The Your Not Good Enough For That Guitar Argument

The Know Your Gear podcast. Hey everyone, welcome to Know Your Gear podcast, episode 450. That's a milestone I think, 450? I feel so, I feel like so. I want to go into a small apology about last week's show. Last week, somebody called me out in the comment section saying that I always say I don't talk politics, yet that I wore a Cobra shirt and Cobra has been responsible for attacking GI Joes for years. So this week, I wore the GI Joes shirt in solidarity to show that I'm on both sides of the Cobra GI Jo fight for tons of reasons, tons of reasons. I mean, I got a deep down say I'm probably more so with the Joes, but you know, the Cobra's got the cool colors. And as a kid, you know, I know this isn't guitar talk, but it's just something I want to say. As a kid, I never realized this, but you know, there was, I saw this thing that said that in psychology, like some kids collected more of the villains of their toys and some of the heroes of their toys. And I always collected more villains and I thought, oh, does that mean I like, I like villains? And then it said that no, it could go either way. That basically it means that, you know, you love the hero aspect of being like outnumbered or overtaken. So I always remember having more Cobra's than GI Joes. I never thought about it before. I had more stormtroopers than I had rebels. So but I want to let you know officially that I'm with the GI Joes and the rebels more so than the Empire and Cobra. If that makes everybody happy or if that makes anybody happy, I don't know. Let's get into guitar stuff. So let's start with a bunch of stuff that I missed last week. This one came from Amanda last week. This was from Petal Power FX. Petal Power is a fantastic pedal company. You guys know them. They make Marshall in a box type pedals plus some other pedals and there's some of the best Marshall in a box pedals on the market. They are amazing guys and they're in Venezuela. So the pedals are made in Venezuela. So it says, OK, what are my expectations of gear sales in 2026? Will they improve compared to last year? You know, I don't know. You know, it's one of those things like I just want to let you know. I don't want you to think that I have some kind of, well, first of all, I know you don't know. I don't have a crystal ball or anything, but I don't have any secret data or anything I can pull from. But I can tell you that I do. I'm planning this year to do more, I guess, on film discussion interviews where I've had a lot of interview discussions last year. Probably more so than ever with companies. Overall, the industry, the vibe I got was everyone was up. Numbers were up. I heard it over and over again from people from guitar companies and pedal companies, more so guitar pickup companies and amp companies than pedal companies. But they would say if we were flat in 2025, in other words, if they did the same sales in 2025, 2024, 2024, they were going to consider it up with all the stuff that's going on. And all of them said the same thing. They were up. Sweetwater was up. So, you know, they told me unofficially. So I guess it's, is it off the record? It wasn't off the record. It's just unofficially. They were up last year. So sales were up. I'll just go unofficially. Unofficially, you know, a lot of companies were up, whether it would be like Friedman or Synergy or DeMarzio, just, you know, companies I know their numbers were up. I got the impression. I'm not telling you their specific numbers. The throwback pickups were up. And again, you know, a lot of people said record sales for Black Friday. A lot of companies echoed that. Now, that sales does, you know, obviously with higher expenses with inflation, with the tariffs, all that stuff. Did profits go down? I don't know. I never had the discussion again. That's too far into the weeds for me to ask. And if they're not offering the information in a way that I could share with you, then, you know, it's not even worth talking about. So in general speaking, because that's something I ask. And so, you know, when I ask those questions to those, to these companies and there's like I said dozens and dozens of them, I will ask like, hey, just how's it going out there in the, in the idea that when I'm talking to the audience on Friday, you know, what can you impart on me? And I really don't care about any one company's specific answer. I just kind of get the sense. By the way, Guitar Center seemed to be up too for the year as well. So again, so back to Petal Pal, it looks like 2025 was up for the whole part. Now, of course, there was companies that closed in 2025 and there was companies who told me they were down. And so it is what I told you before that I think happens always after a boom market. You have this, you have this settling where again, everyone wins in the boom market. So everyone's top selling, everyone's killing. And, and that's why you don't want to get too, too cocky because the fact that just because you're doing great, if everyone's doing great, that's really not a sign of anything for the most part. That's a, that's a really, that's a fluke, right? You don't want to count on that as being the main thing. And a lot of companies, I think, got caught thinking this was going to be, you know, I don't know, a forever boom, but they definitely thought sales were not going to, it was not going to get as aggressive out there. It's been pretty aggressive out there. You have to really work for our money right now. It's a really tough one. It's a, it's a buyer's market again for the most part. So high quality, having a better pricing helps and also having a community behind you. And that's really nice to support you too. So there's a lot of the companies that build communities over the time with COVID. And I think that's where I see a lot of wins as well. You see a lot of companies that just decided during COVID, they were going to reach out, hang out with us and talk to us. And, and I think they, they bonded with us as guitar players, you know, it's easy to, it's easy to see somebody and go, hey, look, they like what I like and they do something I enjoy. So, and I like what they do. So I think that's the whole, but 2026 what I picture, I don't know. I really don't know. I wish I had some kind of insight or at least I could wish I was holding some secret behind, you know, and then maybe, you know, kind of give you some, some insight on that. I think one of the cautionary tales I have is that since so many companies did not seem to feel any pain in 2025, the cynical part of me thinks there's some pain to come in 2026. Sometimes, you know, this, you know, the storm comes in. I've said this before, it's a stupid analogy, but I like it. It's like when the wave comes in, it hits the beach first, right? And then it hits the mainland and then it hits the hills and then it hits the mountains. And sometimes, you know, when you ask the people in the hills, how's the, you know, how's it going? They're like, I haven't seen any water. We're great. And you're like, but really the mainland's flooded and the beach is flooded. So it could be coming towards your way. See what I'm saying? So I would, I would say to Petal Powell, you need to work it. That's what I'm going to saying. And you know, this is not the time to rest on your laurels. I laurels. I would, I would definitely, if I was in a pet, if I was a pedal, if I was running a pedal company, a pickup company, a guitar company, an amp company right now, I would want to be number one in quality. I'd want to be number one in social media presence. I'd want to be number one in prices. And I know that sounds all impossible, but it's not impossible to strive for those things because I think it's not that no one's going to buy. I just think that people are really going to scrutinize their spending and they're going to continue to do that. Not only from the inflation and all the other stuff. I just think guitar players as a whole, we talked about last week with the avalanche of Harley Benton's and inexpensive guitars and guitar stores and stuff. I just think a lot of people have run through a lot of stuff at a much faster speed than we expected. And that's what I'm afraid of is that where you could have enjoyed years and years of us curious guitar players trying the next thing, you know, like, oh, now I tried this pedal. I want to try another pedal. I want to try another pedal. Instead, what you did is you put them in super speed during COVID and they bought all the pedals and now it's hard for them to justify those extra experiences. So I don't know. But on that note, pedal, pal, I think, I think you make great pedals and I think you should promote harder as I always tell you, promote harder, you know, my best advice. And I just, I know this isn't really great for the show, but hopefully it'll be great for pedal, pal. My best advice to companies out there, partner with people who love your product. You know, I may have told this story. I'm going to tell it real quick. It's just because I like it because Shana said it and it's just a great, a great thing. I was talking to somebody. I'm not going to say the name. I was talking to a company and I was sitting there, you know, we're talking and they were bragging to me. I don't want to say bragging is the right word. Boasting to me about the fact that they don't pay any social media. They don't pay for any artists. They don't pay anything to anyone. And I was like, okay, okay, and they don't give any free products. In fact, they're to kind of quote them. They were like, I've only given away two free instruments in the entire history of the brand. And, and it was to to an artist, you know, to and it was like, and he specifically said this kind of giveaway too much because I really like this brand. I don't know if it's a person's, you know, but he's he was saying this artist had bought so many instruments off him that he gave him one for free finally, right? And, and I was like, okay, and at first my first take was, yeah, that makes sense. Right. Why should he said this is what I'm, he said, you know, he's like, you don't give away your work for free. He's like, why should I give away my work for free? And I actually understood and actually was like, yeah, I totally get that, you know, you know, you know, kind of when companies brag like we don't give any product out to artists and we don't do anything with artists. We don't do anything social influencers. And I always thought like, yeah, that's, that's good. That's integrity, right? Like basically, if you don't want to buy their product, you don't, you know, you shouldn't have to. And then Shauna, I think, threw a huge grenade, no pun intended because of G.I. Joe shirt. And when she said it, I just couldn't unring that bell. She said, well, do you pay for advertising and magazines and other places? And they were like, yeah, she goes, so you pay people who, who don't like your product. Just want your money to advertise. You don't support the people who are already loving your product. Her argument wasn't that his idea was wrong. Her argument was why not just put that money that you're giving to advertisers into the people who already love what you do. She's like, it just seemed like a better source. And I thought that was an interesting way of looking at it. So to my, to pedal pal, that's what I'm saying is like, you know, instead of sending a pedal to a channel out there who might, you know, do a video of it. Try to find someone who already likes your pedal and maybe send him a message and say, hey, look, I got a new something coming out. And I got to tell you on a side note, you know, I've had a crazy week as you guys, some of you know, because, you know, I was, had a video this week and obviously going viral, which is not always the intended purpose. And I know some people are like, sure it isn't, but here's the deal. When you work really hard to make videos like I do and you spend a week, two weeks researching and doing a video to see a video where you just have to talk about, you know, some crappy situation, basically do as well as your best top videos or beat your best top videos. It's not really the best feeling, right? That's not what I want. You know, I want my best work to be the best content. But anyways, I had a, so if you guys don't know what I'm talking about, I'm talking about the instance where I got the letter served to me and stuff. I had something happen. I had something happen. Now that you guys super supportive, everybody was super nice and kind. I appreciate that. Please try to be kind to all parties in this. And, you know, it's always don't take the pitchforks and the torches. That's not the situation. I was just out there protecting myself. We'll see how that goes. I'll let you know. Um, but what I was shocked to see was how many companies had reached out to me immediately after that to text in me and called me and, and just showed support, you know, of all the years that they've known me and like they're like, they just want to say things. And, um, one particular person, which I'm not going to name, but you'll probably figure out in a month, he, uh, he reached out and he said something that just made my whole day, made my whole week. Uh, he was like, I know you, right? We're talking. He goes, I know what you really like and I know what you really want. And he goes, I'm going to do something really cool for you. And I go, what? And he goes, I'm going to let you see some secret product that's coming