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they should be quite different, but various makers have muddied the waters quite a bit. my green Strat is the closest to actual BRG that i’ve seen; most manufacturers—including Fender!—often go with something much closer to Forest Green with brown added. GFS is a prime offender here. Sherwood Green also varies, but is quite a bit lighter and typically metallic (the metallic quality of the Strat’s BRG isn’t traditional). it doesn’t seem to photograph well, and reacts very differently to varying light levels. sometimes the Esquire looks like the Tedeschi Tele’s “Caribbean Mist,” sometimes like Hunter Green. this photo matches the hues my eyes see pretty well but is a tidge darker. what baffles me is the differences in what Fender calls BRG or Sherwood Green. did they not save any paint chips?

The inconsistency of color names for major instrument brands is definitely all over the place. I just love the look of that Strat. That color on the Esquire with a black guard would be gorgeous.

i found a surprisingly good Mad Cat-style speckled tortoise guard for the Tele by D'Andrea on eBay. i'm half tempted to do a Strat with one, but that would require doing another Strat which i might do but not soon. though i do admit to watching a older Lake Placid Blue body that's darkened to a blue-grey on eBay. the thing is that i need some of these other guitars available way more than i need another Strat.

the new pickguard and jack plate for the Strat arrived yesterday, and it was reasonably short work to swap them in. i want to wait to post more pictures until the replacement tremolo tip gets here sometime between now and Friday. i really appreciate that this was one of my simpler projects even though i replaced the pickups. but it won’t be totally done until Decoboom has the back plate to match the pickguard at some indeterminate future time. it’s OK though, because it’s seldom that people other than me see the back of the guitar.

the Strat is done so i thought i’d give it a turn. 2025 Player II Strat. mods include Fender CS ‘69 pickups, Stellartone Tonestyler tone switch, flat nickel jack plate, added tremolo spring (had 3, needed 4), Decoboom “Streamline” pickguard and back plate, knobs and tips from Xentric Guitars out of Colorado. i had a Strat in the 00s with the pickups and Tonestyler which i had to sell, and those 2 items were mandatory; in fact, they're the only reason i wanted a second Strat. the rest is cosmetics other than the jack plate which was me solving another of my Fender dislikes.

So today I did something I haven't done in a while but had planned to do for quite some time. I took pics of all of my guitars to document the status quo of my collection. I should definitely look for the folders of older versions on my hard drive. Could be cool to see the guitars I moved on, but also the different versions of the ones I kept. I always tinkered a lot with my guitars and a few had some pretty wild mods in the past. In recent years I mainly tried to put them back in their original state, though.

Ok, here's my collection in October '25:


My current live guitars I use with the band. A Japanese or Korean Firebird copy from the late 80s or early 90s. The Firebird is probably my favourite guitar but my '96 Korean Casino works really hard on dethroning it.


My Tele is a Partscaster I bought while on tour with one of my first bands. It's currently strung with thick flats. My Strat was my first guitar. Inspired by dubkitty's thread about baritones, I recently strung it with super heavy strings and tuned it down to B standard.


The Guild XII is my newest guitar and also one of the very few guitars I bought brand new. Great quality, one of my best guitars ever. The Les Paul is one of my oldest guitars, I think I was about 16 when I found it on a flea market for dirt cheap. It was in ancient times before the internet, when sellers couldn't look up the value of stuff on ebay.


Two Squiers: One Chinese Classic Vibe with frets, one fretless I cobbled together from two different Squiers. They both have their pickups wired in series and only single volume and tone controls. Both with flats and they do everything I could ever need from a bass. They've been on tour all over Europe when I was young and sexy.


The Bass VI was my first and last attempt of refinishing. Few mods here and there, sounds great and plays like a dream. To the right is my electric sitar I constructed many, many years ago. It's tuned EBEBE and totally rocks.


My Epiphone acoustic survived two car crashes and several wild trips with a bunch of hippies. Just like the Les Paul, I got it when I was about 15 or 16. It's currently strung in Nashville Tuning. The Fender was my dad's guitar and the one I first learned to play on when i was a kid. He gave it to me many years later as a birthday present.


I found the Harmomy in a thrift shop in Bucharest, Romania. It's strung with super heavy strings and tuned to C standard for at least 15 years already. Same strings, of course, until I brought to a luthier for some repairs and he broke the G string a few weeks ago. The other guitar is an East German model, pretty sure it's not a Musima, probably a Marma or Migma. Strung with flats, plays and sounds really nice.


My lap steel from 1948 and an old Japanese banjo I recently restored.


This is my super sexy mandolin and a Thüringer Waldzither, some sort of lute that was apparently quite popular in the somehow pre-hippie Wandervogel youth in the early 20th century before the Nazis took over.


