What guitar does Vood have his eye on?

[tot_Ou_tard]

I didn't want to hijack your for sale thread Vood.

http://www.thefret.net/showthread.php?p=93547#post93547

What guitar are you trying to finance?

Guitars - '89 Fender Strat Plus; '97 MIK Squier Strat; '00 Epiphone Dot w/ mega-wiring mods (http://duhvoodooman.com/musical/humbucker_mods/humbucker_mods.htm); '04 Epiphone Elitist LP Standard; '05 Fender Nashville Tele; '06 Epiphone '56 Goldtop; '06 Fullerton ST4; '71 Yamaha FG-300 Acoustic; '06 Fullerton Ventura Bass


My guess: an SG.

[just strum]

I don't know what he's buying, but his write up he is using would make someone looking for a set of drums buy that guitar.

I really like that color, but have no need for a Strat. Personally, I think it is under priced. However, at the BIN price of $125, I don't see it lasting more than a couple of hours.

Good luck DVM, looking forward to seeing the new acquisition.

[tot_Ou_tard]

I don't know what he's buying, but his write up he is using would make someone looking for a set of drums buy that guitar.

I really like that color
No kidding great color & great write-up.

He should freelance as an ad-copy writer.

It's amazing what $125 can buy you these days.

[warren0728]

definitely a great deal and a nice looking guitar...but my next guitar is gonna have p90s in it! :pancake:

ww

[tot_Ou_tard]

definitely a great deal and a nice looking guitar...but my next guitar is gonna have p90s in it! :pancake:

ww
P90s for me too, or maybe just one.

[duhvoodooman]

What guitar are you trying to finance?

My guess: an SG.
That's correct, Tot....if "SG" stands for Surf Green (http://www.thefret.net/showthread.php?p=90286#post90286)! :rockon:

[tot_Ou_tard]

That's correct, Tot....if "SG" stands for Surf Green (http://www.thefret.net/showthread.php?p=90286#post90286)! :rockon:
Ahh, I missed that thread Vood.

Surf's up!

[just strum]

Ahh, I missed that thread Vood.

Surf's up!

me too, before I clicked on the link, I envisioned

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h16/auroraohio/57stratsurfgreen002.jpg

Got the body style right.

[F_BSurfer]

DVM I think you will love the Xaviere for the price it was amazing as soon as insurance comes across I will have a couple back in my house

[duhvoodooman]

I love the Surf Green body/rosewood neck color combo, and those XV870's look like just amazing values. I moved a few used pedals recently, and assuming I can get the $125 I'm asking for the MIK Squier Strat, I'll have the price of admission on the Xaviere pretty well knocked.

[duhvoodooman]

OK, this is all you guys' fault! You sucked me into believing that the MIK Squier Strat is such a stone-cold, lead-pipe lock to sell quickly that I went ahead and ordered the Xaviere. So if it doesn't sell and the wife gets on my case about it, I'm pointin' her at all of YOU. And God help ya! :eek:

Seriously, I ordered it now so that I don't get my heart broken when the color sells out, which happened to me with a certain SX Strat at Rondo a while back. Not this time! Never let it be said that the ol' Voodoo Man doesn't learn from his prior mistakes. Momma drowned the stupid babies.... ;)

[just strum]

Well, to comfort you - you are not going where no man has gone before. Plus, I'm sure if it doesn't sell, tot will belly up.

[duhvoodooman]

Well, it's up on eBay (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=330262965622) now. So we'll see if my "ad copy" is as good as you & Tot say!

[SuperSwede]

So how many mods will this guitar get? ;)

[duhvoodooman]

So how many mods will this guitar get? ;)
Electronically, probably just THIS ONE (http://www.thefret.net/showthread.php?t=3355). Increases the total pickup variations from 5 to 10, including some very useful ones. Bridge-middle-in-series may be my favorite Strat tone, next to the neck pickup.

Might put graphite string trees on, too, but I'll see how the stock ones are first. If they squeak, they go....

[SuperSwede]

Hey thats pretty cool!

I´ve been thinking about a piezo system for my strat, electro/piezo mixed sounds so cool.

