The preamble...

So, my wife sez to me "You should spend a bit more on your guitar, you'll have it a long time", and she mentions a number that was more than twice what I mentally budgeted. So, that means I have to start shopping all over again because I didn't take any notes on ones beyond my price limit. I was originally holding out for something that was all white or ivory. Possibly a Jay Turser JT-300, but it would have taken many weeks to get here if I wanted the ivory body with maple fretboard, from another dealer.

We drive to the city for half an hour to do other stuff and she drops me off at this place that had a few strat-shaped objects almost within my old budget. I had brought my Line 6 Pocket pod, cord, and headphones so I wouldn't embarrass myself in public, and I pick out a stool and start taking guitars off the wall to try out again. There was one white Squier strat inside my new budget, but it was the Deluxe Hot Rails Strat, and I didn't want the Hot Rails pickups. (probably fine for an all-purpose guitar.) I wanted the 3 single-coil pickups.

Ultimately, I kept going back to this Squier Bullet strat that sounded perfecly fine to my untutored ears, and it felt as good as any of the others costing more $$$. The action was fine, the tuning pegs weren't sloppy, intonation was okay (which I could fix myself anyway). This one was only $99. Much lower than my old budget. I would have gotten it before, but it was very pink. It looks just like this:
image
It's lightish red!

Something just snapped in me, and I guess the combination of the price and my puckish sense of the absurd compelled me to buy it. Besides, if I ever really got tired of the colour, my nephew's brother-in-law does custom paint jobs on guitars and he might be able to do something interesting to it. Or something white. Meanwhile, I never play in public or jam with other folks. It's more of a subdued-lighting meditation activity for me.

So I did buy it. Also got some D'Addario .011 - .050 ribbon-wound chromes. The guy at the counter said "I think those are 9s", referring to the roundwound strings already on the guitar. Got home, and straightaway put the new strings on. Tightened up the trem springs, a lot, such that the back of the bridge is floating about 1/16" off the body. Intonation and action still seemed okay for now. May need to get more trem springs (than the four it came with), the spring claw plate is almost bottomed out. I guess they assume somebody buying an entry-level student guitar is going to stick with wimpy extra-light gauge strings.

The plot thickens...

I'm picking and strumming away on my new toy. Then very soon I notice that whenever you hit a barred D-flat chord (at the 4th fret) there's this awful noise, like a combination of fret buzz and clipping. Also for a regular A-major. The open A string sounds awful, So does just the A string at the 4th fret. G-string 7th fret, still there, but not so bad. G-string 6th fret or high E string 10 fret) (that D flat again) - sound awful. Move a fret or two away from those notes, and it's almost gone. Sounds much worse if the neck pickup is selected (or neck and mid). If you detune (with the tuning peg) the open A string ever so slightly higher or lower, the distortion reduces dramatically. At worst, (a wee bit below standard A) it has a bit of a "crackling cellophane" sound to it, rather than a buzz or clipping. The low F on the E string is a bit funny too, now.

That wasn't there in the store, while the light-gauge strings were still on it. Still using the same headphones and the same Pocket Pod. Using the electronic tuner function, there are no amp modeling or effects added - just straight through. I had not plugged in when I got home before I changed the strings, so I don't know for sure if something didn't happen on the trip home.

I tried:
- Different headphones, thinking something might have gone bad with them. Still there.
- Detuned strings to DGCFAD - the distortion just showed up in different placed, still following the A and D-flat notes in their new positions, two frets towards the bridge.
- Tuned back to normal, and found you could bend a note into or out of the distortion, either by using the trem bar or fingerbending.
- Packed a thin layer or open-cell foam rubber between the back plate and the trem springs, thinking they might be in resonance. Still no improvement. Took foam out.
- Pressed on various components (pickups, tuning keys, bridge parts, portions of string above the nut, etc.) to see if one of them was loose or resonating, or some such. Nope.
- Reduced the volume control on the guitar, thinking I might be overdriving the input to the Pocket Pod. Nope.
- Adjusted the pickups (especially the neck pickup) up and down. Yes, if they're too close it sounds crappy, but it's a different kind of crap.
- If it's switched to the middle and/or bridge pickups, you can still hear a bit of distortion, but you have to pick or strum harder.
- Took the trem bar off, thinking it might be rattling. Nope.
- Took the trem bar off AND wedged a wood shim behind the trem block to make better contact with the body. Retune to standard. Nope. no help.
- Tightened the middle four screws across the front of the bridge back to where they were, not just the outer pair.
- I realised that one thing that was different was that I peeled the plastic film off the pickguard and took the tape off that was covering the pickups. Put some tape back on - no help.