out in the future before anybody else. And I'm like, well, really? And he's like, and I'm going to actually let you leak it to your, or send, you know, let your audience know ahead of time. It's not a lot ahead of time, but I get to see something and that is super exciting. See, and that's what, that's what I'm trying to tell you. You know what? I've never had a financial deal with this person, but I can tell you right now, no matter what the, the situation you could in a business, nothing's cooler. That as a guitar freak, as a gear freak, nothing's cooler than being to see something before anyone else and then also get to share it before anyone else. That, that, that's the win, man. That's, that's fun. So do that. Find the people who love your product and work with them. Inspire them. Give them a deal. You know, tell them, hey, look, I can't send you pedals, but I can give you a smoking deal because I know you care about this product. I see you bought our last one. We got a new one. We'd like to give you some kind of deal. I think the community needs more of that. I think more and more and more of that. And that's just my, my shout out for that. Okay, let's jump to next subject, our topic. Steve Wright says, Hey, you cracked me up. This is from last week, so he probably doesn't mean today. He says, there's a rocker verb synergy module coming out. What other modules might be coming out down the pike? There is a rocker verb. So it was leaked at the name show. So synergy has a rocker verb, two channel module with a rocker verb and a dark terror terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, Boy, hard to say normally. And then I got this cough drop. So yeah, that's coming out. I believe, I don't know when that's coming out. I heard unofficially when it comes out and now I can't remember. I have a date in my head and unfortunately it's for something else. So they have another product. So I don't know when that comes out. However, I will tell you that on a side note that the new orange module is going to be here tomorrow. Can I, yeah, I can say that. I was like, okay, we see it. It's just a loner, but I'll get to try it early out. So that's really cool. And other modules, there's another, that's an exciting module for those of you who are interested. And the synergy modules right now, I think the other, there's another module that's going to even be a bigger, like, pow factor. And that one, I don't know when that's coming out. That's been teased for a while now. All I know is it exists and it's going to be awesome. It's just, they're pushing out. It'll be the probably the, I would say the most or the second most exciting module they've ever launched. So it'll be a big deal. So the good news is when that module comes out, I don't think you'll have to worry about finding out when it comes out because it'll be big news. So anyways, so that's the deal with that. So good question. Let's see, what else? Oh, okay. So this is, I don't even have to say this name. So a lot of K cry, cry curator, curator, cry curator 7471 says, writing myself to be booed out of the chat. What new base gear are you excited about this year? I'm excited about, well, the only the only piece of base gear I'm excited about, I don't know if it's even going to come out this year or ever. But it was slightly leaked. And I got a patron reached out and told me about the leaks. So let me just tell you. So Kiesel guitars, Jeff Kiesel had mentioned apparently in a Kiesel chat group that they were going to make a 32 inch scale base. If you guys know, I have a 32 inch scale Warwick base and I have a 32 inch scale, Stuham base, and that's my preferred base by far is 32 inch scale. I do have a 30 inch scale base. I like it. But 32 inch, what they call medium scale base. My favorite base by far. That's what I play. And I love my Warwick. So it's amazing, but I would love to have a 32 inch scale. 8 8 8 8 8 2 is what it basically would be. So I did because I have the end obviously with those guys. So I did mention to him right away. I said, Hey, there's a rumor going on that you guys did a 32 inch scale base. And they said, Yeah, Jeff leaked it. So I'm like, Okay, but they said that we don't know when it comes out. So I said, can I put an order in for one? And so I put an order in for one. Got my phone. I was going to show it to you. It's, it's, we were, and I did this color green. I did the, the, this is all of green, but it's on an army green that I'm pointing to. I did an army green one with one pickup, like a music man, 32 inch scale base. I'm super excited if that ever gets launched. But, you know, I don't know when they, they're going to launch it or if it actually gets launched. And it's the thing about sometimes when stuff gets leaked, just like a NAM sometimes products get leaked and then they never exist because. Sometimes it's an intentional leak to see how we all react to it. It happens a lot in this industry. They show you a product and it's really just like when you go to the car shows and they show you, you know, a future product. They're really just kind of getting some social media hype and they're getting some hype, but also they're, they're also looking to see how people react. And more importantly, not in Kiesel's case, but in other cases, like how dealers react, right? In Kiesel, they need actual customers to get excited, but it's, but, but, so what I'm trying to say, oh yeah, it's just basically if it gets excited. So I don't know, maybe if you see them tell them can't wait for 32 scale base. So, all right, some of that was some of the last week stuff. Let's go to this week's stuff. Oh my goodness, I'm slamming down cups. And like I said, if you're talking to me, put a question mark at the beginning of it and I know it's a topic or a question you're trying to throw my way. So I know, oh, here's somebody who put 5,000 question marks. So, you know, I am not offended by that at all. Whatever gets my attention, it works best. Says, baseville, what is the best pickup you would choose for bass guitars and why? I like to a JJ, a JJ bass. So a jazz bass is the ultimate bass for me. My jazz deluxe is a double J bass. My Warwick, how horrible that is that I don't know. Is it a JP? Oh, I gotta grab it. Hold on. So it's a PJ bass, so P and J. I didn't specify PJ on this bass. That's the way it can configure it. So I said, yeah, but I would have went JJ as well. Easy enough, but that's my favorite. So double J bass, just like a jazz bass, everything like a jazz bass. So this bass is 32 inch scale. So that's the whole beauty of that. And so what's great about that is on stage, no one can tell it's shorter, two inches shorter than normal bass. No one can, it doesn't look like I'm playing a small bass. But when you play it, it's like these are regular gauge strings, but they're like rubber bands. They feel great. And so that's fantastic. So this is a beautiful instrument. They have a video on Warwick's website of them building this bass. They made a video of them building my bass and never said anything to me. And then I think four years later, they sent me an email saying, hey, we have a video of your bass and it was produced in May. And I'm like, really? And they're like, yeah, we're going to put it out. So they just put it out. So I was like, oh, yeah, Nicky say, say a sinner. I'm wow, too hard. Not say Nicky. Nicky says two inches shorter. You say, yeah, I think it's the perfect sweet spot. I found out about a 32 inch scale bass because Stu Ham's urge bass is a 32 inch scale originally. And I didn't know why. And so I just wanted to play one and I got a fill up. It's a Phil Kibicki design in it, but I got a Stu Ham urge bass and I absolutely loved it. And I have one to stay. And then it just made I was a mission on a mission to own a bass that wasn't a signature bass. You know, I just wanted to play something that was, you know, so when people saw the problem with Stu Ham, it's like, to me, it's like playing an Eddie Van Halen guitar on stage. People see that and they're like, let's see those chops. And you're like, I don't have this Stu Ham chops. I'm sorry, guys. You know, I don't, the pressure gets put up. So I like an instrument that doesn't doesn't set expectations too high. Second Jake says, hey, you got the 10 Miller guitar, but what about his books? GMC with Mick, Mick Goodrick is tons of fun. I would imagine that if I got 10 Miller's books, I would just be lost. I got to tell you, like, I think I told you guys this, I hung out with 10 Miller one night and just an amazing dude in every way. Personality, you know, just just knowledgeable, fun, super smart. He screams, you know how people seem pretentious in their smartness and some people seem smart and then, but they're okay. And it's going to sound weird, but I just want to say it like you can tell some people are smart, but they they're okay. Dumbing it down to talk to you. I'm not saying you talk to me like a toddler. I'm just saying, you know, he was not running on all six cylinders of his brain or eight cylinders, depending on what engine his brain is talking to me. Like I say, I wasn't putting any pressure on him mentally and he was fine with that. We were had a great time. So super knowledgeable when it comes to music, music theory, playing and stuff, you know, and it's always, I always find myself to this day, chuckling after the fact that I've gotten myself from this YouTube gig into these weird situations where I'm talking to somebody and they're like, oh, I, Eric, this is like Tim Miller said this to me. I'm like, you know, you, you know, when you're a guitar player, when you're a musician, you pass music stories. Here's a music story and you know, everybody knows that. Hey, when I was in my band once, this person came up to me, right? Yeah, everybody's got a story about their band or music. And it's like funny when you're passing stories and like my story is like one time my cable came out on my bass and I didn't know what to do. And then he's like, yeah, he's like the other day, Eric Johnson asked me to come on stage and play six of his songs. I had to learn them that day. And I'm like, yeah, I hate it when I have to learn six Eric Johnson songs perfectly in a day. So anyways, it was, and that's a true story. He said that he's like, I don't know if it was six. He had to learn a set list or half a set list of songs for Eric Johnson in a day. And I'm like, sure, that happens to all of us. Who doesn't have to learn a bunch of Eric Johnson songs and get on stage with Eric Johnson sometimes. But, but he was so humble and great. So I would check out his books. So maybe I should, but I kind of feel like, I don't know, I'm afraid they're a little over my head, but we'll see. Maybe I should try it anyways. Maybe I'm maybe I can do more than I think. Okay, let's see. Um. Okay, hold on. I don't know if this is to me, but I want to read it. It says John says, hey, I have better guitars than I have the ability to play them to their potential, but I don't feel bad about that. I love that you say you don't feel bad about that. I don't think anybody should feel bad about that. Um, I find that that comment is never rooted in the right thing. You know, as someone who critiques for a living, I'm always in, I'm always spending a lot of time in my head. You know, like, am I a negative person? Am I always, you know, because that's the, that's the gig, right? You know, you, everybody has a profession or a job that they do. And what happens is that job influences you and how you think and act with other people. And, and you can imagine taking guitars apart and criticizing them. You start criticizing all the time. And it's like, I don't want to be that kind of person. I don't want to be the person's like, Oh, there's the flaw. There's the flaw. There's the flaw. You know, and, um, I always think about that, but I've learned over time, uh, not because I've done content, because I've had a watch me make my content. In other words, I make the content and I watch myself. So you, you really, you really do see yourself, uh, you know, like, like the saying is if you play and record yourself, you'll hear the mistakes that you normally won't hear. That's absolutely true. If you haven't done it, I'm sorry to break that news to you. If you record yourself playing guitar, you will hear things that you are like, I'd never had any idea that I was that bad. Um, the, the recordings will never, they'll always be horrible. Um, but anyways, same thing when you record yourself on video and, um, I find that criticism is, is, should have a purpose that has the effect of improvement. And it should be done with love and care. And if that sounds silly or too, you know, whatever for you guys, I apologize. But what I mean by that is this goes to that thing when somebody says, oh, they, you know, they, they, somebody has a nice guitar and they can't play the great. And they, there's always a criticism of that. But I find that in most cases, the criticism is not really honest and care and has care, care and feeling into it. An honest criticism was, you know, you should work harder to be a better guitar player. There's nothing wrong with striving to be a better guitar player. There's nothing wrong with striving to be a better, better person. But really that criticism, most cases just rooted in, um, jealousy that you just have a nice guitar. That's just what that is. Um, cause here's why. Um, a perfect example, uh, you know, I have a friend who just isn't into expensive guitars. It's not