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Post by blindwilly3fingers on Jul 26, 2019 21:54:16 GMT
Vincent who used to post on here reckoned the Squier bullets were good guitars. Not had the experience of them myself but I have a couple of Squire affinity strats both modified. I think with any budget brand you can get good ones and the odd lemon? It's finding one you like and one that fits you. We all have our own ideas of what is good.
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Post by LeoThunder on Jul 27, 2019 5:30:08 GMT
Building a Strat' is not a science. That was the whole purpose of its design. It was meant to be made cheaply by unskilled people. Today's machines do a better job than experts of the 50s. I wonder about fretwork. Since I experienced more irregularity on Harley Benton than on Ibanez, I suppose there is still some cost factor at work in this area. What remains at the bottom of the price range are cheap materials: will the wood move more and make the instrument less playable? It would be a concern in the long run, more than out of the box. Same thing for saddles, tuners or frets. Shielding is probably absent too but the rest of the electronics is just fine. Pick-ups are just wire around magnets. No witchcraft here either and while I suppose cheapest NoName things will scrap a few more cents by using less of lesser wire (that ST-20 or the cheapest Vision Strats sound funny), surely Squier by Fender wouldn't risk its name doing this. Pick-ups on the Bullet are good enough to be a matter of taste, not an objective flaw. They will sound modern, not "vintage", will probably have higher output and less definition as a result. This thing sounds better than any muddy Les Paul to me. Tuners are of the simple sort: I would like to see a review of 20 Bullets, looking for disparity in fretwork quality and judging how good of a set-up they could be given (out of the box state doesn't count).
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Post by LeoThunder on Jul 27, 2019 13:17:50 GMT
I would suspect such tuners can run dry (supposing they'd ever seen oil) and corrode, adding friction to the game and making tuning a little rougher. Those on my Jazz Bass, open, do not seem to be lubricated at all, so maybe nothing is needed? I did put oil into the 38 year old vintage/Kluson style tuners of my Aria Pro II (there's a little hole) and found it made no difference at all. They always worked fine. Those on my ST-62's, both apparently of the same type, have a lower ratio (15:1 instead of 16:1) and are harder to turn. If the worm is soft, maybe it can become irregular? Can these things slip at all under the pull of strings? Or is it just one more of those fantasised quality hierarchies guitar players, who surely seem to think they are the most intelligent musicians on earth, able to judge the quality of tuners by looking at them without even trying them, like to believe in?
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