Things I've not done:
- Played with the truss rod. (When I swapped something to get my SG clone years ago, the truss rod was rattlingly loose.)
- Taken the pick guard off and looked under it. (don't wanna take the brand-new strings off because I don't have any spares except for used ones). Is it possible there was a poor solder joint on the neck pickup that got worse from being in the car, in the cold (about -10 C) for a couple of hours? It got warmed up on the trip home, so it's not like I started whaling on it while it was frozen.
- Phoned the store, because they're closed now, and I want to make sure I haven't forgotten something stupid easy.

This thing had grown on me, like a puppy from the SPCA, in spite of it being pink.

Any theories as to what's gone wrong? (With the guitar, I mean, and not the colour.)

I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing.

I think it's the truss rod vibrating at certain frequencies. I've come across that before. Try tightening a quarter of a turn - you probably should anyway with 11's instead of 9's. If it feels particularly loose when you adjust it give it a quarter turn after it 'bites' See if that makes any difference. Good Luck.

You were certainly right not to buy the guitar with Hot Rails if you didn't want those pickups because that's where most of the extra money is.

http://www.myspace.com/thepashuns

Youth and enthusiasm are no match for age and treachery.

He's using a pocket POD thru phones. Hard to change the tiny little tubes in those pocket PODs.

Swing! Twang! Shake! Twist!

estreet
I think it's the truss rod vibrating at certain frequencies. I've come across that before. Try tightening a quarter of a turn - you probably should anyway with 11's instead of 9's. If it feels particularly loose when you adjust it give it a quarter turn after it 'bites' See if that makes any difference.

That would seem the most likely suspect, since the additional string tension of the .011s should affect the neck, and therefore the truss rod.

wilkat1
If you try making an adjustment to the truss rod, the 'net buzz is that the the truss nut on the new Bullets is often rounded and won't comfortably take a hex key, but a flat screwdriver can work.

Thanks for the heads-up on that.

wilkat1
Try the guitar through something other than your POD before you go nuts making adjustments to the guitar. Check your batteries / power supply.

I didn't think to do that because when I plugged in my SG clone, it sounded find, for all notes. Today I plugged the Bullet Strat into my computer audio and listened with the "Playthrough FX.app" (with effects disabled), and it was still bad in the same places.

wilkat1
Are the volume and tone pots on the guitar crackly? Plug it in, and play with the knobs on the guitar. If they crackle a shot of DeOxIt may help.

Nope. The pots don't do anything like that when you move them. I made sure of it in the store before I bought it, with the Pod gain way up. I had applied that cure to my 30 year-old SG clone, so I recognize that symptom. Also, the noise shows up for any setting of the Volume/Tone/Tone knobs and for more than one of the 5-way switch position.

wilkat1
_I don't intend to sound insulting here, I just know that when frustrated I tend to overlook the obvious._

No insult taken. My day job is in operating and repairing 250 kW short wave transmitters, and when something goes wrong that we can't figure out, as often as not it's something silly like a popped breaker we all failed to check.

wilkat1
He's using a pocket POD thru phones. Hard to change the tiny little tubes in those pocket PODs.

I could if I really had to. I had a course in removing and installing surface-mount devices using a Pace soldering station. But that would probably void my warranty.

I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing.

Some progress.