his thing at all. It doesn't matter what he makes or doesn't make. It's just not his thing. He looks at, uh, he's the one who coined the term furniture with me. He's the one who said pure s guitars are furniture to him. He's just like, I'm not into fancy furniture. I'm not into fancy guitars. I'm not into fancy things. And the point I, I, I, the reason I say that is I've never heard him say, oh my God, that guy can play three chords and look at, he's got a $3,000 guitar. You know why? Cause he doesn't care what kind of guitar you have. He doesn't care if you buy a nice guitar because he doesn't want one. I find that a lot of times when somebody goes, oh, a $3,000 guitar and the guy can't even play, they want to make it about your inability to play because that seems noble of them to be shitty about that. But really what they're really doing is they're just jealous of the fact that you have the money to buy a nice guitar. If that's, and that, and, and, and here's what's got to be honest about it. If that's you and you're being jealous of that reason, you need to rethink things. But, um, I personally don't care. When I see, um, uh, you know, one of my closest friends who's the reason I have a YouTube channel had a horrible experience and I let him to it. Um, he is a, he is exactly, he is the cliche. He's a doctor. So he's a surgeon. And so when they say doctor, lawyer, guitarist and he can buy really nice guitars. In fact, he can buy collect Porsches. I always tell him all the time, you should collect Porsches. He's a surgeon for Christ's sakes. And only as a surgeon. He's such a good person that even though his parents were doctors or his dad was a doctor and I'm sure they could have put him through medical school. No problem. He went to medical school, school on his own and then he joined the army and he served one year in the army. And every year he served in the army as an officer, as a doctor in the army. In orthopedics, by the way, anyone knows anything about the military? You know that orthopedics is very big problem for military people. You know, their feet for Christ's sakes. He, every year he served as a doctor in the army, they paid for one year of his medical school. So obviously he didn't have the financial burden because he served his country. I say that because he wanted to buy really nice Gibson Les Paul. My store didn't carry them. I didn't carry Gibson. I did for a very short minute, but that's it. And I said, here, go to the store. So I sent him the store because they had the best selection. I knew the store had some jerkiness to it. If you're in the Phoenix area, you probably know exactly what store I'm talking about. They're not as bad as they used to be. And I was always friends with the owner too. And I always used to tell him, why are your employees such assholes? I go, you know, it doesn't, I understand why you would be an asshole, but why are your employees that way? Right? Can't you just make them be nice? You're in the back room anyways. But anyways, in this particular case, what happened was I sent him to the store. I said, hey, they're kind of jerky. They don't like you to touch stuff. Everything's don't touch. Don't, you know, unless you ask them. And he's like, okay. So he's a very methodical person. He goes there and to buy the guitar. He's just going to buy a self and nice Gibson Les Paul. Maybe the Les Paul Supreme is definitely going to be expensive purchase. So I see in the phone week, maybe it was two weeks later, and I said, hey, what Les Paul did you get? He goes, I didn't get one. I said, why? You know, I'm thinking, oh, if they didn't have what he wanted, they didn't have the color, you know, right? I don't know price was in the issue. It's not like he haggles. He doesn't, he's not comfortable enough as a personality to haggle. He's, he says, oh, I went in, I did what you said. I didn't touch any guitars and I said, I want to try those two Les Pauls right there and AB them and figure out which one I like. And the salesman got up on the ladder and he got the guitar down and handed it to me. And I started playing it. I said, okay. And he goes and then the salesman walked up to me after I was playing it and pulled it out of my hands and said, you need an epiphone. And he said, I left. And I thought, you know, that's the problem that I can't understand to the point where musicians have gotten this way. This like you don't deserve that someone who's that actually hurt that salesman. It hurt the business he's in. Think about this. It's not even his personality. It's not even just jealous. It's just stupidity. That's why that, that, that whole thing I always say is a dumb way of thinking. You know, I would love to see a car salesman talk himself out of $130,000 sports car sale because the guy didn't drive great. And I get after you're seeing you drive, maybe you need a Corolla with some airbags and safety features, right? Like, so it's just funny how that works. That's obviously 100% true story. And but the point is exactly that that is that you're not good enough for this guitar. To the point where, like I said, it hurt the sales guy on the store more than it hurt my buddy because he ended up just buying one online. So and online didn't judge him, of course, but the, let's see. And then Stoney, I'm looking at this. He says, I disagree. So I see this right away. I like disagree. I like you when you guys disagree. I like because this conversation now says I disagree with them and I think your level of talent should shouldn't have anything to do with that decision. But the people do think that way. Okay, so you're not disagreeing with me. You just, right, you're kind of reiterating that. Yeah, I think it's funny. The other thing I noticed is, is again, I think there's not only these, and I should actually kind of give this some credit to not only do I think it's a jealousy of somebody when they see a lot of times, not all the time. So, you know, but a lot of times when somebody sees somebody that can't play very well or doesn't play, you know, amazingly, and they have expensive guitars and they are jealous of the expensive guitars. Sometimes, they're, I don't say they're jealous of the, I'm not saying they're jealous of the talent. I guess what I'm trying to say is when you see really, when I see really amazing guitar players, they don't seem to think that way. I always been shocked how eager it is. And if I didn't see this because of YouTube, I would have never known. But when you hang out with somebody like Pete Thorn or Phil X. And I'm saying that for this crazy reason. And you, you, you, and they go, hey, you want to jam? And you're like, you've seen me, you don't want to jam. And they want to jam. Like, and they play, they adjust. They adjust. If I can, I've seen Phil X do it twice and it was really mesmerizing to watch. I watched him dumb it down to work with the group of musicians he was with. It was, it was not because he's a nice guy, although I do believe he's a nice guy. It's intuitive for him that the music be the center of the attention that making some music tonight was more important than worrying about the fact that this guy's timing is a little off. And that other guy is, you know, doesn't know all his scales, right? Like, and there was no, and you know what else they don't suffer from, which is really impressive to see these guys, these really amazing players. They don't have an ego where they are like, I can't be seen with this lower player or this person who's not good enough. They don't seem to have that. And when you get exposed that, and I'm just picking on those two, I can name actually dozens more like that. Larry Mitchell, you know, you know, you sitting there with Larry Mitchell like, come up and jam. And like, yeah, you have a gramming, you play amazing, you know, and he's like, I don't care, just come play, you know, and when you make a mistake, he doesn't care. And not because he doesn't notice it, and not because he's too nice to say, not to mention it. It's because like I said, they don't have, there's no fear that they're going to look bad. They're too focused on having some fun. It's really crazy to, and you almost don't want to believe it. And if I hadn't seen it so many times behind the scenes when the cameras are not on them or when they couldn't be caught, you know, like this wasn't a fake, you know, thing. And, you know, so, I don't know, so like I said, so I don't think obviously we've talked about this many times. I don't think how well you play or badly play has anything to do with the type of guitar you own. First of all, I think a guitar is a tool, but I also think it's a piece of art. It's this beautiful instrument that you should play and enjoy, and it's also this thing that looks amazing on your wall to stare at. And even if you just stare at it, I don't even care. I don't even care. I hope that you enjoy music in your life, because I've literally, it's made my life bearable. I would say enjoyable, for sure. But at the very least, it's been bearable for music. Thank goodness. Justin May, what's up, Justin? It says, hope you're feeling better. Ah, thank you, man. I like said, I'm on the mend. That's always good. I did it to myself. I just wore myself down a little too much. Shawna told me to knock it off and I kept going. So I thought I was bulletproof. I hadn't had a cold or a flu or anything in a couple of years, and I thought, oh, you know, I'll be fine. I just wore myself right down to the bone. It was great. When I say great, it's, you can always tell when you went just that little bit too far on something. And all of a sudden you're like, I'm feeling kind of tired. And then I was like, I'm kind of a little raspy, you know, sore throat. What's going on? Let's just hit you. Okay. I feel like I got too preachy there. Let's go back to something fun. Let's actually see. Let me get out of this. Is this today? This is today. Okay. Okay. Um. Okay. This is a man to grab this one. It says, Hey, I have a guitar with a couple of autographs from musicians I've met over the years. Is there anything I can do to protect them from fading a rubbing off, especially if I still plan on playing it? You, um, I don't know. Like I said, I'm not a finished person. Um, I'm not a finished person. You, um, I don't know. Like I said, I'm not a finished person. Uh, but I have, uh, friends like, um, you know, I know the guys that atomic guitar works is in where I live. They, um, you can bring them guitar. Some companies that do our builders and slash repair people who do finish work can put a clear code over your guitar and protect that stuff. Um, I just, what I can tell you is I would really, I would, I'm sure somebody's going to have some suggestions in the comments. But what I will tell you is I've seen a lot of people ruin their signatures, putting clear code over them. I've seen people use, uh, like a, uh, uh, like a tape, a clear tape and the acid in the tape ate the ink. And it was like, what? And it was just, it just like faded out. Um, I've seen people shoot clear code over and then before the clear code hardened to secure it, the ink ran because it got wet essentially. And it depends on the ink and the type of material. So I, I, I said, I would treat it not so much like a situation as a guitar player problem, but maybe as a finish issue, you know, and if it's important to you that they stay intact, I would, uh, I would take it to have somebody seal it. I'm sure it can be done. I've seen it be done. Hold on a second. All right. So, uh, see the cough cam works. That's I, I was thinking that's the only thing about today. I was like, man, I just don't want to cough in the mic. All right. So, um, what else do we got? Okay. Hold on a second. Grabbing some stuff here real quick. Let me refresh this. And, uh, I don't know how to say the name, but I, something tubes, air, airosoft tubes that stay hydrated and take care of yourself. Yes. Hydration. Well, hydration is the key for sure. I am. The worst thing about me when I get a cold is I get a hard craving for caffeine. I don't drink, uh, uh, you know, diet sodas too much, but when I get sick, all of a sudden I just crave it. Like it's weird. Like I, a fountain drink soda or something, something to sip on. I don't know why it's really bad for you. So it's really hard. I got to push myself to drink water, which I hate drinking when I'm sick. Um, okay. All right. Let's get back to some stuff. Um. What? Michael wants to know, did you ever eat cough drops? Uh, even if you weren't sick when you were a kid? No. So I have halls. Uh, now, uh, I can't do the, the, the cherry or any of that stuff. Uh, we didn't do that stuff as kids. So, uh, no, no, uh, medicine tastes like candy. So. Yeah. Big hairy guitars. Michael says, Hey, water is the worst coffee is life. I agree. You know, I was late. Uh, I was late to drinking water as a kid. I didn't drink water ever. I would always drink like tea, something like that. You know, a diet and pop. Well, back then it was probably regular pop. It was horrible, horrible, right? Um, and, um, it took me a while to enjoy water. Uh, Shawna always drink water. She's never been, she doesn't like soda at all. She doesn't like carbonated drinks. So in fact, if she drinks a soda, oh my God, she's going to hate me for saying this, but it drives me nuts. Um, if Shawna drinks a soda, it's, I mean, once in a blue moon and it's flat, she opens it and let it go flat. She like, she likes it flat. I'm like, that is the grossest thing ever. Anyways, um, I used to