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Vintage threads from the first ten years

previous: Trace Re: Cesar Diaz mods?...help... -- 10/13/2000 7:31 PM

Stay away from Cesar Diaz video

10/18/2000 4:54 PM
Jim S.	Stay away from Cesar Diaz video I don't have anything to say about Cesar personally, since I've never spoken with him, nor have owned or worked on any of his products. I DID buy his guitar/amp tech video some years back and was completely disappointed. It's truly awful. In the video, Cesar somehow comes across as not being very bright and he acts a bit like a "cowboy" in the way he handles vintage gear. There's one scene in the video where he's restringing a guitar by first clipping off the old strings while they're under full tension - PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! This is NOT something I'd do with a guitar I cared about -- I much prefer changing tension on the neck gradually. In another scene, he's at his workbench, working on a blackface Fender amp, looking for a bad filter cap. The chassis is live; it's upside down and the doghouse cover is removed, exposing the caps, which appear to be all original. He's holding a new cap in his hand which has a long wire connected to it and clipped to the chassis. He's touching the positive lead of that cap to each of the amp's filter caps in turn, listening for when the hum will away. Between each test, he discharges the cap that's in his hand by touching its + lead against the chassis. ZAP! SPAKK! ZZAP!! Why doesn't he just replace all of the caps, since they're old anyway? And his approach to troubleshooting seems a bit dangerous to me -- bad enough to discharge a filter cap all at once, even worse while holding onto it. To be fair, I had heard from somebody that Cesar Diaz himself thought the video was badly produced and he was very unhappy with the end result. It's one thing to be good at something, it's a very different thing to project a positive image on a video screen. (This might explain, to some extent, the sorry state of politics.)

10/18/2000 4:54 PM

Jim S.

Stay away from Cesar Diaz video

I don't have anything to say about Cesar personally, since I've never spoken with him, nor have owned or worked on any of his products. I DID buy his guitar/amp tech video some years back and was completely disappointed. It's truly awful. In the video, Cesar somehow comes across as not being very bright and he acts a bit like a "cowboy" in the way he handles vintage gear.

There's one scene in the video where he's restringing a guitar by first clipping off the old strings while they're under full tension - PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! PING! This is NOT something I'd do with a guitar I cared about -- I much prefer changing tension on the neck gradually.

In another scene, he's at his workbench, working on a blackface Fender amp, looking for a bad filter cap. The chassis is live; it's upside down and the doghouse cover is removed, exposing the caps, which appear to be all original. He's holding a new cap in his hand which has a long wire connected to it and clipped to the chassis. He's touching the positive lead of that cap to each of the amp's filter caps in turn, listening for when the hum will away. Between each test, he discharges the cap that's in his hand by touching its + lead against the chassis. ZAP! SPAKK! ZZAP!! Why doesn't he just replace all of the caps, since they're old anyway? And his approach to troubleshooting seems a bit dangerous to me -- bad enough to discharge a filter cap all at once, even worse while holding onto it.

To be fair, I had heard from somebody that Cesar Diaz himself thought the video was badly produced and he was very unhappy with the end result. It's one thing to be good at something, it's a very different thing to project a positive image on a video screen. (This might explain, to some extent, the sorry state of politics.)