[duhvoodooman]

My new XV870 is on the UPS local delivery truck this morning! Hubba-hubba!! :dude: :rockon: :dude:

[sunvalleylaw]

Surf's up!! :AOK:

[tot_Ou_tard]

So has the purple guitar with the purple prose sold?

...& no matter what Strum sez, I am not bellying up to anything but the bar.

[just strum]

So has the purple guitar with the purple prose sold?

...& no matter what Strum sez, I am not bellying up to anything but the bar.

I can't believe it hasn't sold. Geez, $125 - belly up there Tot.

[duhvoodooman]

Nope, the Squier hasn't sold yet. But this showed up on the front porch about 2 PM today:

http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/full_front.jpg http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/body_front.jpg

http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/hs_front.jpg http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/full_rear.jpg

Will get to the commentary when I've had a bit more time to work it over.

[tot_Ou_tard]

Time to get that wide & deep 'verb going.

Strum: $125 here $125 there soon we're talking a tank of gas.

[M29]

Oh man I love the Out For Delivery stories:rockon:

Can't wait DVM can't wait:AOK:

Doh...I missed it already came...:thwap:


M29

[duhvoodooman]

A couple of more pics. The strings on the guitar were obviously pretty cheap and had a bit of corrosion, so while I was changing them, I decided to remove the pickguard and have a look underneath. The soldering/wiring looks pretty good, other than there being a lot of extra wire in there. Plenty of room for it in the cavity, though, so no big deal.

I thought I might find something amiss in there, because while position 2 is hum-cancelling, position 4 definitely is not. This strongly suggests that the factory swapped the positions of the bridge and middle pickups during installation. Measurement of the pickup impedances bears this out--the p'up currently in the neck position measures a bit higher than the other two, which agrees with description on the Guitar Fetish site. So I'll just swap those around and rewire the switch accordingly.

Scgmhawk reported that the tone controls on his XV870 had little effect above 4 or so, so I looked into that, while I was in there. The explanation is pretty straightforward--the pot tapers are swapped from what is generally used. The volume control is a linear taper, and the tone controls are both audio tapers, which is the opposite of what is typically used. This is what makes the tone pots so "one-sided" in their effect. However, this is a minor annoyance, so I'll change the pots around some other time. But it definitely looks like the Xaviere factory needs some remedial guitar electronics training.

The rosewood fretboard was very dry, so while I had the strings off, I cleaned and oiled that well. Looks a lot better now. The frets had some "factory crud" of some sort on them, and that cleaned up pretty well.

The only other minor defects I've found are that (1) the cut of the pickguard edge is a bit crude and needs to be trimmed/smoothed out in a few places, and (2) there are three small cracks in the finish between the electronics vacity and the neck pocket, but that's a common location for them, and it's covered by the pickguard anyway.

http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/electronics.jpg http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/body_cavity.jpg http://duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/XV870/finish_cracks.jpg

Don't want to create too negative of an impression with these small defects, however! None of these are serious, and GF/Xaviere seems to have gotten the big stuff right. The guitar plays well, the neck is nice, the p'ups have a nice, ringing vintage tone, and the overall fit and finish is much better than you'd expect from a $170 guitar. I have to play it a lot more to really give a more complete report on the guitar....

[Tone2TheBone]

Heck for what you payed for it that's a damn fine price for a pretty geetar. I just loves me some surf green. All that other stuff is penny ante. Make it your own and you'll love it.

ps - does the truss rod work? How do the pickups sound? They ought to sound pretty decent if they're the staggered vintage GFS pups.

[SuperSwede]

A really yummy surf green! You did good Voo !:)

[tot_Ou_tard]

All that other stuff is penny ante.
Perhaps, but it makes it really clear that I gotta learn to solder. Either that or talk Vood into (read pay) accepting any such order & giving it the once over before it reaches me.

