So now I'm home, and my first reaction is ... yuck. I remember a story about how Woody Guthrie got in trouble with his wife for buying Arlo an expensive guitar, as recounted by Arlo Guthrie here:
Even today $70 spent on a five-year-old kid seems like a lot of money. My mother was angered beyond words that my father would spend that kind of money on a little kid. Not only that, but as he left to purchase the guitar, the neighbor said "If you're getting one for your kid, pick one up for mine." He certainly thought, as did my mother, that he would come home with a $15 toy and not a real instrument. The neighbor went ballistic in sync with my mom's utter disbelief.
If Woody hadn't thought this way, the world may never have had Alice's Restaurant. OK, maybe it's not the best example for the readership of this blog (which currently numbers approximately 0), so feel free to replace "Arlo" with "Stevie Ray" , "Guthrie" with "Vaughan", and "Woody" with "Big Jim" (I kid you not).My father told them "If you buy a kid a toy, he'll play it for a day and lose interest in a week. If you get him a real instrument, it'll never let him down and it'll be a friend for life." Both me and the neighbor kid are still playing.
I mention this story, because this is not an impressive instrument. I know it's not set up well (intonation is way off for example), but nothing can change the fact that the neck feels like its made of something almost but not totally dissimilar to wood.. Anyhow, it just feels cheap. I'm glad little Arlo never had to feel the way the recipient of one of these must feel. I know that if Jeff Beck played it through a pignose, he'd sound better than I do playing with the best equipment, but most people aren't Jeff Beck, and for them playing this guitar is swimming upstream. I can only hope that the SX guitars are better than this.
Most people think the first thing I replace should be the pickups. I know it's common wisdom that this makes a huge difference. OTOH, given how bad this thing feels, I'm more inclined to replace the bridge and neck. Speaking of the bridge, when I popped off the spring cover, I found that the claw was screwed in all the way. No wonder the bar had no float ... Also, one of the screws was in at a weird angle, which really surprised me, and I am not usually surprised by angles.
For the bridge, I plan to go with one of the fine products from Callaham. These things are really expensive, so they must be great! It's interesting to read the Callaham site, particularly stuff like this about tremolo blocks. It does give the feeling of being a very serious shop that makes high quality products. Of course it may be that almost anything is an upgrade from what's there now, but I want to go for something great, preferably machined "from a cold rolled non-leaded U.S.A. steel".
It will be weird to have this fancy bridge in my cobocaster. At that point, the guitar will still be a crappy Squier with a very good bridge, and not a great guitar which just happens to have a bad body, neck, tuners and electronics (the strap buttons could be better too). But at some point, a magical transformation will occur, and it will become a great guitar with an anomalously crappy component or two. It might still be fun to refer to it a Squier I bought on Craig's List. This gives you a good idea of my notion of fun.
More and more pieces of humans can be replaced. Hip and knee replacements are commonplace, and I've heard that shoulder replacements are done now too. We do organ transplants, etc. So what does one say about a human who's had all of his pieces other than the brain transplanted? Is he the same person? If you say yes, then you are a Cartesian Dualist, and will probably never be invited to any parties with Zaphod Beeblebrox. If not, then we are approaching a time when people may be gradually transformed into different people over the course of their lives. And what if a computer program could in fact simulate a human intelligence, i..e when "seeded" with the "contents" of someone's brain, it could continue "thinking" exactly as the person would. Doing a final replacement of the person's brain with a computer running this software on this data would complete the replacement of all the physical components of the person. All that remains of him, is the data downloaded from his brain, used as input to the program running on the computer sitting where his brain used to be. Make sure not to get a Squier Bullet brain, even if it's a COB model.
