It Came From My "Guitar" Bookmark Folder!

How handy, an online guitar tuner.

Eventually, I will get around to needing this archtop-guitar luthiers' messboard.

I probably will never need to know how to wire an Ibanez guitar to stock specs, but it's comforting to know that I'll be able to find official guides if I need them. Speaking of Ibanez, their archive of past catalogs was a most enjoyable timesink for a weekend. The 1980s were apparently so awesome they ended in the mid '90s.

Thanks to the evergreen-helpful GuiterNuts.com: Non-Artist's Rendering of Strat™ Wiring and Troubleshooting A Standard Stratocaster™ Guitar.

The next time I need to buy replacement electronics for my guitars, I'm going to give guitarelectronics.com a try, based on how handy this one-volume, one-tone Strat diagram has been.

I'll probably master Rubik's Cube before I understand half of the Strat wiring jobs on this page, but I admire how exhaustive it is. It's still hard to believe that Leo Fender thought the guitar was perfect with just a three-way, neck- middle- bridge- selector.

Guitarplansunlimited.com looks pretty cool but, again, I won't be needing any such things for a while.

No shit, this truly is Effects Heaven if you have a soldering iron, a little gumption and a lot of time.

Another handy tabulature site.

A confession: I'm pretty good at every aspect of setting-up and even modifying an electric guitar .... except for adjusting the truss rod. I'm like a chimpanzee with a prism locked in a room full of irregularly pulsing strobe lights, trying to figure how to straighten a neck correctly. That page has helped, but I still literally take my guitar's life in my hands every time I place a screwdriver or Allen wrench to the nut.

My next guitar-restoration project, by the way, is fixing one and a half dead pickups and vacuuming out the dust in my 1966 Harmony/Airline 7280. It was a thank-you/please-let-me-headhunt-you gift from an old intern that I got in Seattle -- it sounds so nice and surprisingly loud acoustically that I never actually plugged it into an amp until this summer while I was running tests on my repaired and rewired homemade Strat. [See above; this probably betrays how long these links have been collecting dust in my bookmarks.]