Beware, long and potentially boring material ahead. Feel free to close this window, I won’t even know! Of course, in just over 24 hours, Happy Hearts will begin, and I’m sure I’ll be distracted by that, which means a brief respite in my inane postings; aren’t you glad? And the way I’ve been behaving lately, I’ll probably get disciplined by the GMs. They’ll turn me into a frog or something.

Today, the Hello Kitty guitar picks I recently ordered arrived. And wouldn’t you know it, about two hours after I placed this order, I found one of my other picks. That’s my kind of luck. Well, I know there are others floating around, and you really need more than one, so it wasn’t an unnecessary purchase.

I’ve placed my other pick in perspective, which is just a standard medium gauge tortoise-shell pick. The HK picks are of the same size and gauge. Six of white, six of pink, and the back is the same on all. If you look closely at the pink one here, you might think that it is blurry. It is actually that rippled finish that changes the image depending on the angle.

They are fairly nice, almost too cute to actually use. And they’re medium gauge, so they have a nice firm bend. They feel like a different material, or may it is just that finish, so I don’t know how they’ll hold up to heavy picking.

But the saga will continue. When I was noodling with my bass, I was having a horrific time with the intonation. I tuned it, using both the 5th fret and open string method, and the 5th harmonic and 7th harmonic. But when I was playing, it sounded horribly out of tune. At that point, you have to look at the neck. And BOY was it seriously bowed. I’m ashamed that I didn’t notice the horrible bow.

Most guitars have a truss rod inside the neck, which adjusts the bend of neck, to make it flat. So you just crank it up or down. Not too much, because it’s possible to snap the rod, and then you’re looking at buying a new neck. The instrument needs to be stringed and relatively tuned, otherwise the neck won’t have the proper tension to adjust.

Once the neck is re-tensioned, you’ve really changed the the performance  of the bass, and now you have to adjust the bridge. You need to bring the strings up or down so they’re parallel with the fretboard. No hard rules of thumb, just no buzzing and a comfortable fretting. You shouldn’t need to muscle the string to fret it.

After the string heights are adjusted, THEN you need to adjust the intonation, by shortening or lengthening the string. The 12th fret, the 12th harmonic and the open string should be exactly in tune (give or take the octave).

Two hex screws on top to adjust the height, one screw on the rear to make it longer or shorter.

Once I get it all tuned and adjusted, then maybe I’ll amaze you with my mad skillz at playing.

Well, that was all very interesting, wasn’t it? Say yes. Please? Thank you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Music, Kitty stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.