complain cause I didn't want to drink water. And so I'd be like, I used to say this, I feel bad now saying it. People are like, I always have some water. I drink water for people who like to taste their own spit. That's how I used to complain all the time. I'm like, I want to drink water for people who like to taste their own spit. And, uh, but now I drink water cause it's good for you. Okay. So, um, let's go back to, uh, all right. Uh, vet head says, Hey, would I benefit any sonic difference if I reverse my neck pickup on my PRS special SE like on the S two special? Always look forward to your Friday shows. Uh, when you say reverse it, you mean like flip it physically flipping around or reverse it like take your ground wire and make your ground the, the hot and your hot the ground. Um, I don't know. I don't know specifically why it's reversed in the first place. Is it physically reversed? I think that's what I think is, is what you're talking about is the S two physically flipped upside down. And then here's the problem. If it's physically, um, what I would need to know is the polarity of each magnet to know why they did it. I didn't, I didn't specifically look at that situation. So I don't know why they did it. Sometimes they do that to give you kind of like said that more nasal out of phase sound in the middle. Sometimes it's done for other reasons, but I don't, I don't know. Um, but what I can tell you is my guess is that, uh, would you say you have the SE or the S two? Hold on. You have the SE. Um, my guess is the S two and the SE are not wired the same. They're not exactly the same. So it's not as simple as that. There's probably another decision than that. Uh, PRS tends to make not only decision about different pickups in each guitar, they also make decisions about different wiring. These are based on those pickups. So they do all kinds of, they're known for doing all kinds of shenanigans when it comes to electronics in the SEs, S twos and in the cores. I always thought just so much to make them different kind of justify the sound difference in price points, but they're always claim is to kind of, you know, just cause they do a lot of, they actually do a lot of solid testing to make sure guitar has a purpose to exist. One of the things I got to give them credit for, which I obviously, you know, it doesn't sound like a big deal, but now that you see how powerfully big and epic SE has become as a, as a sub brand to the Paul Reed Smith line, um, they really go to great lengths to make sure the guitars all have their own unique sound and voice. And not so much so it's like, oh, I got the SE and it doesn't sound like the S2 and the S2 doesn't sound like the core, but it's also to make sure that they all have a server purpose. And, and their dream world, they want us to buy all of them. You know, they're like, oh, you, not even like an SE and you graduate up the line, like some thoughts, they're just like, in some reasons you might want this SE and then there might be a reason why you want a core. Like they, they want it to be like a reasoning for that, but that's just my, my guess. Jeremy says he never really understood the out of phase thing. It's really big with the country guys. I always kind of like, that's the way I explain it, that weird, I always call it this weird nasal honk kind of sound. And I, same thing, man. I was like, I don't get it. However, if you've ever jammed with anyone, it's like there's certain things that just sound great in a mix and there's certain things that just don't sound great in your bedroom. To me, out of phase, to sit there and play out of phase just sounds weird. It almost sounds synthetic sometimes. Like, like it sounds like when a key, you know, when keyboard sounds sounding like guitar, it would sound almost like a keyboard guitar. It sounds horrible. But I'm telling you, if you watch these guys, these real pro players play, especially in the Nashville circuit and stuff, they always have this out of phase stuff and they go right into it. And when they, they do it, man, just, it's right on top of the mix. You can just hear them perfectly and you can see why they go for it. And that's why they're after it. That's his biggest point. That's his biggest purpose. Anytime I've ever done that wiring for anyone on purpose, they always did it because either some artists did it and they just wanted that because that's what happens. They're like, hey, make my thing like this person's thing. But that wasn't as common. The most common was literally somebody wanted it for lead play. And if you think about it, especially clean, it's a really big deal clean because here's why when you have gain, you can boost, you know, you can throw out of the level up. Clean is a hard thing to boost on an amp because if you push more signal in the amp, now you're going to get break up. So you get a louder clean. But, you know, if you're in the front of the amp, right, you're going to get a clean, a louder clean. But the clean will have a little bit more break up. Sometimes that's ideal, but sometimes it's not. If you listen to those guys that are chicken picking those country players, they don't want the amp to break over. So they're boosting in the fr... It's not accurate to say boosting in the frequencies, but essentially they're going into different frequencies. Right? Joe Bonamassa, from all his crazy talks, he always has like... I swear to God, I think Joe Bonamassa and Paul Reed Smith. I could listen to them Ted talk all day each, but then they're going to say something crazy and then that makes you mentally tune out for a minute. But it doesn't matter because always something comes back around and Joe Bonamassa, he has this great video and I'll search for it and see what you can timestamp it here. Talking about why every musician should have like a Graphic E-Glyzer, Rackmount Graphic E-Glyzer, like a huge one. And experiment with frequencies and how they work. And he said that's like the best way to understand, you know, sonically where you should live in the music, you know, and where instruments should live and stuff. And we did a patron bonus podcast last month. We did a four and a half hour marathon of craziness. And I was talking about this and I was talking about as a bass player, you know, bass players, you are... It's very important bass players, you don't want the bass player to just be loud. Loud isn't really a sound. You want the bass guitar to have a fullness to the sound, to full up the band, to make the band sound full and not so thin, right? But more importantly, not to be too bassy. And the reason is, is that a lot of singers, because I played a bass, I've played a lot of bass in a lot of bands. And more importantly, a lot of bands that weren't metal bands, because metal bands are important to bass, but bass becomes a different thing to a lot of other types of music. Like I've played like gospel bands, you name it. Most of the really good singers that I've performed with got the key from the bass. That's how they knew exactly where they... So if the bass got muddy or too bassy, like everything was just like a rap concert, and it was like... Just that sound. The singers could be flat, or sharp, but mostly flat. Hold on a second. That was a little cough and a sip. Okay, so, yeah, so the singers, they get the key that they're singing in from the bass player. And so when the bass is too bright or too bassy, it'll throw them off. When it's buried in the mix, they can't find it with their ears. And what's even scarier about that is, not all singers know that. So it's not something they're used to, because if you think about it, some singers... Like I've performed with singers who played mostly acoustic sets, and there was never a bass player. So obviously they weren't getting the key of the song from the bass, because they weren't playing with bass. And then when you have a bass with you, you know, a bass player with you, maybe they didn't do it intuitively. But that's what I'm saying. I think that's a great idea, what he said about EQing and learning how EQing works, which is why I love the Boss G7. It's a very narrow spectrum of EQ for most guitar players, but I think at the very least you should have like a seven or ten band EQ pedal, because you will learn exactly that. A perfect example is, and that's kind of actually so you know, when we talk about out of phase playing, you know, that tone, I kind of don't want a wire on my guitar to be like that. If I had to do that, I would just probably use an EQ pedal. I would just kind of push the mids in a really... Because you can find the mids and you can make the mids really nasal. Makes me just think I could just do that. But, I don't know. So... So... Alright. You know what it's time for? So, alright. We got to get faculty's back on guitar. We got off subject somehow. So... That's funny. Okay, so it says, Music Theory Last says, Water is hot or cold with a squeeze of lemon. I know, you know what, normally I was going to drink some tea, some hot tea with some lemon. My fear is that if I got hot tea, it would just go cold, and then it'd be sipping on cold tea, and I think when the tea gets cold it gets a little harder on your throat. But yeah, back once I'm off this show, I'll go back to warm tea. Dan says, Well, hopefully there won't be a legal defense fund. Hopefully it will get resolved. That was my whole point. You know, not to go down that road, but since we're there for a second, you know, obviously with the video this week and the discussion, this is the second time something like this has happened. And let's just tell you, I'll just tell you the first time and what the mistake was. So I was sent a product, this is many years ago, from a company, and I didn't like it. I just didn't get on with it. I didn't like it. I liked the way it sounded. I didn't find a purpose for it, and I just didn't like it. And I was new to the YouTube arena, so I didn't know how to communicate that to the company. Like, how do I tell them I don't like this product? And before I could tell them, they sent me an email, and the email was, hey, we're going to send you a different version of that product. We've redesigned it. And I was like, oh, okay, then they know it sucks. Right? I was so excited. They know it sucks, and they're going to fix it, and everything's going to be better. Hold on a second. Okay, so anyways, sorry about that, guys. We're just doing the show the best we can today. I said, oh, they know it sucks, and everything will be better. And they said, no, we figured out the original one causes fires. Oh, my fires. They go, yeah, it gets catch on fire, so we fixed it. And I was like, oh, my God. Right? And the new one, and the new one sucks. And I'm like, okay, well, this is easy. So I reach out to them and I said, hey, look, just not feeling it, you know, you know, watch a bunch of YouTube channels, and they seem to like it, but I just don't seem to get out of anything out of it. I don't understand it. It's pretty expensive for what it is, and I didn't say that part. And I said, I'm just going to send it back. So I, we send it back. And I was out of breakfast with my wife. This is so sad because, you know, the sad thing is the time I get to spend with my family is very precious to me. So anything that messes with that really upsets me a lot, because the fact that I am a workaholic. It's just, I don't know what it is. It's my nature. I'm not proud of it. It's not a brag. It's actually, if anything, it's the part I just don't know how to undo it. You know, I don't relax very easy. So I'm at breakfast with my wife and the messages start coming in and the company got the product back and said, oh, I, and they posted on their social media, receive this back from Phil McKnight damaged. And I was like, damaged. And they show a picture of it and it's damaged. And I'm like, I can't believe it's damaged. So I sent the message to the owner right away, right there at breakfast, right? In fact, so you know, for the record, couldn't get any real good reception to send the message. I had to leave the breakfast. We leave, we leave early. We leave the go out. I send him a message and say, look, I'm sorry that happened. I'll pay you, you know, I'll buy it. I'll just buy the product. The first, the first one, second one, I'll buy it all. I'll pay for the return shipping. I'll pay for everything. I said, I don't know. Now I want to be just very clear about this. I didn't believe I damaged it. I didn't believe it was even shipping damage. I didn't believe anything he was saying, but. I didn't know and it wasn't really ultimately anything I was too concerned about. My, my reputation and my ethics were more important to me than anything else. So at that point, if I just, if I just dissolve this, you know what I mean? I'll just throw some money by the product, call it a day. And he doubled down and threw a bigger fit. And I was like, I don't understand what's going on here. And maybe looking back, maybe he was just super offended that I just didn't like his product. I don't know what the deal is. So I'm just trying to tell you this time when this happened, something like that again, right? It's a, hey, I want my product back kind of a excursion and there's this rhetoric. And I got to tell you, I'm not upset that I got served a legal notice or whatever you call it, a lawsuit or whatever you call this thing that it is. The verbiage in there. Look, how, how it works is simple in life. If you get an attorney involved, you usually have