.

Now, I do have an old Cort 24-fret where any half-blind monkey could see that #24 is clearly flat, but given the closeness of those notes up there, & the somewhat randomising nature of strings, it doesn't sound any worse than the dead-on 24s I have. It's more a visual distraction than a tonal disaster... something I could maybe overlook in a $200 guitar.

But... well, look back at the photo you posted that's sighted from down past the bridge. If you run your vision down the neck from the headstock end up toward the bridge, all of a sudden the "illusion" is that the neck itself suddenly curves up at you past #22. My bet is that, if you were to sight right down the fret-tops, it'd look like there's about zero gap between #22 & #23.

 

[LushTone]

It seems accurate enough in this new picture. In appearance anyway, you should demand a picture with measurements before you accept it.

Did he admit to a fix? Or was it an 'optical illusion' in the first pictures?

 

[Cederick]

I get my money back  :hello2:

And he will make sure to make the frets right in the future, haha.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

Great. You did the right thing. He can sell that guitar to someone now, with full disclosure, and you can get the guitar you wanted somewhere else.

I'm glad he didn't dig his heels in over the refund, that's how a professional behaves.

 

[Cagey]

I get my money back  :hello2:

And he will make sure to make the frets right in the future, haha.

Good for you!

Unfortunately, probably bad for somebody else. He's not going to throw that instrument away, and if he wanted to fix it he already would have.

 

[Cederick]

Actually I don't think he will sell it at all since he said "at least it looks good on picture" and knows it's unfunctional.
I'm not sure if his earlier guitars was that way too, but I cannot see any problems with those.
Mine was his first customer order, so I guess he was excited about it and maybe rushed the whole thing a bit too much.

Anyway, I don't give up on this guy because he's nice and he probably learned his lesson, and will look over his technique when making fret slots.
I'll go with Warmoth for this guitar design for now tho, and when I see that he has made some more guitars for other people, I might return to get a relatively cheap neckthrough guitar later on, I'll go for some Rhoads-like V that time I guess.

 

[Cagey]

That's a very charitable attitude, and it sounds like he's being reasonable. I tend to doubt that's a first effort - it really is a fine-looking piece. You don't build stuff like that right off the bat. I suspect it was the 24 fret neck that threw him for a loop. At 21 frets, like a typical Strat, none of those flaws would have shown up. I'm sure he knows where he tripped, and since he acknowledges it there's no need to beat up on him. Good on him for taking responsibility.

 

[Cederick]

It's not his absolute first effort, but it's the first customer order.
Here's a look of his earlier works, which he made for himself as practice:
http://www.m-a-s.se/gitarr/gitarrgalleri/gitarrgalleri.htm
Cannot see anything weird about any of those frets.
I really like the green strat on the bottom! It looks like some gem or magical stone haha :glasses10:

 

[Cagey]

That's a sharp guitar, and I can see why you'd trust him to build something. You'll notice, though, that that's a 22 fret neck. Perhaps going to a 24 fret for you was outside his experience. It happens.

For instance, a buddy of mine had a custom guitar built up from scratch by a talented builder and had a similar issue...

You can't really tell from those pictures, but that's a 22 fret neck that was deliberately built to be a 21 fret neck. Buddy said "No! That's not what I asked for!" So, the guy somehow managed to tack on an extra fret at the very heel of the neck. You could probably knock it off just by yelling at it. Point is, when you're dealing with custom builders and asking for things out of the ordinary, you have to expect some anomalies. You don't have to take them, but a little forgiveness is sometimes in order.

However, in your case, the guitar might be unusable. In the above case, it was fine. Just less than ideal structurally.

Incidentally, that thing is made of about 8 different exotic woods and has some solid gold and jewels embedded/inlaid in it, and all that fanning on the back is Walnut in Curly inlay. I don't have any better pictures. Definitely a unique piece. There's Maple, Purpleheart, Ebony, Walnut and I don't remember what else in there. Weighs about 7,629 pounds. He named it "Gizmo", and the upper rear bout has an inlay of the little beast juggling a series of different colored Linde Star sapphires. Why? Nobody knows. Active EMGs. Some kind of bizarre pushbutton switching dingus. And, of course, the dreaded Floyd.

 

[Cederick]

Haha that was a cool guitar.