What I did on my holidays

It's been quiet here for a month but then again I do have a good excuse, I've been on holiday in NZ for three weeks. A friend was getting married and it's so far away that if you're going to go you need to make it a long trip.

As I was going to be travelling about in a car killing time for a few weeks I took along my WI66ProE and Amplug. Lots of people might go to NZ to do active outdoors stuff I was going to relax.

There are many anecdotal stories of airlines destroying guitars, so I used one of my Hiscox Liteflite cases, which is about as tough as you'll get short of a full professional flight case and took the WI66ProE because it cost me tuppence and I wouldn't miss it. In the end, Air New Zealand didn't put a mark on the case and it survived the entire trip unscathed.

I had a good look round the guitar shops I found hoping to see something 'different' but even one of the guys in Rockshop admitted they carry pretty much the same stuff we do in the UK. So I failed to bring home a guitar related NZ souvenir.

Last couple of shots are of Whitianga where I finished my stay. I practised a little sat on a bench by that beach then got up early the following morning and watched the sun rise over the Pacific. Which is pretty special if you're from the UK.

I'm still dead impressed by the 'no frills' nature of the Amplug. The battery lasts ages and it's very easy to sit on a bench and play without being distracted by lots of stuff to fiddle with.

Anyway soon I'll be back on the guitar fiddling wagon and as summer is coming I'll clear off the bench in the shed and do it out there. Still not sure what to do with the Explorer but I've got a Strat body to refinish lined up.

Amplug at Indiecon

Well the idea worked. I had a couple of evenings free and got some solid practice in instead of vegetating in front of the TV. The only problem I had was that my old MP3 player has no repeat function and the buttons are a bit dodgy so I found myself slightly annoyed by it. You can pick up a 1GB 'stick' MP3 player for a pittance so I may do so.

My next hurdle is to take it into work and use it effectively there. I'm not quite sure where I'd go to practice. We tend to have a bunch of meeting rooms free in the building so I may just wander round until I find one.

Have Amplug will travel

I've got a gaming convention coming up and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to assemble and try my 'travel kit'. At these events, games are in 4 hour slots and unless you play 12 hours a day you can end up with a fair bit of time to kill.

This is based around the Amplug I bought, the WI66ProE and an old 128MB MP3 player I've got kicking around. I've given it a spin and found that mixing the backing from the MP3 player with the guitar is a bit hit and miss but works OK once you've got the levels sorted. It all runs on AAA batteries, bar the EMGs in the guitar which last ages, so I can have a single set of batteries and charger.

This should all fit in one of my gig bags easily and if it gets dropped or nicked won't be a tragedy as the WI66ProE cost me tuppence.

Mirage #1 - crapola Steinberger clone

In the mid 90s I had a Hohner G3T, which was a very acceptable clone of the classic Steinberger L-series, only made in traditional materials. I ostensibly had this, along with a Zoom 9000 to practice at work in my lunch hour.

In reality I spent lunchtime in the pub and never liked the sounds I got from the Zoom. So both got sold on, the Zoom at quite scary a loss but there you go.

With an eye to resurrecting this idea I've been keeping a look out for a travel guitar. However the Hohners go for very good money, as do pretty much any decent travel guitars. You get the odd no-name one come up but they're always far too pricey to take a risk on.

Somebody put this up on eBay with a £75 'buy it now' and it hit my threshold for taking a risk on an unknown quantity. How bad could it be I thought.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. This is by far the nastiest guitar I have ever touched. It looks OK at first glance but it's nasty.

The actual neck is OK. It came with quite a bow in it and having adjusted the truss rod it's now much better. The frets were grotty, like they're corroded and I've cleaned it off but I bet it comes back. The rosewood is obviously the nastiest driest stuff they could find and not very well finished.

It has a zero fret, like the original Steinbergers but the locking nut isn't fitted very well and doesn't hold the strings down against it hard enough. So the top E/B strings don't really sound properly.

The bridge is made by the improbable sounding 'Overlord of Music' out of mystery monkey metal. This includes the saddles, so I can see them wearing pretty quickly. The whole thing is shonky in the extreme. Locked in place it's not very stable, I dread to think what it would be like if I found a tremolo arm that fitted and tried to use that.

Even with the worst of the bow taken out of the neck, the action is excessively high and there's simply no adjustment available to lower it. Each saddle can be adjusted but they all came at the lowest position without any effort to match the fretboard radius. I may do this but it's only going to raise the action. I think I'd need to route out the body a bit and lower the whole bridge assembly a little to fix it. The neck is set so there's no real opportunity to change the angle.

Amazingly it sounds kind of OK once stuck through my JamVox, the pickups are sort of acceptable and all the controls work. Setting the stupid action aside it actually plays OK, but feels nasty while doing so.

I could spend lots of time sorting this out but you know I'm not sure I can be arsed. I may fix the worst bits (the nut really) and punt it back to eBay. If I do I'm tempted to steal the leg rest for my Jackson Rhoads so I can play it sitting down.

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