This is my first bass - a lower-tier Japanese EB-3 copy - and I just finished its restauration. It was really quite nice before a stupid version of me spray painted it, drilled the headstock to make it a Bass VI and destroyed its pickups but now it's good again, only need to finish the wiring. It's tuned like a cello CDGA.

Next I need to take some pictures of my amps.

i didn’t really arrange these guitars at all, they just wound up next to each other by chance. i just optimized the blue DeArmond M-75, whose pickups are absolutely beastly. you’ve already seen the Strat process. the fretless Jazz Bass and 2010s Lead Ii need work…the JB really needs the neck steamed because the truss rod is maxed out but for now i’m going to shim the neck to hopefully make it more playable, and the Lead II’s pau ferro fingerboard is poorly prepared and needs to be sanded so it doesn’t feel gritty. they’re both good instruments, but need help. i just found the color balance appealing…as i said to my gf “even dark white LOL.”

dubkitty wrote: ↑Fri Sep 05, 2025 9:35 am sometimes the Esquire looks like the Tedeschi Tele’s “Caribbean Mist,” sometimes like Hunter Green. this photo matches the hues my eyes see pretty well but is a tidge darker. what baffles me is the differences in what Fender calls BRG or Sherwood Green. did they not save any paint chips?

i dunno but i do just want to say that it's a very handsome esquire

they’re making some absolutely gorgeous colors for the Squier Custom Esquire. there’s a lovely Shell Pink, but you really need to see the CME FSR version in one of the nicest Dakota Reds i’ve ever seen. that’s the only Fender red i’ve ever really liked though the Transparent Crimson on the Lead II is nice. this is so nice i’m tempted to buy it all over again, and i really don’t need or want a third Tele/Esquire. if they do a Strat i’m in trouble…ever since Richard Thompson started playing a rosewood-board Dakota Red Strat (which belongs to his guitar tech but he appropriated it) i’ve been thinking about one. RT is the only guitarist who can still tempt me to copy him.

i also noticed that the whole Fender American Pro line are available in Faded Sherwood Green. the Jazzmaster is particularly beautiful.

i’m curious about the Waldzither. how would you tune that, like a mandola?

<edit>and where does the low 9th string fit in?

it reminds me a bit of the Giannini mandolin i used to have, a peculiar flat top/back instrument with a round soundhole that was 200% as loud as any other mandolin i’ve ever played. i just missed one for $210 on eBay.

dubkitty wrote: ↑Sun Nov 23, 2025 8:21 pm i’m curious about the Waldzither. how would you tune that, like a mandola?

<edit>and where does the low 9th string fit in?

it reminds me a bit of the Giannini mandolin i used to have, a peculiar flat top/back instrument with a round soundhole that was 200% as loud as any other mandolin i’ve ever played. i just missed one for $210 on eBay.

It's tuned Open C. Not sure why the lowest string is not double coursed but that's how it is. The instrument is super loud and incredibly resonant, so much it sometimes plays a sympathetic note when the kids are yelling in the living room. It has a nice droning and sonorous sound that reminds me of Joni Mitchell's dulcimer on "Blue". I think this video captures the sound of a Waldzither quite well, even though it sounds a bit softer than mine:

nice! that one really looks like a Portuguese mandolin with the weird headstock and tuners. it sounds kind of like a Portuguese or Brazilian mando…my old one had that kind of loud, open sound.

I’m going to guess the reason the lowest string is not double has something to do with ouds

Yes, that's very possible. As far as I understood, the oud is like the archetypical stringed instrument and came with the crusaders and during the arabic rule of the Iberian Peninsula to Europe. Interestingly enough, the Waldzither was a mideval instrument but was, according to the wikipedia article, almost forgotten before it was rediscoverd in the early 19th century. So it is really quite possible that it's very close to its mideval ancestors, thus very close to the oud.

Now here's the twist: During the so-called "Third Reich" all attempts to establish the Waldzither as the typical German instrument came to an end, because the Nazis associated the (cheap) instrument with the more liberal (and evidently very open towards homosexuality) wing of the Wandervogel movement (there was also a strong nationalist wing) and also traditionally left-wing and unionist working-class. Then, after the end of the Nazi regime, the Waldzither had a new problem: German folk songs and tradition were now associated with the Nazi heritage and like many pre-war traditions, the Waldzither was rejected in German mainstream culture. With the rise of Rock&Roll in the 50s, the guitar gained popularity and the Waldzither silently disappeared again.

So, nowadays, there is apparently very little information about how you actually play it because there's so little traditional knowledge and so much interference from adapted guitar playing techniques. My guess is that the single low C string could also very well be a drone string, like the g string on a 5 string banjo.

intriguing...it's like a little capsule history of Germany with strings on.