a, your first thing is to say, we usually start with some understanding. You say, hey, look, we know you get busy. We know things are, you know, things, things happen, right? You say something like that to, to imply that maybe there was no malice, right? And say, look, we, our client has asked for their, their property back and you haven't responded. And then please, you know, respond to this or return the product within so many days. Otherwise, unfortunately, we're going to have to escalate things. You get a notice like that and you go, okay, wow, I'm sorry I got to this, but any, a normal person, I'm a normal person. I swear. I read that and I go, oh crap. Okay. I'm really, you know, like bumping somebody in the hallway. Like I'm sorry, man, whether it was my fault or not, I'm sorry it happened. Let's just, you know, are you okay? Let's move on. I would have been like, let's send this back. Let's dissolve. When I read that letter, that's a nuclear letter. That's the, that's the letter you get. That's not even the second letter you get, by the way, if any of you guys know how collecting things works. I've had to collect on people before anyone's who business and business knows how you collect on people. You sure don't start with you piece of crap. You haven't paid me. It's not going to, that's not going to work. And so when I got the nuclear letter, it's not that it upset me. I don't want you to think I was upset and I'm mad and I'm like, I'm going to say something back. I saw that and I know, okay, this is not a realistic response. This is not normal, which means there could be some other intent. In other words, my biggest fear was if I just were just send the product back, he could then just start making up stuff or whatever that could have. I just didn't want that to happen. So I wanted everything on the record. So that's all that was about. So I tell you that not because I want to drudge it back up because it's really something I'd like to get past. It's like between this flu and that, I'd like this next week to be just not that. And that's not even the worst thing to have this week. I'm just going to tell you, Sean has had a much worse week with me. She's had a lot of family issues this week than been pretty traumatic. So, so this week we'll get past it. But more importantly, I just didn't, I saw a potential problem coming and I was like, okay, let's get this all out in the record. It's all out in the record and all out there. And more importantly, since the, I thought his letter explained the situation, I just read his letter and I think that's what I did. And that's, so I'm just letting you guys know. So I'm just trying to tell you, please don't send me money for a defense fund. Don't, don't do anything like that. Don't do anything. I put everything on the record. I feel like I've, I've done what I'm supposed to do. I've returned his instrument. I don't want to be involved with the company in any way. I got nothing to say bad or negative other than I'd rather like to, everybody should go on their own way. And that's just how that goes. And then in that note, we'll segue to something, to something fun. What are we going to do? It's fun. I got to find something fun. Let's see what Amanda pulled up. Amanda, you find good fun stuff. Let's see what Amanda pulled. She pulled Damien, dot tree 3432 says, where would I recommend to get a guitar box or boxes? So I shipped my guitar back to a company to have work done. If you, if you can, if you can go to your local mom pops guitar center is no good. They're, they're using boxes now to ship. And even if they don't, they destroy them. They don't want you to come for boxes, a guitar center. But mom pops sometimes still have boxes. It's really tough now because a lot of mom pops are shipping online. So a lot of times those boxes have value to them, but a lot of times they'll sell you a box. We used to sell boxes for two bucks. So, you know, we used to give them away like all the time. And then after a while we needed them. So then we would just charge two bucks. And it was just like, and, and, and so, you know, people were happy to pay it. Every time, every time they come in, I go, I can't believe you only charge me two bucks. And we're like, we just did it just because we were just trying to, you know, actually, I think try to create a nuisance, right? For ourselves, like in other words, we don't want people just coming in and I don't know, always asking for boxes or something. But, but, uh, so you could always try that. If you can't, Amazon is, uh, Sean gets boxes on Amazon all the time. They sell them in like a four pack, I think, or a two pack. If you go to the UPS store and the mailbox, et cetera, and all those type of places, you can get those two. It's going to run you like 30 bucks for a box. It's pretty hefty. So, um, uh, Hungadunga says boxes cost a hundred bucks now. So, um, uh, so, uh, I, I'll tell you the best advice I can give you, this isn't going to help you now, but for the future is, uh, I don't even do this. This is a Shauna thing and God bless her for doing this. Every guitar that comes into this house or comes here, everything one. I know because I did a channel, I have a lot of them coming, but every guitar comes in. She takes the box and she takes it apart and she pushes it flat and we have them in the attic, just stacked in flat, you know, flat form. Um, because I used to cut them up with box cutters going, I got too many boxes. We're going to stick all this and she just started putting them flat. Um, the other thing you can do is don't forget to, uh, you know, look, you have a guitar community, right? You know, don't, don't, don't be afraid to reach out. Uh, you could put, um, you know, I've never tried this, but it's just, you know, I'm not saying it's going to work out great. You could probably go on, um, uh, Facebook marketplace or, or, um, uh, what do you call it? Uh, Craigslist or something like that. And maybe say, Hey, looking for guitar box. Anyone got one? So it might help you there as well. But if you don't want to go through all that Amazon, she used to get them from U line, but Amazon was a little easier. So, but yeah. So, um, and any suggestions people have on the comments might help you helpful too. Uh, Papa Hughes says guitar center is offering 24 month financing on used and vintage through February 4th. New year gimmick or are they finding ways to keep prices up? That's probably, um, financing is definitely the best way to hold the line for pricing. These, um, also what they call this the clarinum stuff, all these four payment things. Definitely. It's when everybody says the same thing. Who's buying all these expensive guitars? I'm like, they're financing them. That's how everybody's doing it. They all finance them. It's like, how would we buy a nice car? They finance them. Not a lot of people walking in and paying cash on heck, you can't even do it. You ever tried anyone tried in recent years to try going to car dealership and try to pay cash for a car. First of all, they won't even take cash, which is funny. They act like you're a drug dealer. They're like, you're like, Oh, just bring a cash like we don't take cash. I'm like, what? You don't take cash? For the car? You would think if you walked on a car, I'm not saying I could do this, but it just makes me laugh to think you could walk on a car dealership and like just a like a moderately expensive, non-expensive car, 35,000, right? That's not cheap car, but that's not expensive. That's in the sweet spot. I think that's just my thoughts because I'm like, it does mean it's like that's a really loaded up Corolla or something or Camry, Camry, right? Maybe, maybe they're more now. But anyways, I would think about walking on a lot with 35,000 dollars cash and go, Hey, I like to buy this. You think some sales guy be like, Yes. Instead they're like, No, they let like do it. It's almost like it's like it's evidence in a crime. They're like, we can't touch that. You can't be here. That can't be here. So, um, and then you're like, No. So, uh, so yeah, financing is how everybody does everything now financing. Uh, so, um, yeah, that's actually, if you think about it, it's smart for Guitar Center to do that to say, Hey, we'll give a better financing incentives. It's a lot easier than discounting. Right. So they just say, Hey, we'll get you either zero interest or better, uh, better deals and financing and get you to kind of pull, pull the trigger. I can see that they're trying to keep the line moving, you know, the products moving. That's their goal. And, um, let me delete that and, uh, there it is. Like, why am I having trouble seeing this screen? Um, and, uh, uh, you know, and I, I, my, my, uh, my feelings on that is simple. If you, uh, you know, you're adults and if you feel like you have the money to finance it and you feel good with it, you should finance it. And if you don't, you don't. But, um, um, yeah, uh, uh, I don't even know how to read your name. Just a bunch of letters and numbers says banks don't even keep cash anymore. Oh, tell me about it. So I, I, um, do not mean to offend anyone at all. And it's going to be a slightly offensive. So I'm just going to let you know, but it's not meant to be. That's the important part. The intent. I don't mean to offend anybody anymore, but I made a joke to, to Shawna just a couple months ago that you can tell you're in a nice neighborhood because there's no banks. And I go because affluent middle class and up people just don't have, there's no cash. There's no reason to physically have a bank. Like there's a bank. So I'll just turn into Starbucks because there's just no physical, like everybody's checks is direct deposit and everybody's using some kind of digital cash format. There's just no physical banks. And I said that because I went into a nice neighborhood and I was like looking for a bank. It was a weird thing. I never need a bank. And I was like, and I was looking for a bank. And I was like, man, and I could not find a bank until all of a sudden I was like, well, this looks a little bit like, you know, a little bit more run down in my neighborhood. A little bit. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, there's a couple of banks. And then of course there's, then if you keep going, there's just going to be nothing but pay the loan places. But you're like, yeah, most people, unless they're physically going in the bank to cash a check. And the, and in my first experience with it was, it was all of a sudden the banks, you'd walk in the first, anyone have this? I'm sorry. This is the wrong tie right for the show. I like talking about this because it was so crazy. I walked into a bank. I had been in a bank in years. I, um, I think I had to change a pen. I got a new card debit card and they made me physically come in to change the pen to make a custom pen number. I went in the bank and I knew I heard a comic do this routine. So I'm not stealing the routine, but this really did happen to me too. The same thing. I walk in the bank and there's, all of a sudden there's no tellers. There's nothing. It's like you just walked into somebody's front room. Like, and you just have no sense of where you are. I'm just, I just know I'm in a room now. I'm in a room and there's a person standing there and I'm like, are you waiting? And they're like, I work here. And I'm like, well, okay. And they're like, yeah, what do you need? And then I go, I need to do a pen and they take me to a desk. And then everybody that was coming in, there was just like a concierge, a person who just took them to a desk. And I was like, it was so weird to me. And, uh, and I was like, uh, yeah, it was so, so strange. In fact, so, you know, banks have become so uncommon that I did something that a couple of years ago. There was so dumb that I almost like, I couldn't believe it, which is, um, I bought a Gibson R9. That's not the dumb part. Um, and I bought it from Bizarre Guitar in Phoenix, Arizona. And I went in and they had two of them and I went and A-Bed them. And, um, uh, and I said, okay, I found the one I wanted. And I said, okay, I want this one. And I knew I was going to buy it. So I brought a big wad of cash with me because cash is king when it comes to this music store still. So it's a great thing. Guitar Center don't care about your cash, but mom pops. They still love your cash. So I went in and, you know, cause cash usually means tax out the door. At the very least that's your deal, right? They'll cut you a little break. Um, if they'd say no, which is very rar-rare, I'll throw in the, how about 3% off for no credit card? Cause you gotta pay credit card processing. Give that to me and to the bank. My whole logic is why give it to the bank? Give it to me, right? Um, that's kind of the logic, right? Um, so anyways, I said to the guy at the counter and I said, hey, I want to buy the Les Paul and I said any deal for cash. And he goes, we'll do tax on the door and I go sweet. And he gives me the number and I was like $300, $350 short. And I said, okay, I said, how about this? How about I give you cash and then I'll pay the last 350 on my card. I'll run a debit and I'll, and you can add whatever you need to offer the 350. So if you want to charge me the, you know, whatever tax on the 350 or whatever you gotta do, just add a little bit to it. He's like, you can't do it. It's cash only or nothing. They're like an hour from my house, like 45 to 50 minutes on the freeway. So I call Shauna and I go, do you have any cash? And