Grateful Dead Music Forum

Vic,
When I played at the Wormtown festival last Sat night I got there early and I caught some of your set. You sounded great (as usual), but noticed you were using the old strat. What happened to the Tiger? I didnt get close enough to see the whole rig, were you using the AxeFx with FRFR's?

I tried to stop by after the set to say hi,but my daughter was insisting on staying at the playground in the kids camp.

During our set that night my boogie was not responding like usual and seemed to break up in a nasty way earlier than it should. I couldnt figure it out, but then again I was in a Chocolate induced haze (the problem with playing festivals is that you forget you are there to play and have a little too much fun seeing other bands ) anyway I go to pack up at the end of the set and there is a 6L6 sitting on the stage behind my amp! needless to say, Tube depot got an order for 4 power tube retainers first thing Monday morning.

Hey Jeff ... sorry we missed you, man!

I wasn't sure if it was you guys playing or not, there's some other band in western MA that's taken the name Shakedown. Ironically, they called themselves "Play Dead" first, but we convinced them to change. I was using the AxeFX with the QSC monitors. My sound is perfectly consistent every show now, I really dig it.

Gary Brawer has my Tiger, he's fixing the truss rod, setting the bridge correctly, refretting and Pleking it and rewiring it. It will come back ... some day!

[quote="playingdead]


Gary Brawer has my Tiger, he's fixing the truss rod, setting the bridge correctly, refretting and Pleking it and rewiring it. It will come back ... some day[/quote]



Dude, that's nuts.

Vic,
Your Tiger is a Resurrection built guitar right? That sounds like a lot of problems and I was under the impression that they were very high quality. Are these just fine adjustments that you've realized you wanted or were there actual problems?
J

If you look at any Les Paul, you'll notice that the bridge is angled so that the low E saddle is farther "south" on the guitar than the high E saddle.

Resurrection put a bridge similar to a Les Paul tune-o-matic on my guitar, but they didn't angle it. Therefore, it didn't have enough adjustment to it, even with the saddles reversed, to get the low E to intonate correctly. In fact, the saddles had to be adjusted about as far back as they would go to get the other strings to intonate. That means it could be off just a hair overall and not being tilted made it worse. I know of at least one other Resurrection, built before mine, that has the same problem.

That is the biggest build flaw on the guitar. (The bridge on the real Tiger is set straight, but it's an SG style bridge and has more adjustment to it, I guess.)



(Note that this photo was taken before the initial setup at Resurrection, I can tell because the saddles are adjusted the way they should be adjusted for the guitar to intonate if everything is correct -- on a right-handed guitar, though. This has something to do to compensate for the thickness of the three wound and three unwound strings -- the low E and the G string should have the saddles back the farthest. Once my guitar was actually set up, the saddles were almost all the way back on every string.)






The woodwork is nice, the set neck joint is a work of art. The fret work was passable, nothing outstanding. I had the frets dressed locally not long after getting the guitar, which helped. But the guitar always had some buzz in certain spots. Finish was decent, some pitting in spots, but cocobolo is very hard to work with, and the finish is nitro as opposed to poly.



The truss rod Resurrection installed had a socket welded onto it instead of a threaded nut. Recently, the guitar developed a rattle in the neck (which was likely the rod) and a buzz around the 3-7th frets, particularly on the low strings of the guitar. When I went to adjust the truss rod, I got some resistance which felt normal to me, then the allen wrench turned freely. The weld had snapped off at the socket. This was a few weeks after I had the guitar out on stage in Vermont in 40-degree temperatures. We had heaters on the stage, and I left the guitar on a stand for a couple of hours to try to acclimate it before we played, but the guitar refused to stay in tune that day. I wound up playing my Strat, which was more stable. It was theorized that with all the different woods and laminates on the Tiger, things were expanding and contracting at different rates, and that was why it wouldn't stay in tune. Whether that helped cause the problem with the truss rod a few weeks later, I can't say. Maybe it was a bad weld, or it was brittle, or I just turned it too hard.

To replace the truss rod, the fingerboard comes off the guitar; that means a refret and Brawer has a Plek machine. I don't know how many of you have played a Pleked guitar, but I have a Suhr Strat that was Pleked and it has terrific frets. I am also going to put a little bit thicker frets on there, which I prefer.

The wiring on the guitar was okay, although the volume pot became scratchy recently and the guitar has always had an iffy ground -- it has picked up radio signals on occasion. However, it was not done "correctly" as per the real Tiger, and, obviously, since Gary Brawer did the original guitars, he knows what to do on that account.

So, while the truss rod issue necessitated the repair, I had been thinking about sending it out there anyway to address the bridge and the wiring. Brawer said it would come back "perfect," and I will report back on my experience with him when the guitar arrives. For what it's worth, he's worked on a lot of Resurrections.

S--- happens, but the guitar will be, in theory, much better when it comes home, so for now I am suffering with my 22-fret Tiger-ized Strat and my Suhr Strat or PRS Custom 22 as a backup.

playingdead wrote:
S--- happens, but the guitar will be, in theory, much better when it comes home, so for now I am suffering with my 22-fret Tiger-ized Strat and my Suhr Strat or PRS Custom 22 as a backup.

My new PRS Custom 24 is a pretty good "Dead" guitar.

Sounds like it going to be a real beaut when you get it back. I'm sure it's hard to let it go for a long time but in the end it will be worth it. Would love to hear about it once you get it back. I've been real happy with the set up of mine (I had Chris Michas build me one recently). Everything about the neck feels real good but it's not "just exactly perfect". Once I mod my Strat I would like to send mind out and have someone give it a real good going over.
Good luck and keep us posted.

I love everything about my PRS Custom 22, it's nice and light, plays like a dream and has a terrific neck, but the stock electronics -- Dragon II pickups and a 3-way selector plus coil-tap -- don't get anything approximating the DiMarzios through the buffer for the tone I favor. It's easier to get an ES-335 Weir tone out of it, or even something approximating a Tele. I can get somewhere in the neighborhood of the old Travis Bean tone with the bridge pickup, but that's not my preference.

Lefty PRS guitars are also rare and valuable enough where I don't want to screw around changing pickups, etc.; they stopped building leftys a few years ago.