Jaguar/Jazzmaster diy set up guide in Premier Guitar Magazine
Tuesday, 18 April 2017
Premier Guitar Magazine just published a thorough set up guide by Michael Adams, and they asked me if they could use my tremolo set up illustrations in that piece. Why yes, of course!
Imagine my surprise, when, a short while ago, my office rang in the evening, telling me that they'd just had someone from "America" asking to speak to me on "urgent matters".
As it turned out after a short round of name searching and twitter dm-ing, it really was Premier Guitar Magazine's Chief Content Officer, Shawn, asking if they could use some of my schematics of the 'Setting up the tremolo system' article I wrote back in days when the web was operated on coal-powered servers.
Since the German magazine 'Gitarre & Bass' had featured my illustrations in a special "Jazzmaster" print issue some time ago, luckily I already had the illustrations in print-resolution (somewhere, more on that later), so yes, of course I'd be honoured to have them published to an even wider audience.
Not that I had to be convinced, but learning that the schematics would be used to illustrate an article by Michael Adams (who's blog and Instagram stream I admire on a regular basis), I was totally sold. :-). Michael is currently (at least in my little corner of the web) *the* goto address for offset wisdom. And, like me, he's got the Jazzmaster bug, big time:
My heart goes out to the Jazzmaster; it really does. Introduced at a time when Fender was thinking of discontinuing the now-hallowed Stratocaster, what began as a top-of-the-line model eventually fell into obscurity, relegated to pawn shop bargain bins and sold to musicians who couldn’t afford the upmarket prices of more familiar, more desirable guitars. For nearly 50 years they were misunderstood, maligned, and marred by stories of string slippage, tuning instability, and impossible intonation.
So of course I was very happy to supply my schematics to this article.
The only problem: Where are the damn printable files? It took my about two hours rummaging in my hopelessly unorganized backup archives to find the old Freehand files. Another two hours of trying to resurrect them in a somewhat modern file format, and then vanity kicked in and I cleaned up some quirks in those old illustrations. Had I known back then when first writing the set up article, that the schematics would gain some attraction, I surely would have put more efford in hi-res, scalable graphics, but back then I only thought about how to get them usable for my web site, so, well, here we are.
Reminds me that I wanted to do a make over of the graphics for quite a while now :-)
