Posted By Hiroshi on April 14, 2013
Hey everyone! Mystified and stymied on how to get a good lock on the tuners with your guitar strings? Check out this video, I go over the way I like to do strings on the more common style of tuning machine.
Posted By Hiroshi on March 12, 2013
So you got your guitar’s finish all polished up nice and pretty but your hardware is looking less than a little lustrous, right? Well if your are polishing your guitar with Music Nomad Guitar polish you can also clean up your hardware.
Posted By Hiroshi on January 19, 2013
Hey everyone!! Do you sometimes have trouble with restringing your steel string acoustic guitar? Those little pins popping out or just generally having a tough time with them? Well this quick tip will help make it a little easier for you.
Posted By Hiroshi on November 30, 2012
Okay so you just got your awesome guitar and you want to clean it up to take some pictures so you can post them on your social media site of choice. Right? But that awesome finish has been covered in fingerprints from your diligent playing. Well, then you need something to clean that finish up to its former glory. Enter Music nomad’s guitar one!
Look below and check out the video of me demoing this product…
Posted By Hiroshi on October 10, 2012
Hey everyone! This coming Saturday the 13th we are offering a free restring the same day you purchase strings. All you have to do is buy a set of strings and give me the guitar and strings and I will change them on the spot while you watch. While this is happening, I can also provide you with advice on the many options your guitar has if you want it to play differently than it already does. I can also help you with any questions regarding guitar setup, pickup installation, pickup swapping, or any other questions about your electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, or ukulele that you might have. I will be helping people on a first come first served basis. Any work that I take in that day will be done the following week so we can keep the restring job and easy access for questions about my services open to all that walk in.
Posted By Hiroshi on September 30, 2012
As I mentioned in my previous jack repair post, a Tele jack is slightly different than normal when it comes to bolting everything back together. In the following video I will go over how to fix a Tele jack if it falls out.
Posted By Hiroshi on August 15, 2012
Did your jack fall out?
If yes, don’t be embarrassed as it happens to everyone. Do not fret it is easily fixable, but there are some precautions you want to take while fixing it to prevent damage to the jack wiring and the future of the human race. Also there will be some slight dis-assembly involved.
Tools you will need:
-Screwdriver ( which ever one fits the screws for your jackplate)
-Wrench/socket wrench of some sort (usually they are sized with a 1/2 inch nut but you sometimes can get by with a 13mm one too)
First thing you want to do is find all of the parts that fell off. Usually this should be a washer and a nut. You will want to put those aside for later as you will need them but not right now.
From left to right- Jack, lock washer, washer, and nut.
The next step requires you to remove the jack plate regardless if the jack is still sticking out or if it went into the cavity.
Now while you are pulling everything apart watch out for more falling parts. There will usually be more washers and a serrated lock washer to help hold everything in place.
You want to take everything apart before re bolting everything is so you can hold the jack in place.
The reason you need to hold the jack in place while you are screwing everything back together is because if you screw the nut on without support you will usually cause the jack to spin which will cause the wires to wrap up around the jack and prevent you from plugging your cable in, or you will cause a solder joint to break and there will be no signal at all and some horrid banshee noises coming from your guitar.
For this example I am reattaching a jack to a stratocaster jack plate. Because of the way the plate is setup, you will need to use a socket wrench to access the nut on the jack.
Once everything is taken down, you will want to place the lock washer over the threaded part of the jack then insert the assembly into the back of the jack plate.
Then it should look like this…
Cool now flip that sucker over and put the flat washer on the nut.
Ok. Once all of that is done you will want to grab the jack bit with the tab and use the socket wrench to tighten the nut until it is tight. Remember to be careful of any wires attached to it while tightening as you don’t want to hold onto the wires because you could break them off.
Hold the jack with one hand and tighten with the other
Once you finish all of that put everything back together and you are done! These instructions cover most jack problems you will run into. Jacks like a tele jack or a recessed jack come together differently, but we will cover those on a later date.
I hope this helped. If you have any questions feel free to give me a call at 591-0999. I’m Hiroshi!
Posted By Hiroshi on July 10, 2012
Hey everybody it Hiroshi again! Today I wanted to talk about the tone knob and capacitors and how they work with your overall tone.
Very simply put, a conventional tone control on an electric guitar will filter the high frequency signals coming from the pickups to the ground so your output signal will be more “mellow” sounding, which can provide a variation to your already majestic tone.
A tone control is in its most basic form a capacitor and a control potentiometer. The capacitor connects to the center leg and then to the back of the pot. Then, one of the other legs gets connected to the output of your main signal( see below).
So you are thinking “well that’s all great and dandy but what does a capacitor do?”. What a capacitor does is store energy in an electric field kind of like a battery, but it just stores power and is not a power source itself. They are used for stabilizing power flow, controlling current, and a on a guitar it works as a filter. They range in size from the really small ones we use to really big ones that are almost the size of a soda can.
One of the biggest things you can do it you are not to happy with your tone knobs sound is change the capacitor value; it will change the range of the treble bleed when you turn the knob. The bigger the value on the capacitor the more treble gets removed. So, if you have been messing with your stock tone knob, and find it to be lifeless, woofy, and dead sounding, you might want to try changing the capacitor to a smaller value.
I hope this helped. If you do have any questions feel free to give us a ring at 808-591-0999. I am the guitar tech here and love this stuff!
Posted By Hiroshi on June 14, 2012
You hear the word “nitro” or “nitrocellulose finish” thrown around in guitar talks, but what exactly is nitro? In this article we will try to explaining what nitro is. What we will not cover though are the benefits and/or drawbacks of nitro because that is subjective, and I do not want to get slapped. On that note lets go…
Posted By Hiroshi on April 8, 2012
So, maybe you have been hearing people talk about “active pickups” and are wondering what they are talking about?
Well, worry no more, today we are going on a journey to active pickup land, and hopefully I can help you with your pickup quandary.
To start, you need to know what a regular non active or passive pickups is. A passive pickup is a pickup that through a magnetic coil or some other means creates an electric signal from the vibrations of the strings and transmits it to an amplifier so the volume can be increased and/or recorded. This pickup works on its own without any further assistance.
The “active” part of an active pickup has a thing called a pre-amplifier which is located either on the pickup or in the control cavity of the guitar. What it does is alter the signal, eq and output before the signal goes to the amplifier. What this means for you is that (depending on the model) aside from your normal volume and tone control, you could possibly have low, mid, and high control as well.
There are draw backs though with active pickups. They require a power source. Also, if the system runs on a 9 volt, the way the system saves power is that when the instrument is unplugged, the circuit is disconnected. So if you leave the cable in the instrument while not playing it, the battery will drain faster than normal.
Another pro/con, depending on who you talk to, active pickups change the sound of the instrument. This also goes for any pickup change, but it is worth stating. The hard part is that the sound change is extremely subjective so the best thing to do if you can is to try it out for your self and form your own opinion. Secondly active pickups cut out a lot of background noise associated with passive pickups so if you are in a magnetically “noisy” area they might help.
Hopefully this article has educated and informed you about active pickups, and helped guide you in the direction you desire. If you still want to try out a guitar with active pickups we usually have one at our stores so give us a call or come on down and check us out.
Something you are not seeing here? Call us for pricing and/or availability! (808) 591-0999. Or email us at admin@easymusiccenter.com 
