Been and gone... in It's a llittle llazy over here

Have struggled a lot to keep up with writing, both here and for my (still basically dead) youtube channel. Of course, part of that was the holiday in San Francisco.

We liked it, it was great, but we wouldn’t do it the same way if we did it again. I think to get the best of San Francisco you do need the longer days and slightly warmer weather that you’d get earlier in the year, so you can really enjoy the climate. Also, we’d want to go longer and stay out of downtown so that we could have some more days to just slob around on/near the beach.

Still, we did most of the touristy things that you kind of have to do if you’re there and you may never be coming back, and it was still awesomeness. The time difference gave us way more problems than we had for New York or Hong Kong, I’m not sure why, but it did.

The homeless situation there is something else, it has to be said, and I’m not coming from a place with little to no homelessness so this isn’t just culture shock. I know there’s a lot of factors - not least the fact that the climate makes it significantly more attractive to be on the streets in SF than anywhere in England. On the other hand, it’s pretty unnerving at first, particularly given how many of these people are obviously mentally ill.

Now I’m back and in the fabulous situation of being at least a stone overweight again and just about to hit the Christmas period, which is not the greatest time to be getting fit.

My kit guitar is finished and it sounds amazeballs beautiful. It looks pretty nice as well, though there are five or six areas of the build where my lack of skill and/or the shoddy cheap body and neck do show up. The neck screws are a horrible mess, the pickup surround doesn’t really fit with the neck cavity because the cavity was roughly done (the kit actually had a full pickguard so it wouldn’t have mattered).

But it sounds unnervingly brilliant and it has a llama inlay on the headstock, so it’s automatically 10000000% more awesome than your guitar. The action and setup were great right away, and that’s kind of unnerving because they shouldn’t be. I should have spent ages trying to fiddle with it and set it up and play around, and I pretty much haven’t had to touch any of that.

Of course, most of the sound is the fact that I hand-picked the (good) pickups, which I’ve never been able to do with my guitars, so I was getting ones that I had especially picked out as my favourites from the Seymour Duncan website (Hot Tele set, for what it’s worth).

I did cheat a fair bit in that I bought a fully-loaded control plate with good components pre-wired with a nice 4-way switch mod, so all I had to do was solder in the pickups. But still, the fact that it worked first time after I did the soldering is also unnerving given how bloody awful I am at soldering. I’m just waiting for it to break.

Mk 2 will probably be an ‘everything but the neck’ build, because I’d trust myself to put a bridge in the right place but in no way would I trust myself to cut frets precisely enough to not screw the intonation of the guitar all the way down the scale. So I’d still buy a neck with the frets already in place (or at least the slots cut), but I’d build the body for it from scratch and do all the routing/wiring myself. That’d then be the fully-customised guitar with exactly the control config/pickup config that I want. There’s kind of only so many controls you can fit in a telecaster body without extending the control cavity and I wasn’t up for that this time.

I have to go back to work next week. This is going to suck, but I will not turn on my work phone until I get into the office. Not one second before.

No. Until then, llamas remain utterly fabulous and I shall try to get my body to remember what time it is here in the UK. Yes.