#51 Solar A2.7 & Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow & 5-way install

Local guitarist buddy time again (owner of the Fortin Grind and the Warwick bass amp featured here previously) - after taking several swings at it, he got fed up and let me have a go at installing a brand new set of Fishman Fluence Keith Merrow pickups into his Solar A2.7 guitar. Complete with some custom switching and whatnot, to take full advantage of the entire feature set the pickups offer.

#35 Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP teardown and repair

Yet another sold-as-faulty eBay catch - a nice little Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP Firewire audio interface. The listing said:

"I bought this online and it is not working or it is not compatible with my computer. My computer is not recognising this audio interface. So I am selling it as not working."

 Fine by me. The photo of the back showed the Firewire port as looking quite pristine, so it wasn't a case of connector-inserted-upside-down. And for the price i won the auction for, it was worth the gamble. A frontal photo did show it powered up, so at the very least, it wasn't dead.

#3 MOTU 8Pre teardown & gain adjustment pot replacement

On the latest drum tracking session i surprisingly discovered that channel 8 on the MOTU 8pre in my recording rig was noisy and useful-signal-less. This same unit had a similar issue with channel 6 when i bought it (as faulty, with a shot Firewire chip).

Fortunately, when i was about to take care of ch6, i got two replacement pots. When investigating the issue, i had read it's a relatively common occurrence, so i figured that as long as i'm contacting the local MOTU distributor, might as well get an extra / spare one, just in case (especially since i had two 8Pres at the time).