she goes, yeah, how much does she look and she's going through everything? She's like, I got about 400 or 500 bucks. I go, perfect. I drive all the way home, 50 minutes through traffic, get home, I get the cash from her. I go, I gotta go. She's like, okay, she has no idea what's going on, right? I get in the truck. I drive all the way back 50, 50, actually an hour back because traffic is worse. I go in, I give the guy the cash. I take the guitar. I come back home. I got the guitar. She's like, where did you go? I go, I drove on. I go all the way back to that store. She's like, why? I go, I was 350 bucks short. I had cash. She goes, why don't you go to an ATM? I'm like, oh crap. I forgot they have ATMs. I was so used to no banks anymore. I forgot. It's been so long. It's been, well, actually not been because I did that. I still haven't run to an ATM in probably, I don't know, say 20 years, but dude, 15 for sure. I've not been to an ATM. So that's my dumb story that's boring just to tell you how stupid I am and how we're all kind of stupid now. But yeah, no banks. See financing leads to banks. Banks lead to the boring stories. Blah, 8181 says, when's the lion's egg spider module coming? Spider two, the synergy module. You know it's funny. Blah, 8181. You're going for the joke. I can feel it, but I think there's some realistic in there, which I think synergy should make a like a Roland solid state module. Right? Like the jazz chorus. Tell me, you guys, I know it doesn't make sense because the power section would be then too. I don't care. A solid state module with like chorus built in, that'd be great. I do that. I think the whole point of synergy is do all the, do all the iconic game sounds. Just have them all. We're doing a lot of synergy discussion. I think it's because synergy, I think really crushed it at the NAMM show and it got on it. A lot of people's radars. It says, Hey, is this from Jay? Hold a second. Let's see if water stops me from coughing. Jay says, is the synergy business plan going to age better than the Katana and the catalyst, et cetera, business model? Like we will tech sunset faster. Wait, will the tech sunset faster and last longer? You know, the synergy business model has been around now for 25 years. It originally was Aignator. So if you guys do some research, you'll realize that Bruce Aignator designed and started the modules as an Aignator product. They were two channel models, modules like they are now. They're much like this whole system is now. And it was a synergy product was very expensive and the most famous guitar player I remember using was Tye Tabor from King's Ex and his tone was amazing with it. And then they did a licensing deal. Bruce did, I guess, with Randall. So if you remember Randall had the modules and those are one channel modules. So the irony is the one channel Randall modules work in Aignator hams, but the Aignator modules would not work in Randall amps because of the being a two channel versus one channel. As far as I understand, I cannot prove this. So if anyone knows, put them in comments. But I believe if you have a Randall module, it will fit in a synergy amp and work, but a synergy module will still not work in a Randall module. So Randall did the licensing deal. That was licensed. So Randall was building that designing it, doing all the stuff. It was the licensing play they played. And then at some point that goes defunct. I can tell you because I had the Randall one, I can tell you what defunct it. The Randall amps, the tube amps were made in China. I'm not bagging on that, but just they were not very good quality and they kept having problems. I had one that had problems. I was a dealer and I had so many customers have problems after a while. That's what happens as a dealer. You're like, this is not worth the headache. I have customers who are mad at me. I lost a really good customer over Randall. He got it and it was just fell apart on him and then you got really mad. And then he called Randall and Randall wasn't taking care of them. And you know, it's just like sucks, right? And it's like, and I know it's like, I just sold it to you. I didn't build it. But that's not really a good argument, right? So anyways, and then it gets rebranded as a synergy product. So now it's been a synergy product for many years. And now it has a lot more money, design team behind it and a lot more aspiration to it. But more importantly, it has a place. And the reason I say that is this. I'm really sorry if you guys can hear the clicking of these cough drops. I think as someone who's tried synergy, I'd say Aignator and Randall in the past and thought, oh, it's really cool. But you know, it's just not going to replace my real amp, quote unquote. And I just recently had this conversation with synergy. So you know, with modelers and profilers, the way that we are all going towards synergy is just to me a. A alternate alternative product. It's like you could go, you know, you can go digital modeling. Or if you want to stay in the tube realm, you can go synergy and still have that kind of same concept of an infinity of amplifiers to mess with. Yeah, sorry. I didn't even hit the cough cam. I apologize. But the you have all turn, you know, ton of amps, you can go through and stuff. But the main difference that I think that's making synergy kind of pop right now is, and this is just what I believe. If I don't, I got to do the cough cam. Hold on a second. I got under control. So anyways, the I believe the thing that's going to that's making synergy go to the next level is the synergy 20 head having the IRS, the synergy head is I have the synergy 50. It's great. The synergy 20 way better functional wise, it actually makes sense. It makes sense as a product. It's like I can throw a module in it. I can run IR direct if I want. I can record with it. It's just really easy to use. And more importantly, I think it's a huge disruption to the lunchbox amp market. This is exactly what I told synergy. So you know, when it was in a discussion, a private discussion, which I'm not going to disclose about the current lunchbox head market. And my point is when you're out there and you guys tell me when you're out there looking at these great lunchbox heads, as you guys know, I'm a huge, my Steve Morris Engelhead is amazing. I love it. And there's a lot of great amps out there. You know, lunchbox style heads. There's a lot of great ones. But at some point, you're like, how many of these things are going to own? You can't own them all. You can't have a lot of room and they're not actually necessarily cheap anymore. You know, thousand bucks a whack minimum. So you're like, wow, the synergy send 20 head is it's not even like I said, somebody asked all the time, do I think is as good as the real thing? Well, it's it's a mini in the mini head format. I think the synergy 20 is as good as and that's just what I believe. And I bought my synergy 20. This is important to understand. I bought it. I didn't send it to me and give it to me. This isn't a gifted product. I paid for that. They sent me the 50. I didn't want the 50. I wanted the 20. And so I had the 50 and then I decided to buy the 20 because I was like, I think that's, I think that's what I need for what I'm about to tell you. Once you get the synergy 20 head. It, it'll, it may do to you what it did to me, which is it broke me from caring about any of these new heads. So as they come out with another new head, I'm like, yeah, I'd rather just buy another module. I'm going to buy another little mini head. I'd rather just have another module. So, um, oh, and something fun. If you have a synergy head or any of that stuff, and then we'll do this, um, let me show you something. And how I do this because I never shared this. So let me share something. Hold on a second. Um, I bought this at Harbor Freight Harbor Freight says it sells these. They come in like orange and green and black. It's a pet like a pelican fake pelican case. You can get whatever brand you want, but the, I'm telling you the Harbor Freight ones are 30 bucks and they work. Okay. And this will come a patchy is the name of the brand. Um, this will come in the right thickness and it comes with phone blocks. And you cut the foam out and that's all my synergy modules go in there. You have to do a little bit of work. It doesn't fit perfectly easy. Like I said, they're, but see how they move. But once this, this foam comes down on them and holds them in place. Excuse me. So hold on one second. All right. So you see my eyes, huh? That was coffin. So like I said, this works great. There's some, there's a guy on the internet and makes a nicer version of this, but I was like for 30 bucks. And I wouldn't put this in a plane, but you can take it wherever you want. But that's it. Um, does it give you the measurements? Cause I think they have two or ones. It just, this is the Apache something 3, 3, 8, 0. But you can see you'll, you'll get the sense of it. So, so it makes life easy for me because, you know, I have this thing about that, that little case, your Pelican case and your little 20 head and you have all your modules. So, but anyways, the, something says about 8K in the case. Well, yeah, they're expensive. Like I said, 400 bucks whack. But so you know, that's not, that's not much different than, think about this. You say that, but I would bet you, oh, I'm not going to bet you cause I can take a look what I got now. But, uh, I was almost going to bet you, which would have been bad bet in my case. I was going to say, I bet you my pedal board is more, worth more money. It's not, not particularly the way it's set up now. But if I rearrange my pedal board correctly with the right amount of pedals, not volume of pedals, but price point, my pedals would cost more than that. So, but anyways, okay. Okay, let's, uh, uh, Luma says, Hey, does bass gear get less releases or is it just not as promoted to the guitar folks? You probably don't have all the bass guitar channels in your feed. I'm a bass player by heart. So like I said, I mostly play bass. So I get all the bass channels and then the bass arena. I mean, there was so much bass stuff released this year at the NAMM show. There was a lot of stuff. It's not a huge talking point for this channel. I mean, I dabble in the bass stuff and I dabble in the acoustic stuff and pedals and stuff. Primary electric guitars is the, the way, the way I like to do it. I like to do everything because I keep my interests up. But I mean, deep dive videos are what I've really kind of figured out that I like doing that you guys like watching. And that's the compromise. There's a lot of things I've done in the past that you guys like, but I necessarily didn't love doing them. Like in other words, they were a lot of work or maybe that, you know, just didn't, the passion part of it wasn't as high for me. And then for some reason, deep dives was like, I love the nerding out part of it. And I like, and I get to do that. And then you guys will actually reciprocate by watching it. And when I say watch it, always keep in mind, I don't care about the views. I mean, views are great. They're important to some point. I just care about watch time. So you know, because we run two channels now, the second channel on this channel, the know your gear channel and the film night channel. We physically, I don't want to say physically, we literally go through the analytics every day of how long you guys stay engaged is we live and die by engagement. How long you watch? It's all we really care about. How long do you stick around? Cause that's the biggest way to say, to tell me nothing else has told me anything over the years. People putting comments. Oh, you know, it doesn't help. Comments don't really help. I appreciate them positive and negative, whatever it's all feedback, but really what tells me everything is when YouTube goes, oh yeah. 80% of the people made it to the end of the video. You're like, holy crap, that's good. That's really good. That's a really good new number. And so that means that the topic was interesting and it was the right amount of that topic. And it was, cause keep in mind, if it's too high, that's bad too. So for instance, if you engage like, I've never had this, but let's say it said once that 90% of people watch the entire video. That meet to me would tell me the video was great, but it was too short. Cause you guys obviously what happened is it ended and you guys were like, oh, I would have watched more. And so through those analytics, we live and die by those making sure, you know, that we make the best content. And my theory is, so you know, which is why I stay focused the way I do is that in a few years, you know, like I've been doing this now for a decade. When you look back, I don't think I'll give a crap how many people watched. I don't think anything will matter. Like, I don't want to be like, oh, I got 103,000 views versus 10, whatever. I think I'll just look at the body of work or the videos and go, oh, it was a good video. I love it. And then please excuse this little tidbit, but I'll go to the next guitar subject. I do love it. Sometimes it happens very rarely, but it does happen. And I always kind of relate it to maybe when an artist hears their song on the radio that they like every once in a long time. One of my videos will get fed to me and I'll watch it. And it doesn't happen very often that it does that and it doesn't happen very often when I say next and I go through it. I watch my whole video because I was actually