I checked out the official way to adjust the truss rod, and according to that I needed to back off the tension (fingerboard was slightly too convex), so I gave it a quarter turn counter-clockwise. The neck went straighter, as expected, but the noise was still there, possibly a teeny bit better.

Next I decided to increase the truss rod tension from the original setting anyway, and gave it a half turn clockwise, figuring I could raise the strings at the bridge, if necessary, to compensate. A wee bit more improvement it seemed, but still quite objectionable.

Got curious and loosened the strings enough to slide the pickguard out and flip it for a visual inspection. Nothing too unexpected there. When I put it back together and tuned up, it sounded different, and perhaps a bit better yet.

Finally I decided to do the intonation adjustments. By the time I got as far as doing the E,A, and D strings, I realized that it was much improved. Then I saw that the bridge saddles had all different spacing between them, ie. the A and D saddles were almost (or probably were) touching, the E and A were spaced well apart from each other, the D-G-B-E gaps were narrow, but similar.

I think it's the saddle(s). All those procedures where I loosen the strings, especially the intonation setup, resulted in the saddles shifting around, sometimes touching their neighbour, sometimes not. I used a thin bladed-screwdriver or a feeler gauge to force them apart, and now the distortion is almost gone. I have to hit certain barre chords moderately hard to hear the noise. The bad noise, I mean.

I'm gonna try putting some kind of compressible shim between the saddles, like super-thin felt, if I can get it in. We'll see what happens then.

Meanwhile, I have some snow shoveling to do in my driveway.

wilkat1
By the way, I totally get the pink thing. I think it's a very cool looking guitar.

None of my friends get it. None of them play guitar either, but it's driving them crazy.

I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing.

planish
Some progress.

I checked out the official way to adjust the truss rod, and according to that I needed to back off the tension (fingerboard was slightly too convex), so I gave it a quarter turn counter-clockwise.

Crikey, if its convex now with 11's it must have been mighty convex when it had 9's on.

Re Pink: I had my '65 Telecaster that colour for a number of years but it's black again now ... well .. black with the pink coming through anyway lol..
Before anyone screams in horror, it had no paint on it when I bought it back in '78 so it's not like I ruined it. I kind of like it's Joe Strummerish tatty look at the moment anyhow.

http://www.myspace.com/thepashuns

Youth and enthusiasm are no match for age and treachery.

Yet another installment, and I hope the last. The noise came back a few weeks after my last post. Again, only the neck pickup seem was affected, but this time with a difference.

I found that if I nudged the switch sideways (away from the strings) the noise would clear up. If I nudged it the other way, there was no noise but also no treble whatsoever. Either way, difficult to play while maintaining pressure, and I wasn't about to jam a toothpick in. I sprayed a bit of contact cleaner through the slot in the pickguard, thinlking it was an intermittent contact inside the switch, but it didn't help much. Finally, yesterday, the neck pickup switch position did not result in any noise, but it would only give me the extremely muffled no-treble-at-all sound, no matter how I wiggled it.

Not having any tree branches handy with which to thrash it, I took it to my workplace (on my day off, causing no end of surprised looks) where I had much better electronics trouble-shooting equipment at my disposal. I was really hoping it wasn't in the pickup. A new 5-way switch was only a fifteen-minute drive away if I needed one.

Checking out the continuity and resistances of the wiring with a digital multi-meter while moving the switch revealed nothing unexpected, but a close examination under a magnifying drafting lamp revealed a suspicious-looking connection right at the switch's solder lug. It appeared to be solid mechanically, and the meter indicated it had continuity, but it did not look properly "wetted". Somewhat like this bad solder joint here:

I reheated it, removed the old solder with a solder sucker, and reconnected it with fresh solder. It looks more like this now:

Since I had all the strings slack, I decided to take the opportunity to clean out the gooey "Fun-tak" stuff out from between the saddles (it seemed like a good idea at the time). I put everything back together, tuned it up, and it sounds fine in all switch positions, after an hour or two of energetic-if-artless playing.
Happy-happy Joy-joy!

I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing.