Set Up Your DIY Stratocaster Kit. With Billy Etheridge from Accu-Tech Guitars

You just finished building that strp kit. You are proud now. You want to configure it. Pay attention. I'm Jin Kasses. I want to come back and talk to you about the $65 guitar kit I made a while ago. of answers and a lot of great comments and a lot of great suggestions, so I wanted to go back to a professional, a luier guitarist, did I say yes, okay, and talk about some of these questions and suggest that he is more of a guitar

tech

nician than not No No I build

guitars

, a guitar

tech

nician, well, the professional is.

I would like to introduce you to Billy ESD and the name of

your

guitar company is Acutech guitar Repair Acutech Guitar Repair Billy, how many years have you been doing this? Well, it started in 1968. So it's been there for quite a while, yeah, and it's been a lot of fun, so some of the questions that came up when I built the guitar and first of all, no, I'm not a professional, I was improvising We had a lot of fun and learned a lot as we went along, so one of the first questions a lot of people said was about the tremolo, so what would be the standard for something like that if it was moved back half an inch or not?

Because I know those screws or well no, there's no set distance, it depends on the top plate you have 330 seconds of play on the back and the top plate, so what we want and I think so, go back a little bit further. so let's ah here let's see now everything's okay so we've got this pretty much so it floats okay for the moment mhm and now we're going to come back and start okay so now do it and that Claw is back or you're going to tighten the claw back in a little mhm little by little and then you run it until you get the space between the bottom of the bridge plate and the top.

They are patient and time-consuming, yes, yes, it takes a long time. I deal here and it takes a little bit of patience because it's balance, you know, I wouldn't have thought this was a big deal and it seems more like a finesse and having the knowledge that a professional has on an ongoing basis. anest something like this well yeah after a while you know a lot of things as far as measurements uh and we have the right fit we have the right fit in the back okay everything looks good and the springs are located on the uh, on the edge. block, uh, it's a matter of preference, okay, it's that some people use five strings, uh, springs, uh, some people use two that are very, very heavy, uh, some use three, but the springs themselves come in different degrees of tension, uh, uh, tension exactly like that, um, yeah.

It's all just a PR thing and this will work, this works the same way, man, I learned a lot just from that, there were several things that needed to be corrected, so we removed the bridge completely, took it back, readjusted the spring. I put a cleat on it and within a matter of, I guess it was about 10 or 15 minutes, we had a floating adjustment up and running, uh, right adjustment, Floating Tri, that was the main thing that I noticed that I got wrong because of course, the guitar came. There were no instructions to fully seat the bridge correctly, so the first thing was to back it up to where it would float properly and then notice myself going back and forth between adjusting the cleat on the back and even adjusting how much tension did you have on the bridge itself?

On strings, you have to work back and forth between the tension of the strings and the tension of the springs in the back to get. about a 330 second height on the back of the bridge, that's how, that's how Fender, oh, very cool, the next thing you started looking at was the correct pickup height, again, that's kind of what which I have no idea, but you We were able to show us the height adjustments on the pickups and how, and I realized that you were showing us how the string works. You can see how much more vibration you have in the tension towards the neck compared to closer to the bridge.

Most of the time,

your

bridge pickup will wind a little warmer than the neck and middle pickup, and there's a reason for that: because the elliptical movement of the string on these two pickups is greater than here. you can see it, you see it, but look here, you see, you see a lot of blinded vibration here, but not much here, so it has to be harder to correct to capture the positive side of the bridge. Mhm, another thing I was told I did wrong was that I had put a bead of glue on before attaching the nut and several people told me what a big mistake, which you will regret.

You see it? like a big deal or not, I can take them all off, it doesn't matter, ok I'm just a kid, look when you're putting a nut on, what you want to avoid is having it fall off while you're changing strings. Now, most of the time, I recommend people change strings one at a time, okay, you never run into that situation, but inevitably you know that for some reason I need to remove the guard or something. to take the strings completely, so all I use is a little bit of aliphatic glue, meaning wood glue, okay and just several small dots and just put it on there, clean up behind it that way when you go to take it. you just pick up a block of wood a couple of times and it comes out, makes sense to me.

Okay, now with these pickups, after adjusting them, they seem to work fine, but now you can buy much better pickups. Compared to what comes in the AB kit, I'm sure there is a wide variety though in terms of you can get anything, you get what you pay for or you can handcraft pickups depending on how much you want to spend and how good be I want to send, but I'm sure a lot too, even with these with proper tuning, you seem to get a pretty decent sound, absolutely yes, so another question that came up was about the shielding on those pickups, right, when is it necessary? ?

Shield or how do you know if a guitar should be protected? Oh, it'll tell you, just plug it in once. Yes, today. Shielding is something that is addressed. You will see a small piece of aluminum foil on the back. from a security guard or something and that's okay and sometimes it works most of the time, it's really not okay, it doesn't give you the peace of mind that you really need and that's okay, so why is it important? get rid of all that static noise, well it affects the tone of the guitar ok it interferes ok it's what it does so you want to get as much of the 60 cycle hum and interference noises so that the notes you you're playing ring ring right uh if you want if you want to say something about the shield right now okay, so you have nothing to talk about yeah, no, there's nothing here, you're, you're here Loc in Virginia, but you've worked with folk

guitars

from probably everyone.

Well, the country, the country, okay, it's the website, the best place to contact you, if so, and I'll put a link below to their website. I'll even show it here at the bottom of the screen too if you want to contact Billy as well. Would you ever consider going back and maybe doing some other guitar tips? Oh, I'd love to do it, maybe. a regular session where we talk about something and address questions or comments that people have Billy. I really appreciate you being on the show. I really appreciate the help with the guitar and I'm excited to see what else I can learn. and people here can learn too, I really appreciate that.

I hope you come back a little more. Oh, certainly, absolutely fine, thank you. I will be happy to thank you again. If you have any ideas or suggestions, drop them in the comments section below and consider. by subscribing to the site too and give us a like if you like the show and see you soon. How was it? I hope you were recording.