interested and it's weird for me because when enough time goes by, you forget. So I watch it almost like I've never seen it before. Like I'm just watching it and it'll end and I go, oh, that's a good video. I'm like, I can't believe I made that. Like I did that. It's weird feeling and it's the best feeling. I found YouTube and doing this content creation, I found no better feeling than that. It's a rush to go. Wow, that was amazing. Usually what I think is, hold on. Okay, usually what I usually experience is I watch somebody else's video and go, wow, I wish I made that. And then because that's the worst feeling because one, you didn't make it. They made it. And then two, because they made it, you're like, I can't even make it now if I wanted to. It's a really bummer feeling. It's like, oh, that's a great idea for a video. Now I can't make it because you've made it. All right, let's go to another subject. What do we got? James wants to know, if I bought a Squire on Facebook Marketplace, what's the first thing you would do to set it up? Well, it doesn't matter where I bought it. But once I get a guitar, the deep dive is how I actually, that's what that is. So you know, James, the deep dive is where that formula, that format came from for the video, the way it works. That's exactly how I would diagnose a customer's guitar that came in or a new guitar that came in from a manufacturer. I would sit it on the bench and obviously I wouldn't like do what I'm doing now, which is tell you guys, I didn't sit there and go, and now I'm going to do this and now let's check that. But that's the formula in which I would do things. So everything I would do is I would first the visual inspection, right? Go through. So essentially what I'm doing is specifications and going through and looking at some of the stuff. I'm looking for damage, looking for stuff, whether it's new or used, I go through. And then the next step is then start diagnosing the setup. How is the guitar setup? And once we know it's free from defects and the setup is really going to be an important part because it's going to really tell you. It's almost like, and I know it sounds silly, it's almost like when you go to your doctor for your health checkup every year. Checking the setup on a guitar is a great way to tell how healthy the guitar is. In other words, how well it's constructed, I don't know if there's any issues. Like all the problems start coming to life once you realize the setup is bad, right? So if a guitar setup is great and plays great, then you're going to go, it's almost like, oh wow, it's a bad analogy, I'm sure. But it's almost like the doctor going, oh look, you know, like your A1C is good, you know, right? This is good, this is good. Just going through the stuff and you're like, this is all good, Phil. And you're like, cool. And he's going to go, okay, at this point, let's check a couple other things, but this looks great. So there's no concern so we can freely go to the next thing. Same thing with the guitar. When I look at a guitar and I look at this action on the guitar and I go, well, the action is good. Oh, the intonation is good. Okay, there's no fret issues. Okay, I think we have a good guitar. Let's then let's go a little further. And so, so same thing when you buy a used guitar, you just go through and just and have some time with it. The, you know, just making sure that the action plays great. Changing the strings is always a good idea when you use guitar. First of all, you know, it usually has old strings and it's nice to put your new strings on and see what kind of problems start coming to bear. So, but yeah, I don't know. But yeah, so I would just follow those every one of those videos. That's how it was formulaized. I literally was like, oh, I needed, I needed to do something. At some point, I made the conscious decision like everybody on this on that creates content. You create, like said the way you do any business, anything in life, our art business, imitations first. It's why every great guitar company, besides the original like the inner Gibson, every great guitar company was copying stuff. You know, I've been as was copying stuff. ESP is copying stuff, right? Copying stuff. Shector copying stuff. copying stuff. You copy and then you perfect the copy and then you go, okay, how do I make that better? Paul Reismith copying Hamers, right? He's copying, you know, you copy the thing that you love and then you go, okay, now let's figure out how to make it better or make it more personalized or something, what can I add to this? Where's my voice in this? It works the same way when you make content. So when I started making review videos, I was like, okay, well, I get the idea. You have a chair and you have a background full of crap. I always call it the Sanford and Sons look. Yeah, it's all my stuff. Here's all my stuff, right? It's the first thing. I love that dearly so you know, it's like when you see every YouTube channel, you go, oh, there's all this stuff. This is what he has. And there's a sweetness in the idea that you look at that and go, you know, this is, oh, what does he have different than me? What does he have like me? What does she have different than me? What does she have like me? So anyway, so you start that idea and then I went from, at one point I go, it was as simple as this. I thought, you know what, this would be a lot easier. I got the first idea from, and I'm horrible at this. I don't know the name. There's a YouTube channel, massively huge, massive, huge. Probably like three 30 million subs or something. Any unboxing crap? And I don't know, like sunglasses and phones and stuff. I don't know. And he was on a table or a bench and I thought, oh, you know what, that makes more sense. Why isn't it in my lap? This doesn't even make sense in my lap. It needs to be on the bench. And then I go, okay, we'll put it on a bench. And then once it's on a bench, it was just instinctive for me to go, well, this is how, why don't I just do it how I used to do it? And then I started that process. And I thought maybe it'd be boring that way. And then it kind of worked that way. So, but, I remember just reading somebody, you're talking about Scott, where's the glove because it's metal condition. You're talking about the bass player? Scott, that wears that glove? I only reason, sorry, you got me sidetracked. I saw it because I knew he wore the glove. I just didn't know it was in medical condition. But anyways, and then that just became the formula that worked for me. And luckily people liked it. So, and it makes sense to me. It makes my brain happy to do it in that way. Okay, Alexander says, this is what he says. He says, hey Phil, a guitar amp never sounds the same. The acoustics of the room, where it stands in relation to the speaker, are bare faced audio cabinets, ace the solution and experience. I've never tried bare faced audio cabinets. Let me look at them. So, I think I know what they are. And then I'll give you my, hold on. Bare faced audio cabinets, bare faced audio. I don't know why there's a solution. I don't know what it is that's different about these, unless I'm not looking at something correctly. This is what he's talking about. Here's what I will tell you. You're right. So, let me just start with my insight and what I've learned and how I've learned for me. The reason why I have a couple of different amp fires, and in fact, I didn't have a ton. I'd always have at least three. I don't think I'd ever have less than three different amplifiers at any given time. I don't think you need 10. I don't think you need even five. But I definitely think you need, well, two at minimum is two amplifiers. Three, I think is ideal. Why do I think that? Because of exactly what you're saying. The amp fires are different, depending on where they are in the room. They're different based on you. I've said this before. When I test gear, I test gear in the morning. It's a little fun fact. I test gear in the morning because my ears are fresh. One of my fresh is your ears throughout the day, you hear a lot of sounds, maybe cars driving by, airplanes, noises, swooshing sounds. And when you sleep all night, your ears were in the quiet all night. My theory is that you wake up in the morning and my ears are different. I always found that my, I learned this because when I worked in a music store, I would come home and I'd find I'd play an amp in the morning before I go to work. Let's go play and I play for like 30 minutes and it sounded great. And then I play in the afternoon and I didn't like it. And vice versa, sometimes it's flipped the other way, but mostly the other way. And I was like, why is that? And then I thought, wait a minute, the amp didn't move in the room, the room didn't change. So what changed? And I'm like, I changed, I'm not the same. I'm not hearing the same. And then I go, oh, okay. So I like to test gear with my ears in the morning. That's when I tested all the product that I'm doing. It makes me, I don't know, it just gives me a sense of comfort. But that being said, sometimes when you, it's because your ears, you're not hearing things the same way. Sometimes emotionally, you're just different. Sometimes your playing is different. Things just change all the time. So I will do this all the time. If I plug in a guitar into an amp and I start playing, if I'm not having a connection right away, I literally will switch amps right there. I go, you know what, let's try a different amp. Let's see what happens. I don't do that though, just like sporadically just trying different amps. I'm just like, I'm not feeling it. There's no connection there. It's like, and I switch amps. And I find that sometimes it's not about an amp being good or bad. It's just different amp, different, different sonic textures are going on, different things are going on. And so that's just how I do it. But, but let's see, hold on. Vin Thrawn is saying, bare face cabinets won't solve room acoustic issues though. Room acoustics will always apply. They just remove the directionally, they just remove the directionality of the speaker. Okay. The other thing is also everybody's different. One thing that I do that's very rare, and I just can tell you, because very few guitar players I know do this. I tilt a lot of my cabinets at me. I tilt my speakers up at me like a monitor. That's the way I like to play. That's a bass player thing. I don't know if guitar players should all do that. It's not the best advice I have for you. I used to always tilt my, I used to play bass so loud. And then I started to learn to tilt a bass cabinet up towards me. And I met a genius bass designer and he was, he designed a wedge bass cabinet. And I was like, oh, this is really good. And I said, yeah. And he go, why is it so good? And he goes, well, it's tilted your face. And I said, I said, I thought speakers was supposed to be towards your face. And he goes, well, your knees don't have ears, do they? And I just, just made me laugh. Your knees don't have ears. So I started tilting my bass cabinets. And I was like, oh, I really like this. And I know you lose some content on the ground for low end frequency, but it doesn't matter. And so guitars, I tilt them too a little bit when I can. So yeah. And then Susan says, I like slant cabs. Same reason. Yeah. Same thing. I like the speaker just a little bit tilted. I find that, I will tell you this, it helps me personally as a YouTube content gear creator, whatever the hell you want to call it, I'm recording because a lot of times what sucks is I get a tone dialed in and I like it and then I'm recording it and there's something going on. It's usually always the same problem. It's too dark or muddy in the recording. And it's because of the fact that I'm, I'm sorry, backwards. It's too bright. So it's too bright in the recording. And it's because I have to crank all the high frequencies because there are nothing's coming up my ears. So that's just the way I do it. I'll check out the bare face cabinets. I didn't, I didn't know about them. So maybe there is some kind of truth in that, but I'm not that I know of. Okay. And then we'll end on this one. This is from Gerald who says, Hey, your favorite subject we never hear about. My favorite subject we never hear about strings. I wish we would talk about strings more. I'm a huge fanatic for strings. I love talking about strings. I think strings are the most underrated thing that guitar players talk about. I find that even now you, I can, I can physically feel the universe as you all just turn off. There's so many you're gonna turn off because string talk, string talks boring. To me, it's everything. I love guitar strings. I love, I love experimenting with guitar strings. And I loved trying, you know, at some point I would just, you know, some people keep buying a pedal, you know, like I'm gonna try every pedal out there. I'm like, I want to try every string out there. I love having different strings on guitars. You know, I recently did this, a buddy of mine bought a Emerald guitar and he bought the classical version. And I thought, oh, that's kind of cool. And then I go, well, here's what I'll do. So I went, so I took my Emerald, this is my Emerald acoustic. That's a carbon fiber. Oops. And, well, you can't see that. Can I find a change camera angles to help that? A little bit, you can see it's kind of red. Look, you can see all my stuff. Red carbon fiber. So this is a carbon fiber guitar. This is made in Ireland. ["Carpon Fiber"] Let me do this. This probably won't