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Two more pics before leaving it there. Enjoy the p0rn!

They have arrived, my Sonic Explorer x 2, by Paolo Salcuni. Haven’t tried them plugged, but they feel great in my hands and are surprisingly light. They came with hard cases, which I wasn’t expecting. Tone report will follow as soon as I’ll have time for that. Cheers!

Because I thought the Calis were your ultimate tool. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Interesting! BTW, I got it from a guy in Canada who strangely isn’t a member of the HFC, but owns many cool Hamers. He’s selling several of them, and some are true gems. I promised to him I would recommend him as a seller around here and on FB. His name is Tyler Henderson. The guitar was packaged perfectly and shipped in a snap. He’s very cool too, nice person to deal with. I’m going to propose to him to become a member of the fan club, and he might start selling his stuff here when he’ll get authorized by the administrators.

@cmatthes or @HamStd, do you know anything about this one?

Serious stuff, no BS. Is anybody here who can tell me more about this beauty?

True. I hadn’t realized so. This might torment me endlessly. Yet, they are beautiful. If they play well, I might live with it. 🤷🏻‍♂️

According to Jol, reverse slanted is “the right way”, as it would capture higher frequency harmonics on the lower range. What we consider “normally slanted pickups”, like on the Californian, reinforce the lower harmonics on the lower range, so Jol said they were basically wrong… though he also said “oh, well” 😜

A shame they’re going OOB. 🙁 Now I wonder what will happen to the Fernandes Sustainer. Several well-known players have used it for years. Perhaps Fender or Ibanez will buy the technology?

Yes. I was going to mention Brad Gillis, but you beat me on that. Here’s an old ad: Brad Gillis is a guitarist that has inspired me enormously. So I tried one once; it was for sale in the now-defunct Italmelody music store in Montreal. It was very clean, quite cute little Strat. Sadly, I didn’t like its skinny neck and the feeling of playing it. I guess the guitars of our heroes aren’t necessarily the guitars that we end up liking. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I mostly use Ernie Ball these days, but I use whatever is at hand. I still have high E and B strings around I’ve purchased in bulk —D’Addario. I also have several “mutilated” sets of different brands, because when I go to a guitar shop I often compulsively buy a set of strings when leaving. 🤪

It might be something I do that might weaken the strings there. I put roller saddles on all my TOM bridges because I like sometimes pushing down the strings behind the bridge, for a tremolo-like effect. 🤷🏻‍♂️ Look: IMG_9488.mov I do that even on my Mayday-V. I don’t do it that often, but I guess that only sometimes creates a weak spot at the tip that snaps later on, when I go wild on bending.

Yes. Well, they were. I’ve taken some measures, as you can see. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Before blaming the brands, I’ve had similar problems with D’Addario, Ernie Ball, Dean Markley, Fender, GHS Boomers… Fact is, my high E string keeps on breaking often. Here are some solutions I’ve tried so far: 1- Wrapping the string around the stop-tail. 2- Using a soldering iron to strengthen the tip of the string and its winding —unwinding occurs sometimes, specially with D’Addario. 3- Adding an extra “ball” to the tip of the string. Solution 1 above works for TOM bridges. Solutions 2 and 3 work for other bridges, specially for my Brian May-like tremolo. Today I combined 1, 2 & 3 on one of my guitars, and also did 2 & 3 on my Mayday V. Some pics: Hope you’ll find this useful. CU around!

We tried those ideas too. The “stadium” logo was because the word “ITALIA” was hard to put there in small characters. Also, though the homage to Hamer is more than clear, it is NOT a Hamer —and it’s not American, but Italian, and they say “Italia” in Italy. 😉 In any case, all variants considered, that was our choice. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Time to unveil my in-progress custom order from http://www.sonicguitars.com As you can see, I have my standards too. 😉 What do you think about the logo? 😎

Aside from the “Slammer by Hamer” models, which actually were cheap stuff, I’ve never stumbled upon a bad import Hamer and I’ve owned some, including several Slammer Series and XT’s. The two XT’s I kept are very good, specially the Vector. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I sent him the link to this thread. Got a 👍 as a response, so he might drop by and answer all the questions and say “hi” personally. To be continued… 😉

I’m one of those people who would like to know the year of production of my imports, just for the sake of it. I guess I’m just curious. I own two Indonesian XT’s —one Vector and one Standard. Excellence-wise they have nothing to do with the US models, but they are great guitars. I play both often. Both are very resonant, sound great and have comfy necks to my tastes —I prefer necks to the beefier side. These are my Indonesian axes: By the way, at a given point the imports went from Duncan Designed pickups to pickups labeled “Hamer”. Indonesian guitars made in 2011 and after seem to use the latter. My two XT’s featured those, though I replaced the bridge pickup on the Vector by a Seymour Duncan Super V, George Lynch signature. Also, the tuners seem to be labeled “Hamer” on more recent Indonesian guitars. That’s the case on my two XT’s, as it might be visible here:

Gonna send him the link to this thread to see if he wants to drop by. Keep on those messages coming, you guys know he’ll appreciate your kind words!

Hey, I talked to Kev this morning, he’s doing great, sounds energized and happy. Also, in one year he retires from his regular job. We talked music and guitars, of course, as well as about the HFC, and he asked me to say HI from him to you all here. I don’t know if he’ll show up later, but in the meantime I’m doing my part by transmitting you guys his warmest regards. Stay well! 🙏🙇‍♂️

I just listened to the long version on Spotify: I like the shorter version better. The full-length version becomes too concrete towards the last section, the lyrics start thinking for me and I prefer thinking for myself. It turns almost into a pamphlet. But with the longer version we can dance, drink and (hopefully) screw more, right? 😜

Great songwriting, straightforward and effective, plus awesome lyrics. And the arrangement is very intelligent, its “density” goes in crescendo, it’s like if they were adding layers progressively. How this song went under my radar is hard to understand. Thanks a lot for sharing it!

Awesome song. Wow!