Nos402

Luthier did NOT find anything wrong and said they sounded normal to him so I guess i'm just spoiled by the silence of digital models!

So first off let me say that I completely disassembled my JTV-69 to get the body refinished. In that process the black wire from the humbucker snapped off the circuit board on the pickup selector. I had my friend (who owns and runs a music store and knows what he's doing) solder it back on. Ever since then I've felt like the mag pickups have more hum than they should, especially the humbucker. Now, truth is, I never use them as I only use the digital modeling, but I would like them as an option in case of emergency. The thing is, I'm not even *sure* there's anything wrong. I'm wondering if I'm just so used to the silence of the digital models and am scrutinizing extra hard since I know it was disassembled and had to have that wire re-soldered and such. I took it to Guitar Center today just to compare it to a cheap $79 HSS Squier Strat in terms of noise. Again, I *think* it seems a little noisier, especially the humbucker but i'm just not sure. Took another look inside at the electronics tonight, and nothing seems amiss. I was going to have my luthier take a look at it tomorrow to see if he could find anything obvious but he's not really familiar with electronics this complex. He's used to just regular old guitars. Just wondering if anyone had any ideas about it. The one thing that baffled me is that when I looked at the offical wiring schematic it shows "shield" and "black" going to W2 but I don't see a "shield". I see Black, Green, Red, White. Of course, I know very little about wiring and such.

2 problems with that: 1. let's say I have the volume pedal at 50%. Now I hit the footswitch and it turns the wah on and volume pedal OFF and now my volume is at 100%. 2. I'm using the EXP to control amp gain.

I can't see a way to do this. You can assign a switch to turn wish on or off bit as far as I can tell the only way to switch between exp1 and exp2 is with the toe switch (or an external exp pedal).

Unfortunately, it's headphones at home (not optimal I know) and direct to PA with in-ears live.

I like to have a "master" setlist for when I'm just flying by the seat of my pants and selecting guitars and amps on the fly. Currently, each bank is a single amp, with 4 flavors of that amp (usually 4 gradual increases in gain). I'm redoing this idea from scratch because I found that just isn't very usable or efficient for many reasons (some amps just don't have a huge usable gain range, etc.). My new potential idea is to have a single patch per amp model with the EXP-1 controlling the gain. One caveat I can see of this method is that you now pretty much can't use a Wah with that setup, unless you don't mind that you have to max out your gain to activate the wah (the EXP switch has to be pressed to MAX to activate the toe switch and go into EXP-2 mode). I don't use a lot of wah so no big deal. I can always have wah specific patches. I also would like suggestions on the best (in your opinion) general all-purpose FX setups to go along with this, including where in the signal chain you would put them. Again, my initial thought is Noise gate, overdrive/dist, comp/boost, Chorus, Phaser, Reverb. I comp/boost, chorus and phaser could go so many places in so many orders in the signal chain, that I'm not sure which I prefer. It's nice to have a comp/boost in case you need a little extra solo volume, but I also run my HD500 out into a separate volume pedal with an adjustable minimum volume to have a nice global control of that. I always have such a hard time getting all the volumes adjusted evenly for live use as well. I also like to be able to just turn the amp off via a foot switch to have it dry for acoustics and such from my Variax so I try to match all volumes to the bypassed volume as well. Any other ideas, opinions, etc. are welcome. Just brainstorming the best overall, all-purpose-general setlist ideas. Thanks!

And also, now I just hope any future improvements are available as retrofitted parts I can put in THIS body!

This was totally worth the trouble of disassembling/reassembling and voiding my warranty (which was probably out any way). The image doesn't come close to doing it justice either. We used a couple of different size flakes and it shimmers with an almost 3 dimensional holographic effect.

I have a friend who has offered to refinish my JTV-69 and I was just wondering how complicated it would be to disassemble and reassemble it so I can just get him the bare body to refinish.

I've played many Strats but not a lot of Teles. In the past I always used the Tele as the twangiest, a Strat as a good compromise between a Tele and Les Paul, and a Les Paul for the beffiest most overdriven. With this latest software release though, the Strat now seems way twangier than the Tele. The Tele seems bassier. Is this true to Strats in relation to Teles?