be great. So you know, because I'm gonna plug it into my electric guitar amp. And I'll explain this because hopefully we won't have any problems. ["Carpon Fiber"] Switch cameras here. Here we go. I have the microphone in the way, because it's okay. ["Carpon Fiber"] ["Carpon Fiber"] Okay. Really don't like that delay. Let me get rid of that real quick if you don't mind. Just because I thought it was cool with the electric, but not this. Okay, here we go. Give me one second. Not a whole lot of, I just don't want, I'm gonna boost that signal up a little bit. Okay. So here's what's cool. ["Carpon Fiber"] So this is a electric acoustic guitar. What I'm using is ball-in classical strings. Ball-in means exactly what that means. These are classical strings. These are silver, you can get different kinds, phosphor, bronze style, silver classical strings with ball-ins. You can convert any guitar, acoustic guitar to a classical guitar. So I was like, I'll just make mine classical. So you get that. That's roll-y. ["Carpon Fiber"] So anyways, my point is, I love that subject because let me pull them up real quick. I'll pop them in the sweet water, I'm pretty sure. I tend to buy my strings. I try to buy them in Guitar Center. The reason is, is because I get 10% off at Guitar Center because I have an affiliate link. So I can use my affiliate link and get 10% off. But sweet water is so much faster to get stuff. So sometimes I'm like, I'll pay a little bit more just to get it faster. Let me go to my order history and now I can tell you exactly what strings are. Well, let me log in, continue. All right, give me a second. Stupid. Okay. Come on, sweet water, let me in my count. It's thinking, sweet water's thinking. It's gotta go to space. Okay, ready, looking. I didn't buy these at Sweetwater, I bought them at Guitar Center. Let me use it, I don't have a history of it. So these are didario. So let me just do this. Didario, ball end. Classical strings. And sometimes, let me see. So I went with ball end. This is what I went with, hold on a second. Okay, this is what I have on here. Silver plated wound nylon, folk nylon strings, ball end, he's gonna say that. And 11.99. You can put these on an acoustic guitar. So if you have a steel string acoustic guitar, you can absolutely put classical strings on it. The things you need to know is what's gonna happen is, this is carbon fibers, well I did this, nothing's gonna happen in this guitar, I just did it and it plays amazing. But if you have a wood guitar, what's gonna happen to your wood guitar is the neck is obviously, it's used to having the string tension pull and so what's gonna happen with that neck is it's gonna pull back really far back and then your strings are gonna be laying on your fretboard. So you have to relieve the truss rod a lot. So you just really leave the truss rod on your acoustic guitar. So a light setup is what's gonna need. Now, do you have to cut a new nut? Not if you go with this. So there's a reason why I picked that gauge, which is the .45 to .20. So it's 25 to .45. So you gotta get the gauge correct because otherwise, yes, if you get the strings a little bigger than the classical strings, the nylon strings, what will happen sometimes with the clear strings, the three treble strings, is our two trebles. How many treble strings do you get on the clock? Three treble strings. What could happen on your treble strings because they are thicker than your wire gauge strings, they will bind in your nut. Don't cut your nut slots, just lubricate them. It'll be fine. Once the strings stretch, they'll be fine. So basically it's an easy conversion if you wanna convert an electric acoustic. Transducer pickup works the same on a nylon string versus a steel string, it doesn't matter. So you can convert your acoustic over to a nylon guitar if you want to do that. And I decided, yeah, I got this, I go, yeah, I wanted a classical guitar and I thought, hey, you know what, why don't you just convert one of those? So I did. And that's why I love that subject because it's like the more you learn about the different kinds of strings, you realize how they can suit different needs. So when somebody says, like imagine right now if somebody's watching and they got three or four acoustic guitars at home and they're thinking about getting a classical, you could get a classical if you want the wider neck and the really flat fretboard if you want that style. But maybe you may just wanna convert one of your inexpensive acoustics into a classical. What's great about classical strings, nylon strings is because the tension is so low, you need almost no tension on the truss rod. One of the downfalls of cheap acoustics is that the truss rods aren't very good and you can't make them the next very straight. You won't have that problem because you're gonna need almost no tension on that neck. Somebody says, somebody says, okay, two questions. I'm gonna do this one. I thought I grabbed one, but I'm gonna grab Brian's. Brian says, why do brand new expensive guitars ship with average strings? They usually ship with crappy strings. You know, what's crazier than that is not only why do expensive guitars ship with crappy strings, but it's even funnier when the expensive guitars of a brand actually makes their own strings. Like they have, like Fender has its own brand of strings and you get a guitar from them and it doesn't have the Fender strings on there, which is funny because you can tell because it's not Fender strings because Fender has their strings made by Dodario. And so the Dodario color coding, the Fender strings are color coded using Fender colors. They use like Daphne blue and, you know, and graffiti yellow and stuff like that and surf green. And cause it's cheap. And the reason, the thing that you learn is, is that everyone does, they go as cheap as they can with something. And the main reason is, is that's where they think we're gonna not notice or care. Because the argument is always the same argument. You can't guarantee how long the guitar sits in a warehouse somewhere. You can't guarantee the guitar is gonna get there with fresh strings on a customer. And you're never gonna guarantee that the customer's gonna want the strings that come with the guitar. A lot of players have a different gauge choice or different brand. Brand loyalty and strings is a definite real thing. And so a lot of customers, a lot of players, once they buy a guitar, they immediately change, they usually change the strings no matter what. So a lot of brands are gonna put money there. Hold on a second. There was, somebody had a question and it was about strings. Okay, I can't find it. So, but that's my underrated subject, strings. I really recommend everybody trying different strings. Try some pure nickel strings. Try, you know, everybody always thinks engages in brands. Don't think engages in brands, think some materials. Try different materials. Flat wounds, tape wounds, silk and steel, you know, nickel versus nickel coated versus, you know, versus coated strings. Try different things. I think it's a really interesting thing to do and you learn a lot about yourself as a musician doing it. And on this, this was from Lemon Lust who says, hey Phil, I'm learning how to refrat level of dress and crown frats. When should I pivot to doing this as a business for other people? Well, obviously when you're good at it, that's the first step. And I don't know if there's a right time to pivot, to do it as a business. I find that the advice I've always given in the past is this, when it's time, the first thing I, the first thing, great thing right now is there's not, there's not a lot of heavy competition in the repair space. Feels like there is, there's just not. Most repair techs are backlogged. Most Luthiers are backlogged with repairs. If you're going to start doing it as a business, first I would reach out to friends and family. That's the best way to start it. Because again, you're just trying to get your chops out there. If you feel like you're good enough and you've actually got it down, I will tell you though, that when you do guitar repair, the bulk of your business is going to be setups. That's just what you're going to get. So, you know, refrats, all that stuff, it's great, finished work, headstock breaks, but that's not the bulk of your work. Your bulk is in, it's almost like becoming a mechanic just so you can change oil. It's a really silly, weird thing, but that's just the reality of it. So, one thing that I would recommend, in fact, we'll end on this, and this is the best advice I'll give you when you start doing setups. Create some paperwork, like a sheet, you know, right? Some, something with your heading of your business name. Start, you know, you don't have to official start an LSE or anything like that, but start, you know, you're at least have, make sure you have some kind of business cards made to give customers information. But definitely create a menu of your services and your fees, and do not worry about having a full menu. Worry about having a menu of exactly what you do and what you do well. So, when somebody, and don't, and this is absolutely the best advice, do not do something because someone asked you. So, what I mean by that is, you can put on your sheet, I do restrings, I do setups, I do pickup installs, I do refrets, I do level and dress, right? And if somebody says, hey, can you do this, or will you do that? The answer is no. And they go, well, what if, and they always, I don't know why, but they're like, it's weird, right? You're like, you're just telling them, like, imagine somebody's like, it's like going to a doctor, and like, hey, can you fix my liver? And he's like, I don't know anything about it, but what if I pay you more? You're like, it's the weirdest thing. It's the weirdest thing. It happened to me so many times. And I'd be like, hey, you know, will you fix the finish on my guitar? I don't do finish work. What if I pay you double? I won't know, I won't know how to do it because you pay me double, right? So, you gotta say no, because you'll end up down that road, and it's not a good road. But my best advice, start out with a menu of your services and your rates, stick to what you're good at, and then that's how you start, and then like build your clientele list that way. And that's how you do it. And I will tell you, every customer is a return customer. And it's not a potentially, it's just they are. So that's how you work a repair business. A retail business, they say the same thing, I've had both. Retail businesses is repair, as is repeat customers, it is, but it is not necessarily important. Customers come in your store and you never see them again. They came in and they buy an opportunity. They bought, you use guitar you had, you bought the guitar you haven't special. They're on that side of town doing, having a meeting, they walk in your store, they buy a guitar, they buy a guitar and then they move. That happens all the time. It's repeat business is important to retail, especially small business, but it's just part of the business model. In repair, generally speaking, people are not driving across the city to get a repair done. No, what am I trying to say? Not randomly, what do you mean by that? They're not gonna be across town and go, hey, I just happened to walk in your repair shop and I had my guitar on my trunk and I was in the business meeting, I'm gonna work on my guitar. Like people come to you and then they come back to you and they come back to you and come back to you. And I used to tell people, I'm like, I would work on a thousand guitars because of a hundred people. That's absolutely true. So you build it like a clientele list. So my advice is, repeat one more time, we'll end on it, to make sure you set exactly what you do for the customers, don't do anything, you know how to do very well. Make sure you start with your friends and family first and then also, like, and then start building at one customer at a time. That's my advice for that. On that note, I'm gonna let you guys go. We have some cool videos. Oh, Angel Velk says, oh, Taylor A14 on the wall. This is the new 2026 Taylor 814 on the wall. I have a couple of the new Taylor guitars with the new design. I have a deep dive this week. You'll see the video of theirs. I'm super excited about this. If you haven't seen, I know the Taylor A14 is the holy price point guitar, but don't worry, it's down the series too. The new Taylor stuff, they did three new things with guitars that are mind-bogglingly amazing. We'll be going into detail about how the new Nex move, they move and all the other crazy changes they made to the Taylor line that are, and what I think good and bad about them, there's some good and there's some bad, unfortunately. And I'll see you guys next Friday, but also content during the week. So on that note, and if you're really bored for content, then don't forget we have the Know Your Gear channel, and it's rocking, you guys are killing it. Thank you guys for that channel. We do amp videos on that channel. We do pedal videos on the channel, and then we do the pod clips, and then there's bonus materials on that. And then also, don't forget the 10 Pierce course. If this is the last weekend to sign up for that, you wanna do that. And if you wanna become a Patreon member, you can do that. And on that note, I'm gonna let you go. You guys have an amazing weekend and Know Your Gear. If you're learning something or having a good time, don't forget you can subscribe for free.