[duhvoodooman]

Heck for what you payed for it that's a damn fine price for a pretty geetar. I just loves me some surf green. All that other stuff is penny ante. Make it your own and you'll love it.

ps - does the truss rod work? How do the pickups sound? They ought to sound pretty decent if they're the staggered vintage GFS pups.
Oh, yeah--these things are really quite minor, and overall the instrument is still a great value with many strong points. It's a very attractive guitar, as I think the photos show, and much of the "fit & finish" and component quality look to be very good. As I mentioned in my last paragraph of that "defects" post, the pickups sounded great--nice, bright, ringing vintage Strat tone, though I really haven't played it much yet. Seemed to have a pretty good "quack" in the 2 and 4 positions, even with the pickup installation mistake. But after confirming that everything was in working condition, I had the strings off in short order so that I could check out the pickup wiring, oil the dry neck and get a set of D'Addario 10's on it. And since I didn't have time last night to get into swapping the bridge & middle p'ups, the guitar isn't back "up & running" yet. So there's still a lot of playing that needs to happen before I can give a full report on the guitar's tone and playability. First impressions were definitely positive, though.

To Tot's point, however--even though the wiring stuff seems minor to me, such a mistake (1) really shouldn't happen, and (2) repairing it oneself is beyond the skills & knowledge of many guitar players. That would mean exchanging the guitar or bringing it to a tech for repair--hassles that most people don't want or expect with a new instrument. I sent an e-mail to Jay (the owner) at Guitar Fetish, pointing out the mistake and suggesting that he checks with the factory to see if this is how they are assembling these guitars systematically. It's very possible that ALL the XV870's are being wired this way! And since the pickup swap doesn't affect overall functionality of the guitar, it's a defect that is very likely to go unnoticed, once it occurs. Unless the final QC check specifically tests for hum-cancellation in the 2 and 4 switch positions, how would they know there's a mistake? BTW, the "hot" leads on the three pickups are all color coded (neck = white, middle = yellow, bridge = blue), so either somebody is color blind, untrained, or there's a bad work instruction floating around the factory!

Haven't checked the truss rod yet, Tone....

EDIT: Just heard back from Jay at GFS--an impressively speedy response!--and he (1) confirmed that the B and M pickups were swapped, and (2) said that he hasn't seen that defect before. So hopefully mine was just an isolated mistake. I also PM'ed Scgmhawk to ask if he had seen this same issue with the XV870 he recently bought....

[Tone2TheBone]

Perhaps, but it makes it really clear that I gotta learn to solder. Either that or talk Vood into (read pay) accepting any such order & giving it the once over before it reaches me.

I sincerely don't mean to sound like I'm discrediting anyone's ability to "make stuff right" on their own gear. I just know how competent Voo is so I know he'll get it all working properly. :)

....but yeah dude you need to learn how to solder too. :beer:

[marnold]

Soldering is not hard. If I can do it, anyone can. This DVD (http://terrydownsmusic.com/solder_video/soldervideo.html) gave me the skills/confidence I needed to try it.

[scgmhawk]

I just checked and actually my position 4 isn't noise canceling either, although it does seem to have "less noise" than 1, 3 and 5.

[duhvoodooman]

I just checked and actually my position 4 isn't noise canceling either, although it does seem to have "less noise" than 1, 3 and 5.
Yes, that sounds exactly correct. Position 4 doesn't actually sound exactly like 1, 3 and 5. There is some degree of noise cancellation from the RP/RW pickup down at the bridge. But it's physically too far away to have much effect on the neck p'up. That's the one generating the residual hum you can hear in position 4.

[duhvoodooman]

Update on my new XV870:

I swapped the bridge and middle pickups last night, and also rewired the switch to run the bottom tone control on the bridge and no control on the middle pickup, as Bloozcat has suggested. Also took the opportunity to clean up a rather sloppy cut-out job on the 3-ply pickguard; a few minutes with some fine sandpaper smoothed out all the rough looking spots. Reassembled it, put on a new set of 10's, and it's smokin' now! :AOK: :dude: :rockon: The guitar plays very well--I like the 12" radius neck a lot--and these GFS Vintage Alnico Staggers are a nice sounding pickup, with excellent clarity and top-end bite. And now that the fretboard has darkened up nicely with the oiling I did, the appearance of the guitar is really quite striking. I'll have to post a couple of new pics, to show it off.

While it will take time to demonstrate its durability, the quality of the finish on both the body and the neck looks very good. I haven't found any detectable finish blemishes at all. As I stated initially, the quality of the electronics seems very solid, and the hardware on the guitar is of much higher quality than I would have expected on an inexpensive instrument. The tuners, in particular, work very smoothly and hold tune well. Setup on the guitar was excellent, as well. I still need to check intonation, though it sounds pretty good by ear. The only adjustment I had to make was to slightly raise the low E string height at the bridge to get rid of some very slight buzz on a couple of frets. It was set a bit too low, considering the fairly flat neck radius.

I advised Jay at GFS that Scgmhawk's XV870, like mine, wasn't hum-cancelling at the #4 switch position, suggesting that the Xaviere factory might be systematically switching the bridge & middle pickups during assembly. I also mentioned to him that I found it odd that the volume pot on mine was a linear taper and the two tone pots were both audio taper. Though there's not a hard & fast rule for this, my experience is that most guitars use the opposite scheme--audio taper for volume (to better match how the human ear perceives volume change) and linear taper for the tone controls. As they stand, the pots in my XV870 are perfectly functional, but almost all the tone change happens between 1 and 5, and most of the volume change between 7 and 10. Jay is checking back with the factory on both the pickup swap error and the control pot taper issue. So hopefully my feedback to him on these minor quality issues can drive some improvement.

[ShortBuSX]

I dunno bout you DVM, I reckon itd be nice to be able to play it right out of the box, but all the tinkering, adjusting and tweaking is pretty damn fun too!
Sure beats gettin bored with it and THEN taking it all apart.
To me this only increases the perceived value.

[duhvoodooman]

I dunno bout you DVM, I reckon itd be nice to be able to play it right out of the box, but all the tinkering, adjusting and tweaking is pretty damn fun too!
Sure beats gettin bored with it and THEN taking it all apart.
To me this only increases the perceived value.
I tend to agree, especially when talking about an inexpensive instrument. You wouldn't want or expect to have to do this stuff on a $1200 American Strat, but on a sub-$200 guitar, it's all part of the "bonding" process. (Insert audio clip of "Getting to Know You" from The King and I here.) Then again, it's easy for me to say that, since I do most of my own work.

I want to stress again that, while I spent a lot of time in this thread discussing the "problems" and how to fix them, GFS/Xaviere got all the "big stuff" right with the XV870. It plays, sounds and looks good, and it's a great value for the $170 price tag. :AOK: All of this other stuff is detail work....

[ShortBuSX]

Then again, it's easy for me to say that, since I do most of my own work.

Yeah, but even if you didnt...a sub $200 guitar is great to learn on, or hone your skills.
If it werent for that $99 Squier Strat I got last year, and its wiring issues, I probably would still be intimidated with soldering.

[Tone2TheBone]

Cool beans. Now all you need is a Callaham block in that baby.

[Bloozcat]

C'mon, DVM...

You would have been going out of your mind if everything had been perfect and all you had to do was just play it....:D

Think of the torture...
I wonder what pots are in this thing...quarter size? Dime size? What value? 250k?, 500k? Audio? Linear? I've gotta check 'em with my VOM...What's the 5-way switch look like? And the cap...yeah, what kind of cap did they put in this thing, and what size?...

Aw hell...mayday, mayday, I'm goin' in....!! :poke:

(I always like to cast my characters in my little stories after myself...;) )

[duhvoodooman]

C'mon, DVM...

You would have been going out of your mind if everything had been perfect and all you had to do was just play it....
Sh-h-h-h-h!!! You're gonna let the cat out of the bag here, BC! :nono: The other Fretters are gonna figure out that I like working on guitars....and pedals....and amps....and....

[Bloozcat]

Sh-h-h-h-h!!! You're gonna let the cat out of the bag here, BC! :nono: The other Fretters are gonna figure out that I like working on guitars....and pedals....and amps....and....

Shoot....that cat's runnin' down the street with it's tail on fire...:rotflmao:

[duhvoodooman]

Because this string of postings is rather disjointed and a lot of it centers on me addressing a couple of minor problems with the guitar as received, I've started a new thread (in the Instruments/Other Brands forum, where it properly belongs) which will contain a proper review and updated photos. The photos are there already; working on the review next:


http://www.thefret.net/showthread.php?p=94351#post94351